Diablo 3 To Be Released On May 15th 246
Blizzard announced today that Diablo 3 has finally gotten a release date: May 15th. "After many years of hard work by our development team and months of beta testing by hundreds of thousands of dedicated players around the world, we’re now in the homestretch," said Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime. This comes after significant changes to the skill and rune systems in the beta, and news that the PvP system would be delayed so that they could focus on finishing the campaign. The game will be available for Windows and Macs, either via a DVD or as a direct download through Battle.net. For those interested, a skill calculator is available to get a feel for what different abilities do, and many of the skills have videos showing how they work.
Cool, but ... (Score:4, Interesting)
... but will it be as good as NetHack?
My beta impressions, as a major fanboy... (Score:4, Interesting)
They limited multiplayer to 4 players per game, 8 player just wasn't working. If that continues to production, wow, what a blunder.
The (very simple) skill system doesn't require/allow you to make any hard choices
The stat system doesn't allow you to make ANY choices
The rune system provides the illusion of skill choices in the form of yet another item hunt
Gear is the only way to differentiate from one player of the same class to another (since you don't really controll stat or skill.
So basically you are left with the late game of DIablo 2 from day 1: Constant item hunt/grind.
Not to mention, if you ever start to forget you are playing a game, there is something blatant to pull you back out. In-line tutorial messages like"don't forget you have a right-click attack too!" to "You have found new lore!" the random floating health orbs from kills make it feel like either all players are soul eating demons, or you are playing an 80s platformer.
It honestly feels like a browser game trying to mimic Diablo2 late game (aka once a character was no longer fun to play), except with really really good graphics.
It's like they are trying their very hardest to be different from the core engagement of diablo 2 (aka building and experimenting, not late game item grinding), like they can't even remember that had something like 1.5 Billion in sales with that game.
Granted this is beta, but I just don't see them changing the fundamentals by may.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:So PvP delay and a new skill and rune systems (Score:2, Interesting)
So am I the only one who read this as the PvP won't be ready at launch and the skill and rune system is so fucking annoying you have to watch a video and use a calculator to figure out how the damn thing works?
PvP not ready at launch? Fine, whatever. Go play in the arena in WoW or Starcraft if you want to have fun throwing yourself at other players. PvP not being ready tells me that they're concentrating on making a decent single-player/cooperative game. I do not want PvE to be neglected for the sake of making PvPers happy.
And having a complex skill system is a good thing. Complaints like yours are the reason why we get systems like WoW's, where you can click on damn near any random combination of abilities and have a perfectly viable character, and all you have to do to win in combat is press 1-2-3-4. I will gladly take a system where I actually have to take time to learn how it works and then spend time evaluating how the different options interact, and then maybe I'll even have to crunch some numbers to figure out what the most efficient options are.
In short, attitudes like yours are responsible for the decline of western RPGs. Stop it.
Forgetting that this is Blizzard here and it's usually okay to rely on their promises, is it really best to accept and pay full price for an incomplete game expecting them to patch stuff in later on? It's a very terrible habit for a consumer to pick up especially in this age where expansions don't exist and shitty DLC is rampant.