10-10-2011, 12:57 PM
I've now "beaten" the beta a number of times, on three different classes: Monk, Barbarian, and Wizard. Herein lie my experiences, again plot-spoiler-free.
I used quotations around the word "beaten" because it simply means I defeated the beta's end boss. This is not an impressive accomplishment. Once you know what you're doing in the beta and have been through it before, you can go from starting a new character to beating the end boss in 15-20 minutes. It's mostly because so much of the content is skippable. Think of Diablo II's Mephisto runs - you start a game, hit a waypoint, skip as much as you can, get down to the boss, kill him, repeat. While starting from the beginning and rushing all the way to the end boss isn't *that* bad, it can fly by pretty fast.
A lot of it is due to this being normal difficulty only, and we're only looking at part of Act 1. I would relate it to playing Diablo 1 down to the last Cathedral level, killing the Butcher and Leoric along the way. You're then met with a "Congratulations! You have defeated the Diablo III Beta" message that covers your entire screen for 10 seconds, followed by...nothing; you leave the game and join a new one, or just quit out.
In my previous report, I mentioned how I seemed to have to start over again from the beginning every time I joined a game. This was just an error on my part when I lost connection on my private game and then joined a public game. When you go to join someone else's game, it marks what quest they're on. I had joined a public game that started from the beginning, so this marked my character as being on that quest. In effect, joining a game that's on a quest previous to the one you're on marks your character as being on that previous quest, so that's your progress level from then on.
So, speaking of public games, how's the multiplayer? Two words: fast, and furious. The content in normal Act 1 is really, really, really easy - as you'd expect - so multiplayer games on the beta are just rampant bloody slaughterfests. There's no stopping to check barrels, or smash urns, or even pick up normal "white" loot. If you're not constantly running to the next monster group, you get left behind. If you don't like this pace, and prefer to clear levels and/or investigate things, stay out of the multiplayer public games.
When checking the public game list, you simply see a summary of the number of games that are up for a particular quest progression. As you can expect, 90% of the games are on the final quest of the beta, as players just farm the end boss over and over and over in an effort to upgrade their gear. You might think, "that's kinda pointless," but understand that there really isn't much to do, once you've played each of the five character classes (Barbarian, Demon Hunter, Witch Doctor, Monk, and Wizard). The beta is awfully short. In the span of an afternoon, you can complete the beta for all five classes, if that was your goal.
I was tooling around with my Wizard last night. I started a public game from the very first quest, and nobody joined the game at all throughout all of the quests - until I hit the final quest. Within 20 seconds after that, the game was full. So again, all everyone's doing in the beta is just farming the end boss over and over. I find that pretty boring, personally, especially because it poses zero challenge whatsoever.
Okay, how about some gameplay details? Again, nothing new here that hasn't been revealed 1,000 times elsewhere, but if you don't read up much on Diablo III hype, you'll find some interesting tidbits herein.
As you quest in Act 1, you receive three special inventory items that are separate from your normal inventory, but interact with it. The first is the Nepharim[sp] Cube, not to be confused with the Horadric Cube. This cube lets you "melt" items and turn them into crafting mats. It's very similar to disenchanting in World of Warcraft - you nuke an item and you get two different kinds of mats: "common" ones and magic ones, based on whether you melt a "white" item or a magical item. Both mat varieties are used to craft things.
While there will be a number of crafting professions in the game, the only one accessible in the beta thus far is Blacksmithing. From what it looks like, you will be able to take on all professions at once; it's just a matter of gathering the mats you need to both create things and advance your professions. And what is even more interesting is that your Blacksmithing abilities are shared amongst all your characters. Recipes that one character learns are known to all of your characters, as well as your Blacksmithing "level." You advance in Blacksmithing by finding Pages of Training, a drop off of monsters or bookshelves (yes, bookshelves) and lecturns or other clickable thingies in dungeons. These tend to drop in the later levels of the beta. Once you collect five Pages of Training, you turn them into a book that you can use to either learn Blacksmithing or "level" Blacksmithing. Crafting items is a simplified version of World of Warcraft's professions - you take your melted gear's common or magic mats and click "craft" on whatever you want. As long as you have enough mats, the item is yours.
