10-05-2011, 04:45 PM
So I played the Diablo III Beta for an hour last night. Herein lie my experiences. Plot-spoiler-free!
If perhaps you're reading this from some outside source or you stumbled across it via a web search, let me provide you with a little background. I played Diablo 1 religiously, and ran a website (this one here) dedicated to strategy and tactics in the game. I beta tested and played Diablo 2, along with its expansion, and this website was one of the top 3-4 on the Net regarding that game. During that time, I had some of the developers' ears directly via email, and could bounce bugs, exploits, and ideas off them. Those years are long gone, of course, and I'm unknown in Blizzard's circles nowadays. I received a Diablo III Beta invite purely by chance, and I'm almost scared of getting sucked into that universe again after all this time.
I'm an avid World of Warcraft player, having played the game since phase 1 beta. My interest in Diablo II declined quickly once I got into WoW, and I basically haven't touched a Diablo game since. I've totally avoided almost all information about Diablo III to this point, just watching trailers, following some news about the real-money transaction Auction House controversy ("Diablo III is a gambling machine disguised as a game!"), and just steering clear of general hype. I'm old and crotchety, son; hype doesn't work on me much anymore. I've been gaming since before you were born, most likely, unless you're one of this site's regulars.
As a result of my lack of knowledge regarding Diablo III, I am coming into the beta as total nubcakes. However, I have vast experience with Diablo 1 and Diablo 2. This puts me at a strange position where I'm an expert in the Diablo universe, but totally ignorant regarding Diablo 3's internal mechanics. I will thus say some things in this report that will make a devoted follower of Diablo 3 think "wow, what a moron." If you're reading this expecting to hear something that hasn't been discussed elsewhere, you're going to be sorely disappointed. Yet, feedback of the kind I will provide would be useful to Blizzard if they're looking for such input - unfiltered by previous expectations except for those of a Diablo 1 and 2 player.
Enough disclaimer, let's begin!
The beta client download was smooth and clean, the downloader process obviously the same design as the World of Warcraft patch loader. You launch the program, it starts downloading and installing over Bittorrent. At a certain point the game becomes "playable," but I chose to wait for the download to fully complete.
The login screen is ridiculously similar to World of Warcraft's, and that's just smart design by Blizzard to create a consistency with their Battle.Net games. I logged in and was met with the character creation screen. I chose to create a female Monk and began my Act 1 experience.
With Diablo 1 and 2, you start the game in a "safe area," which is a static spot to obtain your first quest, try out the controls, and get used to the interface a bit before heading out into the battlefield. Diablo III puts you out in the field (well, a path) to start and lets you whack a few monsters before "earning" the right to enter the first safe area. This sets a tone very quickly: the "safe area" is under assault and despair is rampant. You offer to help the situation, and are given some tasks to do.
Voice acting? Meh....some of it is not-so-great. There was a Random Townsperson X™ that I talked to and he gave a "woe is us" speech with such poor voice acting that I actually laughed. They were aiming for desperation, but it came off overacted and cheesy. My female Monk had a Russian-ish accent that just seemed...off. But we don't play Diablo games for the voice acting.
Blizzard did a decent job avoiding the "staticness" of the safe area / town. Walking into the local inn, for instance, showed a bunch of wounded soldiers sitting / lying / crouching off in one area, and as I talked to an NPC, I heard screaming - and the soldiers "turned" before my eyes into walking dead, attacking the inn patrons while I beat them down. Next time I have to try doing nothing, and see if they kill anyone.
So yes, there's more plot sequences in Diablo III than in the previous games. This is good and bad. It definitely makes your first playthrough more interesting, but won't it get old after the 500th time through? "Hang on Jim, I gotta go to the Inn and whack the surprise zombie attack again. Brb."
As far as gear goes, my Monk started off with a basic fist weapon, and that was about it. As I moved out into the world for my first quest, I received random white-colored gear (white quality, that is) and equipped it to boost my stats. But then, I ran into the first conundrum. I could use two weapons, or a weapon and a shield (buckler). What's best for a Monk? Should I be using fist weapons only? Is there a penalty for equipping two weapons vs. just one? How is my damage affected by using two weapons instead of a weapon and shield? Is a Monk SUPPOSED to use axes? None of this is intuitively clear. I couldn't equip bows or wands, because they were X'ed out on my inventory screen, so that was clear enough. But I had no idea if I was penalizing myself for not using fist-weapons, considering my abilities seemed to be very fist-based.
