So just what was Belial's plan there?

[swirly]

Nope, Leah had her "spider sense" tingle and unexplainedly went back to check on Cain.

Ah yeah, I just remembered she was there. Didn't recall her running off on her own. Does make Magda's taunting a bit more silly.

Prime Evils, and their assorted minions, should be seen, not heard. Even if the previous games did not necessarily have better plots, their plots certainly were presented better because the only time any major antagonist pretty much ever addressed the player character directly (or, outside of FMVs, said much of anything) was through a one-liner immediately prior to a fight. Other than that, all you did was brave the wake of destruction they left behind in a seemingly hopeless attempt to catch up to and stop them, which drove the point home better than any quantity of moustache-twirling blathering about the evildoer's latest nefarious scheme ever can. Less really is more sometimes.

D3, on the other hand, has its numerous villains talk at you incessantly, especially Fat Kitty and Big D, and it's simply tiresome. (Cydaea gets a pass because Claudia Black. ) That what they do have to say is peculiarly insipid merely adds insult to injury.

I think this is a good point. In D2 the player wasn't really involved in the story. The story was the traveler's journey and the player was just following along behind. Sure the player had an effect by killing things, but there wasn't really any involvement beyond that.

In D3 they had the design goal to make the player a more interactive part of the story. So they have the bosses talking to and taunting the player more often. They traded story quality for interaction. I suspect the problem isn't actually even in the story itself nor in the desire for interaction. It is in the two not being grafted together well.

Looking over the complaints, I don't really see people complaining about the overarching story points. It's all the little interactive moments that make it bad. Seems to me that they had a decent story and a decent interactive play mechanic and decided to shoehorn the two together whereas what they really needed to do was build the story from the ground up with the interactivity in mind. Doing it separately and then combining ends up with bosses taunting and talking to the player for no real reason other than to make the player feel involved.

All that said, I do also think Leah is badly conceived. Ignoring the interactive stuff which has several things involving her I could complain about... the Diablo world is just too Demon/Angel infested for them to ask us to accept characters thinking they don't exist. I do think that is a core mistake with their story. They base it around a character not believing something that is blatantly obvious to the player and seems like it should be to everyone in that world.

Despite all of that, I'm pretty content with the story. I can accept all the interactive stuff as cheesy shallow fluff and enjoy it. Meanwhile I can enjoy the overarching Demon/Angel warring story separately. Thinking about it, I notice that mentally I have a divide. When I think of the story I really just think of the cinematics. If I try to delve into details I might pull some information from the game, but mostly I just view the cinematics as the story. All the interactive and in game stuff I somehow have mentally separated as play experience or just something not really story even though logically I know it is. So I end up being mostly content with the state of things because of that divide. Though I will also say that I feel like I've not rewatched the cinematics as much as I did the D2 ones which makes me suspect there is something lacking even there. The whole thing just isn't as gripping as I would like it to be. Again though, I would call myself content with it. Not happy with the story. Not sad with it either.