Okay, so what's the second interesting special inventory item you get? A Cauldron of Jordan. This lets you sell your inventory items anywhere, anytime. It's a "vendor" that lets you dump your trash items you don't want just like you were selling them to a vendor in town, essentially letting you forgo town trips just for the sake of clearing inventory. Stay down in the dungeon indefinitely! This is a good thing, keeping the dungeon crawl going without sudden breaks to town that are more inconvenient than anything. It's also a little related to the last special inventory item you get.
Your Stone of Recall is the last special item. This lets you port to town whenever you want to. No scrolls of Town Portal, folks. However, unlike the instant-cast Town Portals of Diablo 1 and Diablo 2, used by many to quickly escape a deteoriorating situation, porting to town takes 10 seconds ala hearthstones in World of Warcraft. You can't port to town as a means to escape a horde anymore. So, you can see why the Cauldron of Jordan is useful: it keeps the action going as you take a few seconds to sell your crap instead of a long port to town, running to a vendor, selling stuff, and running back.
More tidbits - game balance. What game balance? It really doesn't exist at this point. Some abilities are grossly overpowered compared to others, so much so that you never look at older abilities again once you get that one special one. The Wizard for instance seems a bit weak until you hit level 6 and get their chain lightning ability...after which you wade into dozens of monsters and laugh maniacally as they splat dead in seconds. In a game where AoE damage is king, any AoE damage ability is all you're going to use 99% of the time. This probably changes in later difficulties, I'm sure (well, I'd hope) where strategy and tactics would be necessary, but so far with each class it's a matter of "find/level up to the skill that just does gross AoE damage, and spam that with impunity."
Okay, now to quick-fire off lots of little tidbits:
1) Barbarian's Leap Attack ability is just as fun in Diablo III as it was in Diablo II. It's especially nice to leap to places that would normally require you to run around stairwells or just go out of your way.
2) I fought some Lightning Enchanted bosses! And just like Diablo II's, when you hit them, sparks fly out. Made me grin that Diablo II's most dangeous boss ability made a comeback.
3) Beyond lightning enchanted bosses, there's a number of different newer types: Molten, which leaves pools of fire where they go and explodes when you kill them (so run!). Arcane, which launches stationary "fiends" that can't be attacked and shoot arcane bolts at you. Illusionist, which creates copies of themselves with no indication of which is the "real" boss - but only the real one drops the loot. Frozen, which slows you and also creates a chill bomb when dead to ice you up.
4) An interesting and somewhat rare monster is the Treasure Hunter. These goblins don't attack you; they're exploring places for loot. When you attack them with anything, they immediately start running, dropping gold as they go. They're pretty fast, and the challenge is to keep up with them. If you don't attack them in time, they create a portal and escape. Killing them yields a lot of loot - drops, gold, mats, etc. What happens is that you see one of these guys, attack them, and they run away from you - into packs of other monsters. You can't let him go, so you keep chasing, waking up more and more monster packs. You kill him, getting his loot...but have to face a massive horde of monsters you woke up. I like it.
5) I'm still finding new events / set pieces / side dungeons I haven't seen before. Exploring definitely yields interesting finds. After one or two complete playthroughs, you might think you've seen it all, but you haven't.
6) Lag / disconnects. These are jarring because the gameplay is really, really smooth most of the time. Simply put, you forget that you're playing online on Blizzard's servers. However, from time to time, a disconnect or lag happens. Last night I had a game where everyone stopped moving. I could still move around, but couldn't interact with anything. I ran around a bunch until I hit the "end of the world" - similar to Diablo II where you're lagged and can just hit a border of the game world. After 20 seconds of that, I was suddenly teleported back to where my lag first started. 5 seconds after THAT, I was met with a black screen and that was that. Couldn't do anything, couldn't see anything, couldn't port to town; had to leave the game. Stuff like this will drive purists nuts, especially if you like to play solo. You can't play offline, period, so a bad internet connection means that you can't even play solo.
More in the next report: followers, how Diablo III compares to WoW, and maybe a separate plot report if people want to know the plot of the beta. There's a lot of lore from D1 and D2 in the game so far.
