I Never Get Invited to Beta

[Zarathustra]

Got my D3 Beta invite. I'll be posting some updates/impressions and so on later this week.

As there's tons of media out there on the net - beta streams, screenshots galore, etc, I'll be focusing more on how D3 compares to D1 and D2 in terms of gameplay, atmosphere, etc.

Tycho over at Penny Arcade gave his impressions and a comic...

The reason the electrified parts of the world have not ground to halt altogether is that the Diablo III beta includes only subset of a percentage of a portion of a slice of a morsel of the first part of the game. Well, we have been there, we have done that. And we’ve gotten the boots.

I talked about the “spirit” having gone out of the plastic when it came to youth fetishes; and it’s like that with Starcraft II for me. I’m not saying it isn’t good, I know it’s good. I simply know it too well. How can a game come out ten years later, which seems like a long time, and ultimately make me feel exhausted? I know where the problem is, believe me. I love watching other people play it. But whatever receptors I had for it are gone.

I came into the beta of Diablo III with a sizable chip placed squarely on my shoulder, a chip of substance, very nearly a pauldron. The reality is that Runic games makes a twenty dollar version of the Diablo series with grace and expertise that satisfies the starving gecko in my brain which longs to click. I played the sequel at PAX, and it’s incredible; I would buy the game for the idle animation on the female Berserker alone. You see “tough” barbarian-types, you see “crazy” ones, there’s a pronounced “noble” strain - but you don’t see wild, for some reason, which I thought was the point. Her eyes are rolling around in her head like marbles. I’ve never seen the like.

But Diablo III doesn’t leave anything to chance; it implants the proboscis with utter precision. Even if you are a jaded gaming satirist actively hostile to it, your hypothalamus is pumped with so much liquid nectar that the corners of your mouth curve up into a smile even as the saliva wells behind the lower lip. The best way to say it is that the experience is clean, magnificently clean, without being sterile or predictable. That’s quite a trick.

I like the sound of that.