More regarding Monk mechanics: "Spirit" is your mana. You have a Spirit-gaining move, and can choose between a few of them. You have a Spirit-using move, and can also choose between a few of them. More choices open up as you level, and you can "bind" two abilities to your mouse buttons. So by default, my Spirit-gaining punch move was my left mouse button while my Spirit-using move would be on my right mouse button. I also have 5 buttons to use (keyboard 1-5) that I can place potions or other objects on. The gameplay was naturally very simplistic, as I would expect of an extremely low-level character.
I'm deliberately avoiding plot spoilers, by the way. But suffice to say that if you are familiar with Diablo 1 and 2's plot, you will very quickly be getting to hear about old friends and old places.
Random tiny dungeons were spread out in the landscape. I could enter them and they'd consist of one or two rooms, sometimes with a "boss" monster. They were entirely optional, but if you're like me, you clear everything, so spelunking I went! One of them was called a "Mass Grave." I jumped down in it and there was nothing there except a body I could check for loot. So I clicked on it, and that disturbed the walking dead who started sprouting out from the walls and the floor. Admiral Ackbar would be proud. Nice trap.
When encountering (and killing) a new type of monster, a "Lore" button would appear in the lower right side of the screen. I could click on it and hear a voiced tidbit about the monster, giving me some background on it. This satisfies lore nerds while allowing those who just want to kill the next thing a chance to do so without being bothered. Nice touch. The town NPCs had the same style option - you could chat with them optionally via a small menu that appears over their head upon "touching" them, but it isn't necessary to do so unless you want some more background/plot.
The atmosphere? Wonderfully spooky and dark. Unlike Diablo II's opening Act 1 outdoor areas that felt like you were taking a jaunt through New York's Central Park (well, with random monsters in it), Diablo III lays the undead atmosphere on thick. Rolling fog banks, carcasses everywhere (with zombies eating them only to be rudely interrupted by you), bloated puke-spewing undead, moaning and screaming background effects, terrified victims - just an average day to you and me, right? I'd walk by a dilapidated building and its roof would collapse. Lots of neat little atmospheric effects like that.
Eventually I reached the first "dungeon" of Diablo III, heading down akin to Diablo 1. The monsters here definitely ramped in difficulty, with bloated Grotesques providing a decent challenge. These guys had eels inside of them that would spike outward when you got close and slam you back, hurting quite a bit. A nice difficulty for a melee class such as myself, they had the extra tweak of exploding when you kill them into packs of these eels that would *hurt* when they attacked me. Taking on two Grotesques at once would be typically fatal. I was enjoying exploring this dungeon when I was suddenly met with "You have lost connection to the Battle.Net server" or some equivalent message, and was subsequently dumped out to the main menu.
Ah, that's Beta testing for you! I had to wait for the servers to come back up (about a minute or so) to go into another game. And herein lies one of the major beefs some people have with Diablo III - it's online-only. If you lose your Internet connection, you're out of the game, and there's no offline mode, period.
Okay, no big deal, right? I'll join another game and pick up where I left off. I decided I'd join a public game and see what co-op gameplay is like. Upon joining, however, I saw myself back at the very beginning of Act 1 again, re-enacting the quests that I had done previously. Did I lose all my progress? I checked my character, and she still had the loot and level she had prior to the disconnection - but no indication of the quest she was on. Rather, my quest log showed the beginning quest of Act 1, and I'd have to do the quests over again to get back to where I was.
"Eh, it's just because this is a public game, I'll start up another private game and continue from MY progress level," I thought. So I left that public game and created another private game.
I "zoned in" to the very beginning of Act 1 with no quests completed. Wait, what? Where did my progress go? Do I have to start over again? Is this a bug or did I do something wrong? That wrapped up my play for the evening - about an hour in total. Did I enjoy the experience? You bet, but it would definitely be more interesting with a friend along. I need to play around with my progress and see if I can get back to a game that doesn't require me to start over. I'm also wondering if there's an in-game resource for letting me know how a Monk should handle weapons and shields, or what I should look for with gear. We all know from the previous Diablo games that what you see is not what you get. Hidden powers, combinations, and attributes that aren't intuitive to a typical player are what people find that give them a leg up, but basic gameplay elements such as "should I be using daggers as a Monk or what" should be made obvious to a newbie.
Runes? Didn't get that far, didn't see any.
Thanks for reading - questions and comments welcome.
If perhaps you're reading this from some outside source or you stumbled across it via a web search, let me provide you with a little background. I played Diablo 1 religiously, and ran a website (this one here) dedicated to strategy and tactics in the game. I beta tested and played Diablo 2, along with its expansion, and this website was one of the top 3-4 on the Net regarding that game. During that time, I had some of the developers' ears directly via email, and could bounce bugs, exploits, and ideas off them. Those years are long gone, of course, and I'm unknown in Blizzard's circles nowadays. I received a Diablo III Beta invite purely by chance, and I'm almost scared of getting sucked into that universe again after all this time.
