Slashdot Mirror
Diablo III Beta Begins
dotarray writes "Diablo III really can't be that far off now. Blizzard has just announced that the closed beta test for the game has kicked off – meaning you can start checking your inboxes for an invitation now."
The expanded Friends&Family test had been underway for a week or so, but now gaming sites are getting invitations. Of course, given the popularity of Diablo III, phishers are out in force with fake beta invites. For those who opted-in, the best way to check is to simply log in to your battle.net account. The beta is limited in terms of content — it only includes the first couple hours worth of play in Act 1 — but all five classes are available for play. There's no NDA, so plenty of commentary has sprung up already. Rock, Paper, Shotgun has early impressions of the Demon Hunter. Blizzard has also created a skill calculator for anyone who wants to play around with character builds ahead of time. The beta will be expanding in waves as they ramp up stability tests.
Alright! Another 3 years of my life is about to disappear!
... but I already gave both my wrists to Diablo and Diablo II. They are now RSI ridden husks, ready to be discarded and replaced with official Blizzard prosthetics.
While the body fails me, my mind -- sharpened in the Halls of the Blind and practiced at hunting for elusive pixels outlined with the tab key -- remembers is training well, ready to once again take arms against the forces of Hell.
Sometimes, when I sleep, all I can hear is the clicking of the mouse and the 1, 1, 1 of potions chain-quaffed in haste. The clicking, like the jaws and mandibles of a billion fiendish ants, coming to tear me limb from limb unless I find the last piece of Tal Rasha's Wrappings. ... and the Baal runs. Endless Baal runs, searching, always searching...
Now gaze ye upon my graveyard of Hardcore mode characters, mortal, and despair . Despair as I do when inspecting this broken, shattered life; a veteran of a digital war, a soldier of fictitious battles... ... stay a while, and listen.
Check out my sci-fi book "Lacuna" at http://goo.gl/MVxX8
Huskystarcraft has a 4-part youtube series of co-op play. Great to watch if you don't have access to the beta yet! They play a wizard (so full of himself, it's great!) and witchdoctor.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoGQmKi0Iq0 (1st part)
Perhaps slashdot has changed and people aren't going to care, but it used to be about more than just playing games.
DON'T FORGET! Blizzard is the company that set the precedent for validity of EULAs (wow glider case), demanded real names on battle.net and sued an open source battle net clone out of existence.
IF YOU VALUE FREEDOM YOU CANNOT PLAY THIS GAME!
I'm not sure what you're talking about unless that's a reference to online-only play. I like they way they've handled co-op loot, not having to click on gold, a cauldron that magically turns your crap into gold (saving you a trip to town), and a lot of other little niceties that make it look VERY fun to play and a worthy sequel. Not to mention it looks amazing.
Whether or not they need another cash cow (spoiler: they don't), this most certainly will be one.
Keep that in mind guys, it's not open for everyone yet - nor is it even closed for random invites. - So don't bother losing your marbles or logging in to bnet / email to check.
Don't have an ETA when but obviously soon, my wild guess - maybe another 3 to 7 days.
Personally I'm disgusted they're giving every skill to every class, you no longer select them and build your own guy...every guy will be the same if what I've read is correct.
The end is here, no more "sign of beta".
Hide the children and women! The Betacolypse is upon us all!
i've already won ten million dollars in the British lottery and may need to see a doctor about how large my penis has become, she wants me so badly.
on top of that, my battle.net account has been under investigated for ilegal actions and i need to login to hackmyaccount.ru/battle.net-account/ and click the "i am the owner of the account shown below" button so they don't ban my diablo 3 beta trial key and prevent me from claiming my free winged zebraconponycar.
blizzard keeps telling me not to click links in emails, but just to login to my battle.net account to see if i've got a beta invite, but heck the link looks so inviting..
Keep checking. Blizzard staggers their beta invites so that different people are at different stages of play. If you don't get one today you may in a week or a month.
Check out the skill calculator in the summary. There's a lot of different possibilities (Unless I screwed my math up, something like 170,000,000 combinations of skills/runes JUST for the barbarian class. The other classes look about the same give or take a few million combos). Obviously some combinations will be better than others, and even the "best" build will be pretty situational for a given class depending on what you're doing and your playstyle. Personally, I like how they're allowing some more flexibility with abilities by getting rid of skill trees and allowing you to change what skills you have relatively painlessly. When I played Diablo II, I spent a bunch of time leveling a druid, only to realize after I'd played for dozens of hours that my I had allocated my skill points stupidly, and there wasn't anything I could do about it other than make a new character or deal with it.
CATS/Diebold '08- All your vote are belong to us!
I just checked out the video from HuskyStarcraft, and I guess I must be missing something. Aside from the DRM that forces you to be online to play, and the fact that they censor your character names, how is this an improvement over Diablo 2? It looks like exactly the same game, just at a higher resolution.
