Diablo II 1.10 Beta Patch Released

seirui writes "Blizzard today announced the beginning of the public beta test for the Diablo II: Lord Of Destruction 1.10 patch. Conspicuously absent from the downloadable-now beta patch is Battle.net support (both open and closed), but present are a multitude of little changes, including a rollback.bat file for reverting back to 1.09 to play online. Now that hell has frozen over, the quest for items can continue! Here's a BitTorrent link for the 5mb patch." An anonymous reader also points to a hands-on account at DiabloII.net describing the changes for V1.10.

Comments

Hell froze over?

[Anonymous Coward]

Diablo 1.10 in Beta!
Duke Nuke Forever is probably getting ready to go gold then!

Windows only for now

[derdesh]

They promise another announcement when the OS X patch is available.

This is necessary

[Rudeboy777]

Speaking as someone who has spent many hours playing D2, I must say this is a good way to beta test this patch. For those that don't know, this will practically be an expansion pack with the amount of changes being made. There are SO MANY factors that go into D2's combat system that balancing is an enormous task that even after 3+ years is not ironed out. The new forums on www.battle.net indicate to me that they will be listening to a lot of userland suggestions. That kicks ass. I know /.ers are supposed to hate Blizzard but I am just too much of a fan boy to go against my gamegeek leanings.

Disappointed

[Krellan]

I'm disappointed that they didn't do more in the 1.10 patch. A fourth difficulty level, "Inferno", beyond hell, would have been great to have and it would reduce the boredom at high level. The changes they're doing to Act 5 could have been applied to all acts at this new difficulty level.

There's other nitpicks that make the game still feel incomplete. Act 4 still only has very few waypoints, compared to all other levels. Adding some more waypoints, or even a new area or two, to Act 4 would have been great.

A much-needed "No Hostile Players" checkbox, to prevent players from going hostile, should have been added to the game creation options. Grief players have ruined many a good game by unexpectedly going PvP.

This wishlist was made 2 years ago, when rumours of 1.10 first began:

http://www.krellan.com/rant/diablo.html

A shame that so little has been done in so long.

Re:Disappointed

[Krellan]

About Hell and Hardcore:

I played the game 3 times through to reach the end of Hell mode, not being rushed. It is more fun that way. I didn't do every quest, but I later went back and mopped up the remaining quests after getting to Hell. A lot of other players just get rushed, that's true. One day I saw a Level 1 character on Hell!

Adding another difficulty level beyond Hell probably wouldn't improve the current situation, unless rushing is nerfed. There's lots of ideas to make it so that high level characters can't bodyguard low level characters as easily, which I won't go into here. At least Blizzard was wise enough to put minimum level requirements on their items, so the problem of twinking (high level items on low level characters) isn't as bad as it is on Everquest.

As for Hardcore, no thanks. To me, it seems like just a competition to see which player has the better Internet connection. One burst of netlag, slowing down the response time of your character, and you are permanently dead. This is especially bad, when combined with the problem of grief players declaring hostility. Hitting Alt-F4 at the first sign of trouble helps, but still isn't enough to save you if you're in a hard area and the lag catches you by surprise.

I still think it would be fun to see a fourth difficulty level beyond Hell, "Inferno", geared for characters who are very high level. Currently, at high level, there is nothing to do except repeat the cow run over and over, because nothing else in the game is worthwhile. The enhancements Blizzard is proposing in Act 5 of Hell might be better served by applying them to *all* acts, thus creating an entirely new difficulty level with not much new programming required!