I used quotations around the word "beaten" because it simply means I defeated the beta's end boss. This is not an impressive accomplishment. Once you know what you're doing in the beta and have been through it before, you can go from starting a new character to beating the end boss in 15-20 minutes. It's mostly because so much of the content is skippable. Think of Diablo II's Mephisto runs - you start a game, hit a waypoint, skip as much as you can, get down to the boss, kill him, repeat. While starting from the beginning and rushing all the way to the end boss isn't *that* bad, it can fly by pretty fast.
A lot of it is due to this being normal difficulty only, and we're only looking at part of Act 1. I would relate it to playing Diablo 1 down to the last Cathedral level, killing the Butcher and Leoric along the way. You're then met with a "Congratulations! You have defeated the Diablo III Beta" message that covers your entire screen for 10 seconds, followed by...nothing; you leave the game and join a new one, or just quit out.
In my previous report, I mentioned how I seemed to have to start over again from the beginning every time I joined a game. This was just an error on my part when I lost connection on my private game and then joined a public game. When you go to join someone else's game, it marks what quest they're on. I had joined a public game that started from the beginning, so this marked my character as being on that quest. In effect, joining a game that's on a quest previous to the one you're on marks your character as being on that previous quest, so that's your progress level from then on.
So, speaking of public games, how's the multiplayer? Two words: fast, and furious. The content in normal Act 1 is really, really, really easy - as you'd expect - so multiplayer games on the beta are just rampant bloody slaughterfests. There's no stopping to check barrels, or smash urns, or even pick up normal "white" loot. If you're not constantly running to the next monster group, you get left behind. If you don't like this pace, and prefer to clear levels and/or investigate things, stay out of the multiplayer public games.
When checking the public game list, you simply see a summary of the number of games that are up for a particular quest progression. As you can expect, 90% of the games are on the final quest of the beta, as players just farm the end boss over and over and over in an effort to upgrade their gear. You might think, "that's kinda pointless," but understand that there really isn't much to do, once you've played each of the five character classes (Barbarian, Demon Hunter, Witch Doctor, Monk, and Wizard). The beta is awfully short. In the span of an afternoon, you can complete the beta for all five classes, if that was your goal.
I was tooling around with my Wizard last night. I started a public game from the very first quest, and nobody joined the game at all throughout all of the quests - until I hit the final quest. Within 20 seconds after that, the game was full. So again, all everyone's doing in the beta is just farming the end boss over and over. I find that pretty boring, personally, especially because it poses zero challenge whatsoever.
Okay, how about some gameplay details? Again, nothing new here that hasn't been revealed 1,000 times elsewhere, but if you don't read up much on Diablo III hype, you'll find some interesting tidbits herein.
As you quest in Act 1, you receive three special inventory items that are separate from your normal inventory, but interact with it. The first is the Nepharim[sp] Cube, not to be confused with the Horadric Cube. This cube lets you "melt" items and turn them into crafting mats. It's very similar to disenchanting in World of Warcraft - you nuke an item and you get two different kinds of mats: "common" ones and magic ones, based on whether you melt a "white" item or a magical item. Both mat varieties are used to craft things.
While there will be a number of crafting professions in the game, the only one accessible in the beta thus far is Blacksmithing. From what it looks like, you will be able to take on all professions at once; it's just a matter of gathering the mats you need to both create things and advance your professions. And what is even more interesting is that your Blacksmithing abilities are shared amongst all your characters. Recipes that one character learns are known to all of your characters, as well as your Blacksmithing "level." You advance in Blacksmithing by finding Pages of Training, a drop off of monsters or bookshelves (yes, bookshelves) and lecturns or other clickable thingies in dungeons. These tend to drop in the later levels of the beta. Once you collect five Pages of Training, you turn them into a book that you can use to either learn Blacksmithing or "level" Blacksmithing. Crafting items is a simplified version of World of Warcraft's professions - you take your melted gear's common or magic mats and click "craft" on whatever you want. As long as you have enough mats, the item is yours.
