You do get choices in DX:HR.  You can build you character to be a straight-up walking tank…  You can go for the stealthy approach…  You can focus on hacking…  You have to pick which weapons to haul around – choosing whether to go for raw firepower, or stealth, or non-lethal alternatives…

And, to a large degree, those various options are all viable.  By emphasizing stealth, you can bypass a lot of enemies and get through a mission without firing a single shot.  By emphasizing hacking, you can gather a lot of additional information and resources, and you can turn various robots and turrets against your enemies.

But then you get to the boss battles…

There was one guy, early in the game, that I talked out of fighting.  He probably could have been a boss battle if I’d gone in that direction.  But then I ran into the guy with the gun-arm…  And the invisible lady…  And neither one of them wanted to talk.  Nor was there really a whole lot my hacking or stealth skills could do for me.  Both of those fights took place, basically, in a sealed box.

I didn’t have too much trouble with that first fight – the one featured in this strip.  I lobbed an EMP grenade at the guy and then emptied all my combat rifle ammo into him.

That second fight, with the invisible lady, was horrible.  I’d had more time to specialize in hacking and stealth, and had bypassed most of the combat in the game.  I was not built for a straight-up firefight.  And I, as a player, wasn’t sure how to deal with a straight-up firefight.  I must’ve died about 12 times in that one fight alone.

Penny Arcade does a pretty good job of summarizing the latest furor over Diablo 3:

So, Diablo 3 is going to require an always-on connection back to Blizzard for the DRM.  Instinctively, this annoys me.

I don’t like DRM to start with.  I don’t like being told what to do.  Being told that I have to be on-line to play D3 because of the DRM just annoys me.

But, realistically, it isn’t that big a deal.  Unless something happens to my ISP, I’m on-line pretty much 24/7.  And even back when I played Diablo 2, I was usually playing on Battle.net anyway.  Even if I was playing by myself – I’d create a game, password protect it, and go to town.  That way I didn’t have to worry about backing up my characters if I had to reload my computer.

And, of course, none of these folks screaming about boycotts are actually going to refrain from playing the game.  They might pirate it instead…  But they’ll still play.

The video cannot be shown at the moment. Please try again later.