Campaign Creations

So my long-winded open beta impressions :

After finally managing to get in (after seeing more logging/hero selection errors), the game went quite smoothly overall. So I am presuming they are using different servers for the games themselves and the logging screen/auction house. Still, I find it very bad for a stress test beta.

I took the Monk. Liked that it had some AoE healing abilities although I might be sad to see Auras go (compared to the D2 Paladin). It also have AoE attacks and I kind of liked being able to break multiple barrels at once instead of poking of each them individually.

I only played said Monk to finish at lv9. I kind of felt it was pointless to redo it with other characters in a beta.

I do dislike the game became a bit too linear compared to D2. While making the quests more linear aren't a bad thing by itself, you do have less side areas to poke for more loot/levels. Thus you probably have to remake games more often if that's your goal.

I do like that they tried to put some story effort along the way during the quests. Thus, you feel less doing the quests just for some shiny reward.

Gold is pickable along the way, less useless clickies for that 2 gold, 5 gold and 14 gold on the ground.

Inventory items tend to take 1x2 and the char's inventory space is larger compared to D2. As someone who like to keep too many things I like that. The stash seems to have a final higher space cap although the initial size sucks.

Kind of like that the artisan mimics WoW's enchanting by scrapping magic items into "essences"-like items to hopefully better stuff after. So no magic item becomes 100% useless.

Although a valid fear would be that it feels too easy. Despite playing like a brainless grunt, I think my HP only went down to 40% HP without using a single potion excluding the Skeleton King fight. The Skeleton King only required to use my AoE heal about 2-3 times + a 400 hp pot. Started with 5 heal low-pots, bought 3 low-pots "in case" with my started gold and ended up with 31 low-pots at end game. Fortunately, healing potions stack in D3 rather than using 15 spaces for 15 pots.

I am aware that the difficulty is very likely to be higher eventually. After all in Blizzard's interest, players have to have a need to buy better stuff with real cash off the AH at some point. In my mind, the 1 million question is ... when? I honestly don't want to wait for end-Nightmare or mid-Hell difficulty to be any afraid of dying. Although, perhaps Blizzard is trying to cater more to casuals. Hopefully not too much.

Anyway, I tried a public game real quick. No more named games and all mixed in a big bag where you randomly join one. People tend to run straight to the goal. After a game, the good thing is you see people as your "recently played players" tab. So blizzard actually tried to add some way to make friends.

I am not 100% sure if it's possible to have a private game with friends but it seems so since I could potentially invite said players from my "recently played players" into my game.

Then I tried the auction house. At the time, it did seem Blizzard had trouble of some point (likely the same server as the login one). What I disliked most is seeing the message : "Please wait while your item auction is being processed. This may take a couple minutes."

I just called bull on that one. Auction stuff should be fairly instantaneous. With the problems at the time, I couldn't buy or bid on any item without an error showing up on me.

So in the grand scheme of things, I would have much less doubts about buying D3 if it wasn't the online-only enforcement to avoid all the internet-related issues I had only to play it solo. Although, I am not saying that I am not buying either. Still a bit on the fence.

I did consider TERA more although the pay-per-month always tend to drag me back. I am just that cheap heh.

So if I buy Diablo 3, it would likely be as that "Just to pass time" game rather to play for big fun and such. If it becomes better later then good and if not, at least I wouldn't too deceived in my expectations.

EDIT : So it seems the transaction fee for the gold-based auction house is 15% of selling price. Seems a bit too high to my tastes. I expected it to be between 5-10% quite frankly. Wonder if it will be the same for the real money one.

Not terribly impressed by the beta. It's a short game, and I played through with a friend so I suspect we burned through it. I played a Monk, my friend played a Demon Hunter. It was better than I thought it would be though, which is a plus.

I will say this, the game is fun. I had a lot of fun punching and stabbing things with my Monk. I ended up dual-weilding a pair of swords and chopping my way through hordes of undead. Good times.