Okay, so what's the second interesting special inventory item you get? A Cauldron of Jordan. This lets you sell your inventory items anywhere, anytime. It's a "vendor" that lets you dump your trash items you don't want just like you were selling them to a vendor in town, essentially letting you forgo town trips just for the sake of clearing inventory. Stay down in the dungeon indefinitely! This is a good thing, keeping the dungeon crawl going without sudden breaks to town that are more inconvenient than anything. It's also a little related to the last special inventory item you get.
Your Stone of Recall is the last special item. This lets you port to town whenever you want to. No scrolls of Town Portal, folks. However, unlike the instant-cast Town Portals of Diablo 1 and Diablo 2, used by many to quickly escape a deteoriorating situation, porting to town takes 10 seconds ala hearthstones in World of Warcraft. You can't port to town as a means to escape a horde anymore. So, you can see why the Cauldron of Jordan is useful: it keeps the action going as you take a few seconds to sell your crap instead of a long port to town, running to a vendor, selling stuff, and running back.
More tidbits - game balance. What game balance? It really doesn't exist at this point. Some abilities are grossly overpowered compared to others, so much so that you never look at older abilities again once you get that one special one. The Wizard for instance seems a bit weak until you hit level 6 and get their chain lightning ability...after which you wade into dozens of monsters and laugh maniacally as they splat dead in seconds. In a game where AoE damage is king, any AoE damage ability is all you're going to use 99% of the time. This probably changes in later difficulties, I'm sure (well, I'd hope) where strategy and tactics would be necessary, but so far with each class it's a matter of "find/level up to the skill that just does gross AoE damage, and spam that with impunity."
Okay, now to quick-fire off lots of little tidbits:
1) Barbarian's Leap Attack ability is just as fun in Diablo III as it was in Diablo II. It's especially nice to leap to places that would normally require you to run around stairwells or just go out of your way.
2) I fought some Lightning Enchanted bosses! And just like Diablo II's, when you hit them, sparks fly out. Made me grin that Diablo II's most dangeous boss ability made a comeback.
3) Beyond lightning enchanted bosses, there's a number of different newer types: Molten, which leaves pools of fire where they go and explodes when you kill them (so run!). Arcane, which launches stationary "fiends" that can't be attacked and shoot arcane bolts at you. Illusionist, which creates copies of themselves with no indication of which is the "real" boss - but only the real one drops the loot. Frozen, which slows you and also creates a chill bomb when dead to ice you up.
4) An interesting and somewhat rare monster is the Treasure Hunter. These goblins don't attack you; they're exploring places for loot. When you attack them with anything, they immediately start running, dropping gold as they go. They're pretty fast, and the challenge is to keep up with them. If you don't attack them in time, they create a portal and escape. Killing them yields a lot of loot - drops, gold, mats, etc. What happens is that you see one of these guys, attack them, and they run away from you - into packs of other monsters. You can't let him go, so you keep chasing, waking up more and more monster packs. You kill him, getting his loot...but have to face a massive horde of monsters you woke up. I like it.
5) I'm still finding new events / set pieces / side dungeons I haven't seen before. Exploring definitely yields interesting finds. After one or two complete playthroughs, you might think you've seen it all, but you haven't.
6) Lag / disconnects. These are jarring because the gameplay is really, really smooth most of the time. Simply put, you forget that you're playing online on Blizzard's servers. However, from time to time, a disconnect or lag happens. Last night I had a game where everyone stopped moving. I could still move around, but couldn't interact with anything. I ran around a bunch until I hit the "end of the world" - similar to Diablo II where you're lagged and can just hit a border of the game world. After 20 seconds of that, I was suddenly teleported back to where my lag first started. 5 seconds after THAT, I was met with a black screen and that was that. Couldn't do anything, couldn't see anything, couldn't port to town; had to leave the game. Stuff like this will drive purists nuts, especially if you like to play solo. You can't play offline, period, so a bad internet connection means that you can't even play solo.
More in the next report: followers, how Diablo III compares to WoW, and maybe a separate plot report if people want to know the plot of the beta. There's a lot of lore from D1 and D2 in the game so far.
Quote:Considering the mods here are generally liberals who seem to have a soft spot for fascism and white supremacy (despite them saying otherwise), me being perma-banned at some point is probably not out of the question.