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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)
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.
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..
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.
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.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
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.
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! ~~
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".
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.