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.

Comments

Time to die!

[Deflatamouse]

Alright! Another 3 years of my life is about to disappear!

Re:Time to die!

[sortius_nod]

Tell me about it... oh well, might as well quit my job now.

I'd love to play...

[Sasayaki]

... 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.

Over an hour of gameplay co-op footage

[SendBot]

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)

Re:Over an hour of gameplay co-op footage

[A Friendly Troll]

Yogscast, Jesse Cox and TotalBiscuit also have Diablo III footage.

Yogscast vids start here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4qmrZEF-rE

Blizzard is evil, boycott if you have integrity

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Re:Blizzard is evil, boycott if you have integrity

[SendBot]

I value my freedom to play some seriously fun games that take advantage of my slick 2011 hardware. They dropped the real names issue after all the outcry, by the way. Blizzard puts a lot of their name into the quality of their games, being unafraid to shelve a project with heavy investment if necessary. I'm not especially happy about the bnetd thing, but I do kind of appreciate that they make it difficult to operate a bot in WoW.

Re:Blizzard is evil, boycott if you have integrity

[TheRaven64]

I bought Diablo II. I bought Lord of Destruction. The last time I played them was about 18 months ago - not bad for a game from 2001. I won't be buying Diablo II though. Blizzard's policy on aggressively tethering the game to their servers means that it's not of any interest to me. Fortunately for Blizzard, I'm sure a large chunk of their WoW players will disagree.

Re:Blizzard is evil, boycott if you have integrity

[Totenglocke]

Exactly. I haven't purchased Starcraft II and I don't plan on buying Diablo III. I've purchased every other game Blizzard made (save WoW expansions after I stopped playing years ago), but until they ditch the DRM, I'm done with them. Sadly, I don't think this is something Blizzards wants to do, but the DRM is most likely forced on them by Activision.

Re:Blizzard is evil, boycott if you have integrity

[arth1]

There's no surer way to kill an online game than balkanization by releasing too many expansions. When people can't play together because they don't own the exact same expansions or DLCs, they'll say "fuck this" and move to a game that doesn't irritate them. And the publisher then scrambles to release a GOTY edition with all the add-ons, in hope to salvage pieces. But by then, a large part of the damage is already done.

A good game doesn't really need to always show the player something new. Familiarity is a lure in itself. Yes, you might get tired of raiding Bhaal for the hundredth time, but then again, you might also be working on perfecting your runs. People return to far simpler games than DII. I won't even try to estimate how many hours (and coins) I spent on certain arcade games, which were far more repetitive. Cause that weakness can be a game's biggest strength too.

Honestly, I fear this game will fail because they've jumped on the PORT+DRM+DLC bandwagon. The only thing missing are in-game mood breaking sales pitches[*] and gratuitous product placement[**].

[*]: "You are overburdened. For only $1.99, you can buy a storage expansion from the Blizzard store".
[**]: "Stay a while, have a Mountain Dew Vibrate(TM), and listen", "Beyer Health Potion" and "Stone of Nike Air Jordan".

Re:Blizzard is evil, boycott if you have integrity

[Triv]

So...you haven't bought a recent WoW expansion, or Starcraft II, and you won't be buying Diablo III.

In other words, you haven't bought a Blizzard game since, when? Diablo II? Brood War? You haven't bought a Blizzard game in something like ten years, and you're upset that the way games are played and the requirements for those games has changed out from under you? Do you still want your games only to be playable with the disc in the drive, too? Which, by the way, was as frowned upon back then as DRM is frowned upon now. Same stuff, different decade.

Get with the times, man.

Re:Blizzard is evil, boycott if you have integrity

[brkello]

Oh shut up. Blizzard makes fantastic games. If you boycott them, you pretty much have to boycott every single company on the planet because they are all going to do something you don't approve of.
 
They backed off on the names thing (demanded...you are such a drama queen), WoW glider was a bot that people were using and then getting banned for using (it was a tool specifically made to break the rules and exploit one program, this isn't a general use thing like a p2p service), and the open source battle.net clone was used to circumvent Blizzard's cd check and allow pirates to play multiplayer together. These are all reasonable actions any corporation that cares about their produce would take.
 
On top of that, no one supports their games like Blizzard. They have a free online service and provided patches and support for games that are 10+ years old. That is really rare. So you have to look at the good they do too.
 
I value my freedom. So don't tell me how to spend my money. What a stupid thing to say any way. Blizzard is one of many game companies. Buying their games is not going to cause every company to be like them...whether you approve of them or not.

Re:Won't be playing

[SendBot]

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.

Don't check your inbox.

[Anonymous Coward]

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..

If you don't get an invite right away

[dbet]

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.

Re:Won't be playing

[Rebelgecko]

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.

Eleven years of gaming evolution?

[Phaid]

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.

Once upon a time...

[wickerprints]

...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.

Re:Once upon a time...

[thejynxed]

I feel that way about console games.

PC games however, they will pry from my decrepit old fingers after I die.

If you don't have the enthusiasm anymore, it could be because you've been brainwashed into acting like some else's definition of an adult.

PETER PAN DAMMIT.

Re:Rumour has it PRESS ONLY at this stage.

[Anonymous Coward]

Friends and Family beta was a week or two ago, they were allowed to stream the beta.

Press (e.g., Day9) also received beta accounts a week or two ago, but were under NDA and could not stream gameplay.

Closed beta invites are out, and the NDA has been lifted from the press as of tonight. For interesting commentary, I recommend checking out Day9 or HuskyStarcraft's (no-longer-live-but-recorded) streams.

Day9 Solo Gameplay & Commentary:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thGq2G2aGXo

Husky9 Coop Gameplay & Commentary:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoGQmKi0Iq0

Deal breaker

[tecnico.hitos]

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

Re:Deal breaker

[discord5]

Little did I know it would become a huge clusterf*** of small print and other crap that basically ruined all the enjoyment out of SC2

It got resolved eventually (a month after release) at which point I gave up and played other games

Let me guess, you named your profile "Poopfist" for the single player campaign and didn't get to change it anymore?

That was a "feature" I personally remember fondly. My rather obscene profile name violated the Terms Of Service. :-)

Re:Sh*t up you little SC sissies!

[Skarecrow77]

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.

Diablo 3

[CFBMoo1]

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.

Re:Not me!

[delinear]

Same here, I shelled out for an Alienware gaming laptop after barely playing PC games in the last 5 or so years, primarily to play D3 (I went for a laptop so I can have some portability when I'm away from home). After hearing the directions they're going with the game, I've cancelled my pre-order. I don't care if they want to protect their in game economy so they can farm players for cash (although I don't particularly agree with that either, since I think it'll take a lot of the fun out of drops and replace them with greed), but I do care that I can't do a little solo dungeon crawling without being jacked into their servers.

Torchlight 2

[amaupin]

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.

hope they apply this engine to other games

[PJ6]

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.

NoDiablo

[NoDiablo]

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

Re:NoDiablo

[brkello]

There is no chance. I am not trying to be mean, but you are wasting your time. From a programming stand point, all that stuff is so integrated in to the system at this point for the Beta to be even functional, that it would take months if not years and millions of dollars for them to change course. Maybe could convince them to not have a real-money auction house...but that would just mean they wasted all the effort of coding in the payment system for it. You are best just moving on to Torchlight 2.