I'm an avid World of Warcraft player, having played the game since phase 1 beta. My interest in Diablo II declined quickly once I got into WoW, and I basically haven't touched a Diablo game since. I've totally avoided almost all information about Diablo III to this point, just watching trailers, following some news about the real-money transaction Auction House controversy ("Diablo III is a gambling machine disguised as a game!"), and just steering clear of general hype. I'm old and crotchety, son; hype doesn't work on me much anymore. I've been gaming since before you were born, most likely, unless you're one of this site's regulars.
As a result of my lack of knowledge regarding Diablo III, I am coming into the beta as total nubcakes. However, I have vast experience with Diablo 1 and Diablo 2. This puts me at a strange position where I'm an expert in the Diablo universe, but totally ignorant regarding Diablo 3's internal mechanics. I will thus say some things in this report that will make a devoted follower of Diablo 3 think "wow, what a moron." If you're reading this expecting to hear something that hasn't been discussed elsewhere, you're going to be sorely disappointed. Yet, feedback of the kind I will provide would be useful to Blizzard if they're looking for such input - unfiltered by previous expectations except for those of a Diablo 1 and 2 player.
Enough disclaimer, let's begin!
The beta client download was smooth and clean, the downloader process obviously the same design as the World of Warcraft patch loader. You launch the program, it starts downloading and installing over Bittorrent. At a certain point the game becomes "playable," but I chose to wait for the download to fully complete.
The login screen is ridiculously similar to World of Warcraft's, and that's just smart design by Blizzard to create a consistency with their Battle.Net games. I logged in and was met with the character creation screen. I chose to create a female Monk and began my Act 1 experience.
With Diablo 1 and 2, you start the game in a "safe area," which is a static spot to obtain your first quest, try out the controls, and get used to the interface a bit before heading out into the battlefield. Diablo III puts you out in the field (well, a path) to start and lets you whack a few monsters before "earning" the right to enter the first safe area. This sets a tone very quickly: the "safe area" is under assault and despair is rampant. You offer to help the situation, and are given some tasks to do.
Voice acting? Meh....some of it is not-so-great. There was a Random Townsperson X™ that I talked to and he gave a "woe is us" speech with such poor voice acting that I actually laughed. They were aiming for desperation, but it came off overacted and cheesy. My female Monk had a Russian-ish accent that just seemed...off. But we don't play Diablo games for the voice acting.
Blizzard did a decent job avoiding the "staticness" of the safe area / town. Walking into the local inn, for instance, showed a bunch of wounded soldiers sitting / lying / crouching off in one area, and as I talked to an NPC, I heard screaming - and the soldiers "turned" before my eyes into walking dead, attacking the inn patrons while I beat them down. Next time I have to try doing nothing, and see if they kill anyone.
So yes, there's more plot sequences in Diablo III than in the previous games. This is good and bad. It definitely makes your first playthrough more interesting, but won't it get old after the 500th time through? "Hang on Jim, I gotta go to the Inn and whack the surprise zombie attack again. Brb."
As far as gear goes, my Monk started off with a basic fist weapon, and that was about it. As I moved out into the world for my first quest, I received random white-colored gear (white quality, that is) and equipped it to boost my stats. But then, I ran into the first conundrum. I could use two weapons, or a weapon and a shield (buckler). What's best for a Monk? Should I be using fist weapons only? Is there a penalty for equipping two weapons vs. just one? How is my damage affected by using two weapons instead of a weapon and shield? Is a Monk SUPPOSED to use axes? None of this is intuitively clear. I couldn't equip bows or wands, because they were X'ed out on my inventory screen, so that was clear enough. But I had no idea if I was penalizing myself for not using fist-weapons, considering my abilities seemed to be very fist-based.
More regarding Monk mechanics: "Spirit" is your mana. You have a Spirit-gaining move, and can choose between a few of them. You have a Spirit-using move, and can also choose between a few of them. More choices open up as you level, and you can "bind" two abilities to your mouse buttons. So by default, my Spirit-gaining punch move was my left mouse button while my Spirit-using move would be on my right mouse button. I also have 5 buttons to use (keyboard 1-5) that I can place potions or other objects on. The gameplay was naturally very simplistic, as I would expect of an extremely low-level character.
I'm deliberately avoiding plot spoilers, by the way. But suffice to say that if you are familiar with Diablo 1 and 2's plot, you will very quickly be getting to hear about old friends and old places.