That said though, I found the gameplay to be remarkably shallow. While you can only play up to level 13 in the demo, there really doesn't seem to be much in the way of choice in terms of character progression. The skill trees of Diablo 2 are gone completely, so there's no need to invest points into anything as you gain access to all abilities automatically once you reach the appropriate level. Glyphs are kinda interesting though. Much like Glyphs in WoW, they modify what your abilities do. Unlike WoW, they're generally much more interesting since the game was built with them in mind, rather than being a late addition. Like your other abilities, you unlike Glyphs as you level up. I might have found character progression to be a little bit less shallow if the level cap had been higher, but I'm not convinced about that.

Dialogue and voice acting was weak. Even Cain's VA didn't really sound into it and he's still the same guy who did Cain in Diablo 1, and I cringed every time my Monk spoke. King Leoric returns once more as the Skeleton King. I half expected him to break out with a "And I would have gotten away with it if it weren't for those meddling adventurers!" based on his dialogue. Dark fantasy is not the place for a guy who's lines and performance sound like they were made for a low budget Saturday morning cartoon. As much as I love my cheese, Diablo is just not the place for it.

Finally, while visually everything was very dark, the game lacks the atmosphere of Diablo 1 and 2. I just never felt threatened in the game. I never had that moment of "OH GOD I AM GOING TO DIE SO MUCH RIGHT NOW" that you get when you first encounter The Butcher. I never had that feeling that I needed to proceed with caution like the earlier Diablos gave. It was just a case of rush in, slaughter everything and stand on the massive pile of accumulated corpses like you're some kind of war god.

I'm vaguely optimisitc that a few of my misgivings about the game (shallow character progression, lack of challenge) might just be because of how limited the scope of the beta is, with difficulty increasing in later acts and the character progression only appearing to be shallow because of the lack of options normally seen at lower levels. But I don't think that Blizzard's going to be able to recapture the Dark Fantasy atmosphere of Diablo 1 and 2, and that to me is the biggest loss.

@Ricky: I've played through twice now, once as a monk, and a second time as a Wizard. I played both games with a friend of mine, so its quite easy to join a private game with your friends. Just invite them to your party and you're good to go.

Thalraxal wrote:I cringed every time my Monk spoke.

Male or female Monk? I played a female monk and she did seem to have some german or russian heavy accent or something. If I was serious, I would find it quite bad but it somehow appealed to my frenchmaness.

@Ricky: I've played through twice now, once as a monk, and a second time as a Wizard. I played both games with a friend of mine, so its quite easy to join a private game with your friends. Just invite them to your party and you're good to go.

That's good to know since that was one of the things I was kind of worried. With blizzard, it could be easily possible they would somehow decided to cut private games with friends for some dumb reason. "Do you REALLY want chat channels?" for SC2 comes to mind.

EDIT : Oh dear god ... after rechecking, it seems there are only public chat channels but no private channels. At best, it would be 1-to-1 chat with others.

Ricky_Honejasi wrote:

Thalraxal wrote:I cringed every time my Monk spoke.

Male or female Monk? I played a female monk and she did seem to have some german or russian heavy accent or something. If I was serious, I would find it quite bad but it somehow appealed to my frenchmaness.

Female monk. I know that they were going for a very dour, serious individual. But between her bad dialogue and that accent... Ehg.

Ricky_Honejasi wrote:

@Ricky: I've played through twice now, once as a monk, and a second time as a Wizard. I played both games with a friend of mine, so its quite easy to join a private game with your friends. Just invite them to your party and you're good to go.

That's good to know since that was one of the things I was kind of worried. With blizzard, it could be easily possible they would somehow decided to cut private games with friends for some dumb reason. "Do you REALLY want chat channels?" for SC2 comes to mind.

EDIT : Oh dear god ... after rechecking, it seems there are only public chat channels but no private channels. At best, it would be 1-to-1 chat with others.

There's party chat, so it'd actually be up to a maximum of four players at any given time.

