Diablo 3 Beta First Impressions and a brief tirade on statistics

[Lokishadow]

One thing I haven't heard about D3 is any questions about difficulty, I like hard games. I found D2 extremely easy even on hardcore and only finding my own items. I find Diablo 1 very hard to a point. I have hopes that D3 will be very hard, or at least hardcore will be very hard. Could you perhaps comment on your opinion of the difficulty?

Ah, thanks, I knew I left something out.

Difficulty initially felt like a tutorial level. You could accidentally suffer a little damage and not really be concerned about it. Once I hit the cathedral during the search for Deckard Cain the difficulty started to go up a bit, but I didn't have any "whoa, this might kill me" moments. I think part of this is actually a symptom of my hardcore macroing in Starcraft 2. After trying to keeps tabs on around 100 units and a dozen structures that all have their own abilities, Diablo 3 doesn't feel as frenetic or feel like it needs as much of my attention to avoid a loss. This is likely a result of the training I've been putting myself through to try to get up in the leagues, though.

There was a moment when I realized there was real danger: I ran into a room in which I couldn't see anything until I was already in the room and there was a large pack of upgraded zombies (I think they were some sort of adjective + Risen) and a pair of the bloated critters that explode into eels when you kill them. I ran into the pack and started wailing away with my new "get spirit" skill that can pierce enemies for multiple hits. Abruptly, one of the bloateds did some attack that knocked me backwards . . . into the other bloated, who did the same thing, and I ended up in the middle of the pack. I glanced at my health orb and noted that it had dropped under 80% for the first time, and quickly executed a Lashing Tail attack to give me some space and ran out of the mob. I then pummeled Risen to build up my Spirit (mana) and used Lashing Tail (Spirit Spender) to keep the bloateds at bay.

Here I noticed a nice rhythm to playing the monk that reminded me much of the assassin's martial arts from LoD. Hit things with your basic attack and then use a special move. I like this, it feels like setting up a combo and owning things with it. It feels heroic and awesome.

However, I did not feel in serious danger of getting killed. Maybe if I took my hand off my mouse and took a few sips of coffee, but that's about the only way it would've happened at this point. I noted potential danger and reacted accordingly to escape a potentially dangerous situation, but it wasn't anything that pushed my abilities as a gamer. I'm hoping that the difficulty continues to ramp up throughout the game at about the same rate, though. If it does, given that I felt in zero danger at the beginning and actually experienced some danger (read: I could get killed if I don't pay attention) less than an hour later, I would expect that Act 2, or possibly even later in Act 1 the game might begin to push gamers' abilities to analyze a situation and determine a course of action for survival and victory. That would be a good thing, IMHO, but I also like ridiculously hard games like Ninja Gaiden and Devil May Cry.

I will report more as I get farther into the beta. I haven't been able to sit down and play for more than a couple hours, and I was having fun mauling mobs and looking at the pretty scenery.

I did note a graphical issue. There appears to be no Antialaising or Anisotropic filtering, which may be causing this issue. Specifically, when running about, small artifacts and jagged edges will filter from the top of the play area to the bottom if I'm moving towards the top of the screen, or from the bottom to the top if I'm moving towards the bottom of the screen. This is usually a symptom of either poor hardware or a lack of AA or Aniso. It's not a hardware issue (I'm running a Superclocked GTX 570, 8GB of RAM and an i5 2500K processor all with latest drivers), so that leaves software. Hopefully, this is a beta issue due to lack of AA and Aniso and will not be present in the final version.

Now I'm off to get my Demon Hunter into the Cathedral to see if that dungeon is static or random.

-Loki