Diablo III Beta Begins 102
dotarray writes "Diablo III really can't be that far off now. Blizzard has just announced that the closed beta test for the game has kicked off – meaning you can start checking your inboxes for an invitation now."
The expanded Friends&Family test had been underway for a week or so, but now gaming sites are getting invitations. Of course, given the popularity of Diablo III, phishers are out in force with fake beta invites. For those who opted-in, the best way to check is to simply log in to your battle.net account. The beta is limited in terms of content — it only includes the first couple hours worth of play in Act 1 — but all five classes are available for play. There's no NDA, so plenty of commentary has sprung up already. Rock, Paper, Shotgun has early impressions of the Demon Hunter. Blizzard has also created a skill calculator for anyone who wants to play around with character builds ahead of time. The beta will be expanding in waves as they ramp up stability tests.
Re:Blizzard is evil, boycott if you have integrity (Score:5, Insightful)
I value my freedom to play some seriously fun games that take advantage of my slick 2011 hardware. They dropped the real names issue after all the outcry, by the way. Blizzard puts a lot of their name into the quality of their games, being unafraid to shelve a project with heavy investment if necessary. I'm not especially happy about the bnetd thing, but I do kind of appreciate that they make it difficult to operate a bot in WoW.
Re:Won't be playing (Score:4, Insightful)
Check out the skill calculator in the summary. There's a lot of different possibilities (Unless I screwed my math up, something like 170,000,000 combinations of skills/runes JUST for the barbarian class. The other classes look about the same give or take a few million combos). Obviously some combinations will be better than others, and even the "best" build will be pretty situational for a given class depending on what you're doing and your playstyle. Personally, I like how they're allowing some more flexibility with abilities by getting rid of skill trees and allowing you to change what skills you have relatively painlessly. When I played Diablo II, I spent a bunch of time leveling a druid, only to realize after I'd played for dozens of hours that my I had allocated my skill points stupidly, and there wasn't anything I could do about it other than make a new character or deal with it.
Eleven years of gaming evolution? (Score:5, Insightful)
I just checked out the video from HuskyStarcraft [youtube.com], and I guess I must be missing something. Aside from the DRM that forces you to be online to play, and the fact that they censor your character names, how is this an improvement over Diablo 2? It looks like exactly the same game, just at a higher resolution.
Way back in the WoW beta, I remember fantasizing about Blizzard making a Diablo III using some of WoW's technology. By which I meant the best of both worlds, a game that looks and plays like WoW but set in the darker Diablo universe with single player and LAN play. Instead, we get basically the worst of both worlds, a dated look and feel saddled with unnecessary online requirements. Next.
Deal breaker (Score:5, Insightful)
The game looks good, but I can't buy it. I travel regularly and I don't always have an internet connection available. Always on connection for single player is a deal breaker.
I will wait for Torchlight 2
Diablo 3 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Blizzard is evil, boycott if you have integrity (Score:4, Insightful)
There's no surer way to kill an online game than balkanization by releasing too many expansions. When people can't play together because they don't own the exact same expansions or DLCs, they'll say "fuck this" and move to a game that doesn't irritate them. And the publisher then scrambles to release a GOTY edition with all the add-ons, in hope to salvage pieces. But by then, a large part of the damage is already done.
A good game doesn't really need to always show the player something new. Familiarity is a lure in itself. Yes, you might get tired of raiding Bhaal for the hundredth time, but then again, you might also be working on perfecting your runs. People return to far simpler games than DII. I won't even try to estimate how many hours (and coins) I spent on certain arcade games, which were far more repetitive. Cause that weakness can be a game's biggest strength too.
Honestly, I fear this game will fail because they've jumped on the PORT+DRM+DLC bandwagon. The only thing missing are in-game mood breaking sales pitches[*] and gratuitous product placement[**].
[*]: "You are overburdened. For only $1.99, you can buy a storage expansion from the Blizzard store".
[**]: "Stay a while, have a Mountain Dew Vibrate(TM), and listen", "Beyer Health Potion" and "Stone of Nike Air Jordan".