Thoughts on Diablo III?

[Rub'Rum]

There is a whisper that the real first wave of closed beta for the public is going to start at some point this week. Maybe as early as tomorrow or Wednesday...

I've already watched a full playthrough of the current beta (I'd say there is 1h30-2h00 of gameplay so it probably gets old kind of fast with many of the features like RUNES not being active yet). The UI, gameplay, loot, skills, animations and stuff look pretty cool and fun to play with. Pretty slick. However, the first act is looking a little bland. I'd say that was the case with Diablo 2 also so I'm not too worried.

I'm not holding my breath for my personal beta key, but I just want it to start ASAP so that the release estimate of Q4 2011 doesn't get pushed back needlessly.

 

[Rub'Rum]

Just want to add that the Diablo 3 website has added a lot of info about all the skills and how they can be radically changed with runes. I am kind of surprised at the amount of skills there are, and multiply that by 5 for the 5 different types of runes to create almost entirely new skills (with different animations).

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/class/

Trying out these various combos, focusing on a specific type of runes, for instance, seems kind of fun. I think once you get into a pattern with a character, acquiring loot that fits with a certain type of runes that you've attached to a subset of skills, I don't think we'll be switching skills all the time as some may fear. And it seems more fun than choosing between Dex 50 or 75.

 

[MobBoss]

Went and took a look at all skills (active/passive) and the rune system. I was also impressed by the overall number of skills, and the flexibilty to tweak your toon in so many ways.

The 'Snake to the face' thing on the Witch Doctor made me laugh just thinking about it.

 

[Calis]

All I saw about the game so far, makes it very interesting for me.

I can't understand why people complain about not being able to distibute the attributes. It's not like it was the main part of D2.

And being online also isn't a big issue for me. I agree with MobBoss that nowadays this is a given most of the time. But if someone (like Akka) has a problem with this, it's fine too. At least for me.

 

[Rub'Rum]

The Blizzard forums are buzzing, some of the fansites and most of the media will have received their beta keys today. The public closed beta was supposed to start almost at the same time as the media, so maybe now it's REALLY coming.

No public invites had been sent at all. Depending on what you consider public. Nobody who was not linked to Blizzard in any way had theirs yet. Now it's press and media, and imminently public.

 

[Luckymoose]

So they removed skills entirely and every character has all the skills regardless of build? What a terrible design choice. 6 active and 3 passive for each class is NOT ENOUGH.

 

[LightSpectra]

I was also impressed by the overall number of skills

lolwhat? Now you're just screwing with us. There's less skills per class than there were in Diablo II. In fact, there's less skills per class than there were spells in the first Diablo.

 

[Rub'Rum]

So they removed skills entirely and every character has all the skills regardless of build? What a terrible design choice. 6 active and 3 passive for each class is NOT ENOUGH.

lolwhat? Now you're just screwing with us. There's less skills per class than there were in Diablo II. In fact, there's less skills per class than there were spells in the first Diablo.

There are about 30 skills per class the way I see it. Each of which can be uniquely modified in 5 different ways by different types of runes. And it's a significant difference. As in, a certain rune in your CLEAVE skill makes enemies explode, and another rune simply makes CLEAVE regenerate more barbarian fury, whereas another rune makes CLEAVE throw enemies back and hurt enemies in the path of these thrown dudes. The animations are supposedly quite different to accompany this. Having high level runes isn't going to be that easy as far as I can tell so you will most likely end up sticking to a certain set of skills (your "build") because you gathered good runes for them, and also because of the equipment synergy you will have with these runes. The number of skills is rather high by itself and easily compares with the previous game, when you add in the runes aspect to it, which nobody had the chance to really see or experiment yet, you have a lot of variety. Two people using CLEAVE in their builds may use it in entirely different ways using different runes and you will be able to tell from the way the character looks when he fights.

As for 6 active and 3 passives not being enough. I don't know, but if you look at the average Diablo 2 build, it revolved around about as many if not less.

 

[Thrawn]

If anyone's interested, there's a play through of the beta here. Looks about 3 hours worth as the first 2 parts are around 30 minutes long.

I tried watching a bit of his steam live at school, alas, school internet can't even handle streaming at 240p.

 

[Maniacal]

That level design is absolutely amazing!


For 1996.


At least they spent time making it highly detailed.

 

[Rub'Rum]

That level design is absolutely amazing!

