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I went to Paris last week to meddle with ultimate evil - or rather, to play Diablo 3: Ultimate Evil Edition. This is the PS4 strain of Blizzard's colourful and divisive action RPG, and it's a game that may actually earn that foolhardy "Ultimate" in its title. It has couch (and online) co-op and all the erupting fireworks you should expect if you've been playing the PS3 or 360 installments - and if you've been playing PS3 version, incidentally, you can look forward to importing your character. Beyond that, the particles seem to be scattered more lavishly, the frame-rate is consistently glorious, and I struggled to see any screen-tearing. Oh yes, and it bundles the forthcoming expansion Reaper of Souls in there too. That really is pretty Ultimate, then - for the time being, at least.Whether you prefer the console or the PC build is a matter of taste, I suspect. (I'm PC, if only because there's something perversely wonderful about triggering mayhem as elaborate as Rain of Vengeance by pressing 4.) What's interesting is how getting Diablo 3 on consoles in the first place seems to have been an early sign that the flexibility so lacking from the game's original reveal - it will have an Auction House that you will love, and if you want to play it offline, there's always Diablo 2 - was starting to creep back in. Like any decent games company - any games company that makes the sort of things people really care about - Blizzard has a tricky balancing act to perform with each of its projects. It's weighing the hopes of its audience against its own instincts and desires. That's not easy.
Luckily, I think you can see the flexibility that comes from getting that balance more right than wrong at work throughout Reaper itself. It's there in a very small way with the new Mystic artisan, for example. Alongside allowing you to reroll one of the properties of a given item, she's also able to change the appearance of items in general, meaning that you can have the benefits of a certain set of trousers, say, with the form factor of another. Patch 2.0.1 may introduce smart loot, then, but the Mystic introduces flexible loot - and the game should be a lot more accommodating for dapper dungeonistas because of it.
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