I decided to give Diablo III another chance now that the new expansion and its version 2.0 is here, bringing new loot rules and a bunch of other tweaks to the mix. And you know what, it’s a big improvement.

I actually enjoyed the original incarnation of Diablo III more than most, and I maintain that its move to an MMO-like always-online structure was actually a pretty good idea from the perspective of easily allowing drop-in, drop-out multiplayer. I did find that it didn’t hold my interest after I’d beaten it once, though, much like Diablo II; the fact that in order to unlock the other difficulty levels you had to play all the way through the campaign again and again and again just wasn’t appealing — particularly if you wanted to try another character and thus had to start all over again.

One of the biggest additions in the new expansion is called “Adventure Mode” and is probably the aspect I’m most interested in. Unfortunately, access to Adventure Mode is locked behind completing the story-based campaign (including the new Act introduced in the expansion) and thus I find myself having to play through the whole bloody game again because the character I previously finished it with was on the American servers and the people I’m most likely to be playing with this time are on the European servers. I understand why Blizzard separated people by region, but it doesn’t stop that particular aspect of the game’s always-online nature from sucking a big load of balls.

Anyway, as I understand it, once you unlock Adventure Mode you can just play Adventure Mode whenever you want, and that’s a much more appealing prospect. Unlocking the entire map from the get-go rather than forcing you to play through that interminably tedious desert sequence (why do action RPGs always have interminably tedious desert sequences?) again and again and again, Adventure Mode sees you tracking down “Bounties” in various areas of the game world and receiving rewards for them, and occasionally jumping into a “Nephalem Rift” where things go utterly bonkers and you have to kill bajillions of enemies.

It’s Diablo in its purest sense, in other words; stripped of the narrative aspects that people skip through and focusing entirely on the game’s most enjoyable aspect: the grind, and the drive to earn ever-better items of equipment for your characters. Making the experience non-linear rather than forcing you to play through the campaign repeatedly is a masterstroke, and is likely to give the game a lot more longevity. It also makes it much more friendly to short play sessions, since you don’t feel tied to checkpoints in the plot to have made “meaningful” progress. It’s just a shame you can’t just jump straight back into it — though with the effort Blizzard puts into the story of the campaign, I understand why they want people to see it at least once.

I do find myself wondering why they bother, though. Much like I question the wisdom of including a single-player campaign in Call of Duty year after year when people are much more inclined to spend their time in the multiplayer mode, I can’t help thinking Diablo would be a better game without the plot. And I generally like the nonsensical plots of role-playing games — but Diablo’s mechanics jar so forcefully with its narrative aspect that it’s hard to ignore. The mechanics are ridiculously fun, bringing in strong influences from arcade-style games such as time-limited challenges, secret levels and difficult-to-defeat opponents that yield massive rewards — and yet the plot takes itself deadly seriously. It doesn’t quite mesh when you’re supposed to feel bad for a major character in series lore dying (spoilers!) one minute, and the next you are literally punching the skeleton out of monsters.

Still, I can’t complain too much. I am actually enjoying the new run through the campaign — helped partly by the fact that you can start on a higher difficulty level now rather than being forced to coast through the super-easy “Normal” mode — and am making good progress with my current Monk character. I still prefer Final Fantasy XIV as an online RPG, but I’m looking forward to having the opportunity to play online a bit more with my friends very soon.

If you played Diablo III back when it came out and have since left it behind, I’d encourage you to give it another look; the updates from Patch 2.0 alone are well worth exploring, and the additional content in the expansion looks like being a lot of fun indeed.