It's randomly generated, I guess there's only so much you can do with random generation and that level of detail. Random generation is a core element of Diablo. (EDIT: I might want to add that the level design doesn't seem so different from what was found in Sacred 2 or Titan Quest, games in which the levels aren't even randomly generated, but painstakingly designed, and don't date from 1996, but a couple of years ago in the case of Sacred 2. The Sacred 2 world was actually fun to explore, the level design was maybe a bit better than the random stuff we saw from the playthrough of D3, but not by much). That being said, I did say earlier that the levels looking a little bland was one of the things I liked less about the playthroughs I saw. I also added that the beginning of Diablo 2, (Act 1) was also notoriously bland compared to the rest. So we'll see.

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

If anyone's interested, there's a play through of the beta here. Looks about 3 hours worth as the first 2 parts are around 30 minutes long.

I tried watching a bit of his steam live at school, alas, school internet can't even handle streaming at 240p.

WHOA that guy sure is annoying.

 

[Maniacal]

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/09/22/how-diablo-iiis-drm-will-affect-you/#more-75047

Interesting article on the beta from RPS, apparently you cannot pause, save your game (outside of checkpoints) and if you lose your internet connection or the servers go down or you get disconnected for being idle (such as having to answer the door or do something important) you have to redo everything since the last check point. Definitely not SP friendly and definitely does not make me want to buy it. Many gamers already get pissed off enough (and often it is enough to make you stop playing temporarily) when they forget to save for a while and have to redo hours of stuff. Checkpoints are also a thing of the past Blizzard ಠ_ಠ

 

[Rub'Rum]

Do not want. It's the worst aspect of always online, when you lose progress and you get locked out of the game if the servers are offline. But that's not like it's news... We know the online-authentication makes the game feel like an MMORPG. At least I do. But I played and enjoyed MMORPGs so whatever. I still intend to spend a lot of time playing D3 alone. When I think of it though, I used to play Diablo 2 in multiplayer mode even though I was playing alone, because it allowed for higher frame rates for some reason, and also because I could more easily get new random dungeons with the characters. So I couldn't pause there either.

Although the beta servers are probably expected to go offline more often for updates and random crashes and cause more grief in this regard.

In any case, checkpoints are only a place where you go back to when you die. You do not lose any of what you found, or the XP you gained, it just decides where you spawn back to after death. The only way to lose progress seems to be if the servers die. And that will depend on how often the servers save your character. Because the game saves your character all the time. You don't have to save. But yeah, in my mind, servers should save every frickin second. But we'll see.

With the nature of Diablo though, I'm not sure what thing outside of Checkpoints they can give you to go back to where you were. Dungeons and regions being constantly re-randomized when you come back in.

Like the article states, they should really create a fully-offline mode where I can play a character (that can't go online with other people and the community and auction house) when I'm on a plane, when I expect the phone to ring, when their servers die, or whatever. But that's pretty much the only time I'd be interested in playing the offline mode. So I'd have this one backup offline character to kill time with.

 

[Wolfbeckett]

That really doesn't sound good. Rare is the time, especially on weekdays, when I can play for longer than 30 minutes or so without something interrupting me. I wonder how long you have to idle before the game kicks you out.

 

[Rub'Rum]

The waypoint system is not different from playing D2. Even in singleplayer, if I remember well, in D2, when you quit, you reappear in town, and you go back to where you were using a waypoint. The waypoints weren't that far apart. They're not checkpoints which just serve as a spawn point for death as far as I can tell. Because of the nature of Diablo, especially the random dungeon design, this waypoint "spawn in town" thing always worked fine. It doesn't really compare to checkpoints in a linear game.

 

[Maniacal]

The thing is though, he lost all progress he had made since the last checkpoint (at least he did when the server went down), and the randomly generated areas, from what I can tell, regenerated anew.

 

[Heretic_Cata]

Unrelated question:
Do they have a release date yet ?

At least is it this year ???

 

[Thrawn]

The thing is though, he lost all progress he had made since the last checkpoint (at least he did when the server went down), and the randomly generated areas, from what I can tell, regenerated anew.

Servers going down in a beta seems like something that should be expected to me though.

 

[Maniacal]

Servers going down in a beta seems like something that should be expected to me though.

Of course and it is mentioned in the article. However, that does not excuse how the game just slowly lags out and wipes your progress since the last checkpint when playing singleplayer.