Random tiny dungeons were spread out in the landscape. I could enter them and they'd consist of one or two rooms, sometimes with a "boss" monster. They were entirely optional, but if you're like me, you clear everything, so spelunking I went! One of them was called a "Mass Grave." I jumped down in it and there was nothing there except a body I could check for loot. So I clicked on it, and that disturbed the walking dead who started sprouting out from the walls and the floor. Admiral Ackbar would be proud. Nice trap.
When encountering (and killing) a new type of monster, a "Lore" button would appear in the lower right side of the screen. I could click on it and hear a voiced tidbit about the monster, giving me some background on it. This satisfies lore nerds while allowing those who just want to kill the next thing a chance to do so without being bothered. Nice touch. The town NPCs had the same style option - you could chat with them optionally via a small menu that appears over their head upon "touching" them, but it isn't necessary to do so unless you want some more background/plot.
The atmosphere? Wonderfully spooky and dark. Unlike Diablo II's opening Act 1 outdoor areas that felt like you were taking a jaunt through New York's Central Park (well, with random monsters in it), Diablo III lays the undead atmosphere on thick. Rolling fog banks, carcasses everywhere (with zombies eating them only to be rudely interrupted by you), bloated puke-spewing undead, moaning and screaming background effects, terrified victims - just an average day to you and me, right? I'd walk by a dilapidated building and its roof would collapse. Lots of neat little atmospheric effects like that.
Eventually I reached the first "dungeon" of Diablo III, heading down akin to Diablo 1. The monsters here definitely ramped in difficulty, with bloated Grotesques providing a decent challenge. These guys had eels inside of them that would spike outward when you got close and slam you back, hurting quite a bit. A nice difficulty for a melee class such as myself, they had the extra tweak of exploding when you kill them into packs of these eels that would *hurt* when they attacked me. Taking on two Grotesques at once would be typically fatal. I was enjoying exploring this dungeon when I was suddenly met with "You have lost connection to the Battle.Net server" or some equivalent message, and was subsequently dumped out to the main menu.
Ah, that's Beta testing for you! I had to wait for the servers to come back up (about a minute or so) to go into another game. And herein lies one of the major beefs some people have with Diablo III - it's online-only. If you lose your Internet connection, you're out of the game, and there's no offline mode, period.
Okay, no big deal, right? I'll join another game and pick up where I left off. I decided I'd join a public game and see what co-op gameplay is like. Upon joining, however, I saw myself back at the very beginning of Act 1 again, re-enacting the quests that I had done previously. Did I lose all my progress? I checked my character, and she still had the loot and level she had prior to the disconnection - but no indication of the quest she was on. Rather, my quest log showed the beginning quest of Act 1, and I'd have to do the quests over again to get back to where I was.
"Eh, it's just because this is a public game, I'll start up another private game and continue from MY progress level," I thought. So I left that public game and created another private game.
I "zoned in" to the very beginning of Act 1 with no quests completed. Wait, what? Where did my progress go? Do I have to start over again? Is this a bug or did I do something wrong? That wrapped up my play for the evening - about an hour in total. Did I enjoy the experience? You bet, but it would definitely be more interesting with a friend along. I need to play around with my progress and see if I can get back to a game that doesn't require me to start over. I'm also wondering if there's an in-game resource for letting me know how a Monk should handle weapons and shields, or what I should look for with gear. We all know from the previous Diablo games that what you see is not what you get. Hidden powers, combinations, and attributes that aren't intuitive to a typical player are what people find that give them a leg up, but basic gameplay elements such as "should I be using daggers as a Monk or what" should be made obvious to a newbie.
Runes? Didn't get that far, didn't see any.
Thanks for reading - questions and comments welcome.
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.
![[Image: Sabra%20gold%20copy.jpg]](http://lh4.ggpht.com/_5eP1tAQLrYk/Sekf3ggYfTI/AAAAAAAAB14/ECIStOuO58I/Sabra%20gold%20copy.jpg)
![[Image: jsoho8.png]](http://i61.tinypic.com/jsoho8.png)
![[Image: 10gmtrs.png]](http://i60.tinypic.com/10gmtrs.png)
![[Image: RnFUN.gif]](http://i.imgur.com/RnFUN.gif)
adface: ), and I'm enjoying your updates. Hope you find the time and energy to keep us up to date with your ventures into DIII. I was a bit disappointed to hear about the voice talent. I thought the voices for WC3 were quite atrocious at times. Could have been the script as well... but when so much of Blizzard games are near-perfect, it seems very strange that their voice talent should be so amateurish...