My Impressions:

Horrible Scripting
Horrible Glitches & Texture Mechanics
Horrible Class Skill System & Vendor Mechanics
Horrible Inventory and Equipment Mechanics
Same old gameplay from Diablo II except with more (TEEEEERRRRRIBLE) Voice Acting.
People waited 6-7 Years for a game that doesn't even have normal mapping, jesus christ activision its 2012.
On the plus side: Ragdoll Physics.

Ricky: You're the first and only person I've heard having login issues, and all of my experiences with the auction house have been instant display.

I actually like the voice acting. It can get quirky at time, but overall I felt immersed at all times. The scripted animations, more than anything, seemed a bit clunky to me. The scene where Cain is running away from skeletons stands out the most for me.

I've also never experienced any "horrible glitches or texture mechanics." Then again, I run max settings, may be a computer issue.

The skill system has been decent for me. No one complained when they lost the ability to have all spells in Diablo 2 like they could in Diablo 1, but people complain they don't have as much customization in Diablo 3? Ever spell appears to have some five runes or such to customize the spell to your liking.

Inventory and equipment: Easier to manage and sort through = Horrible?

My only, and ONLY gripe right now is the selective normal mapping. It's minimal, and their modelers do more work than they have to actually modeling out little nooks and crannies instead of just using normal maps overall on all textures.

The game simply lacks normal mapping altogether from what I've seen. I've yet to find a normal map in the game's files.

Also their UV's for characters are awful.

I guess my biggest issue is perhaps feeling that I would have to jump into Diablo 3, a Blizzard product, out of blind faith ... again.

I am aware that there is patch 1.5 (open lobbies and such) for SC2 and all so that they are trying. But if they failed horribly with SC2 1.3 (fun or not), it could be a telltale that they could have screwed up something big time with D3. Probably with battle.net 0.2 again.

Kind of like I said, if Diablo 3 would allow offline solo gameplay then I would be MUCH less hesitant. The game itself would be probably just fine enough for me. However, it's all the future potential login issues (D3 beta), potential killing lag (Black walls of b.net D2), account stealing (real money AH making it even more tempting) and a few more things that add doubts to my heart.

I am actually considering buying and playing Tera (at least a month) if only to buy and enjoy a game that I don't always subconsciously wonder if something horribly wrong will happen. I simply had zero real issues with it.

Getting Diablo 3 or not is a non issue to me since I'm getting it for free.

Now, whether I'll play it or not is the question.

It's eerie. I like eerie games. With regards to the script. Blizzard always make it too darn straightforward. A twisting plot could be a good change.

It would be also cool if they add surprises. An ambush perhaps. All Diablo games I played so far sucks to me for one thing... the monsters aren't scary enough, and you always chase the monsters. It's Diablo, and the fiends should be evil. Well, to me, it looks like the heroes are more evil than the minions. They were like, I came I saw and I conquered.

phantommaelstrom wrote:With regards to the script. Blizzard always make it too darn straightforward. A twisting plot could be a good change.

lol have you even played SCII

phantommaelstrom wrote:...the monsters aren't scary enough, and you always chase the monsters. It's Diablo, and the fiends should be evil.

The cartoon graphics really help the eerie and scary moods. You know that damn Candy Bear boss battle? That fucking scared the shit out of me. So evil. Rawr.

Pr0nogo wrote:lol have you even played SCII

Not yet, but I'm talking about Diablo of course, I played the 2 sequels, and I'm not satisfied with the storyline.

The cartoon graphics really help the eerie and scary moods. You know that damn Candy Bear boss battle? That fucking scared the shit out of me. So evil. Rawr.

Well, I'm glad that you find that scary. You should try Disney games.

Actually read Book of Cain, so far the story has no retcons to my knowledge, shocking. I may be overlooking things, though.

I enjoyed the beta, the game really played a lot better towards then end of the beta then at the start; they really changed a lot of things. I'm exited and already bought it, I'm probably going to make a monk, then barb, then wizard.