Way back in the WoW beta, I remember fantasizing about Blizzard making a Diablo III using some of WoW's technology. By which I meant the best of both worlds, a game that looks and plays like WoW but set in the darker Diablo universe with single player and LAN play. Instead, we get basically the worst of both worlds, a dated look and feel saddled with unnecessary online requirements. Next.
...I was very interested in Diablo III, but it's been so many years that in the meantime, life happened to me, I grew up, and lost interest in spending my time playing online video games. Diablo I and II were a lot of fun, but it's hard to muster the enthusiasm for stuff like this as I've gotten older.
There are 3rd party character editors which can reset your skill points.
We used to use the hero editor http://www.moddb.com/games/diablo-2/downloads/hero-editor-full-v-096 for this.
DRM'd Network Only Activation? Nah, it's a bloody game, I don't need it and they, apparently, don't want to sell it.
That is how you discern the feel of a game without actually playing it.
The game looks good, but I can't buy it. I travel regularly and I don't always have an internet connection available. Always on connection for single player is a deal breaker.
I will wait for Torchlight 2
The good, the evil and the vacuum tubes.
Normal sex without testicle injuries, like softcore diablo, is for clueless sissies.
Normal sex ain't the same game. Shut up, you're not allowed to talk here unless you get your balls stomped on and ruptured at some point during the act.
Um, 95% of the stuff from Blizzard in your In Box is pure phishing scams. People shouldn't be clicking on any links in their In Boxes at all. They should be visiting Battle.net and logging into their account to check and see if the beta is on their account. Please people, do not assume that invite in your In Box is actually from Blizzard or that the link actually points to the download. Chances are it doesn't.
I'm not interested in Diablo 3, unless I can play off and online like Diablo 1 or 2. I'll stick with Minecraft, at least the worlds are fresh when I put a new seed in and there's more seeds then I'll ever see in my life time. Bonus, Minecraft runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Thats where I'll put my money in to companies who produce things like that.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
Count me among the thousands of diehard Diablo fans who won't be buying D3 because the player is forced to always be connected to the internet to play, even in single player "offline" mode. That's ridiculous. It's an affront to all logic and decency. But I fully expect Torchlight 2 to scratch the "click for loot" itch - the first Torchlight was a blast and the second one is going to be bigger, better, and even more of a blast.
Imagine the Diablo III engine applied to an Avatar: The Last Airbender video game, where you could control the 5 main characters all at once a-la the original Dungeon Siege, and go off with one or two at a time on sub-quests. And all the voice acting and cut scenes were done by the original cast and writers, with a lot of story mixed in unobtrustively. And you have like, 80 abilities for each element class. And 'leveling' is very much based in your own skill. Blizzard + Nickelodeon... I would love to see them collaborate.
I've put together NoDiablo.com for people-who-would-like-to-but-won't buy Diablo 3 because of the "MMO" additions to the game : the always-connected requirement, lack of LAN play, no mods and the real-money Auction House. I think we can understand why Blizzard's doing it — trying to control the environment to cut down on cheating and adding aggressive DRM to stop piracy — but it's an overly ambitious and unnecessary solution they came up with. The MMO additions don't add real value to the way most people want to play Diablo. It feels like their programmers had the funds to come up with their "dream environment" and they got carried away, focusing on their own "what ifs" rather than asking "what do our customers want?" As far as I can tell, for some people cheating was a real problem in Diablo 2, but only when playing online with strangers. Maybe those players complained loudly and it's all Blizzard heard, I don't know. But most gamers don't seem to think that playing online with strangers is Diablo's core gameplay, so how much of an issue was this really? Enough to justify the changes to the game? Or is Blizzard using this as an excuse to take more control and bring in a few more bucks?
Not sure how much of a chance we have of changing things at this point, but if the MMO additions have made you decide not to buy Diablo 3, please consider lending your support at http://www.nodiablo.com
They implemented a way to respec your skills in the last year or two. I don't know if it applies just to Ladder or not since that's all I play. But when you finish the cave quest in chapter 1 it opens up a respec option with Akara in the Rogue Encampment similiar to Larzuk's Socket quest. So you get three respeccs essentially for free now. And several of the Act bosses drop special essences which can be combined in your cube to make a respec token, which means you can respec to your hearts content so long as you can farm or trade for enough essences or emblems.
Good luck using that character editor on a Battle.net character. Having built in character respecs is needed. 3rd party hacking tools don't cut it. I do hear this has actually changed in a recent D2 patch, but I havn't played in a good 2 years myself.
Check out Crimson Alliance, available through Xbox Live Arcade for 1200 pts ($15). Action RPG in the vein of Gauntlet, Torchlight and Diablo. The best part: 4-player couch/online co-op. I'm playing it with my two younger boys. $15 is a great deal when we can all play together on the same box.
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.