I never get into any Betas. (ok I got into the ToR Beta for like the last weekend, but so did EVERYONE)

 

I dislike Betas. They tend to ruin the actual game for me. I beta tested Champions, Saviors, and Betrayers of Kamigawa on MTGO, and I quit playing the game after that pretty much permanenty. During testing you had access to every card, and could draft any set for free at any time of the day. I beta tested twice in WoW (got picked 4 times though). First was WotLK. I got my character to 75 or so, and then said fuck it, since I would just have to do it again in the general release. Then, I tested Ulduar, and was part of a dedicated raid test group that managed to get quite a few of the bosses. Some of them got tweaked after that, and I never did raid seriously again after that nightmare until level 85. Haven't played in over a year, and MoP doesn't promise to be something I want to play.

On a more related note, I did get a D3 beta awhile back, but I refused to do it. I don't want anything to spoil the reveal of the game for me, and I haven't seen any gameplay at all. I read about the classes as they were revealed one at a time, and I watched the first few trailers back in 08 or 09, but that's it. I want blown away when I first play the game because I've been lusting after this game for the last decade, and even if it does end up sucking, I'll still play the shit out of it.

 

Well, too be honest, all the games I've ever entered Beta for are games I would never actually pay for (MMO's). So yeah, I don't have that worry!

 

Open beta all weekend. Happy Friday, that is all.

 

So just some basic thoughts so far:

Spoiler

First off and this is a big one to me, I made a Demon Hunter and it is just too damned easy even on normal. I got a life leeching Crossbow and the machine gun fire fuck you attack and combined with the massive health globes that drop I was close to unkillable and this was before I got the Templar companion who could heal and tank. Even the final boss of the Beta was fairly damned easy, the only problems I had came when he would somehow teleport in to whack me even while stealthed and when he raised so many shield minions that they replenished faster than I could shoot them. It still only took me a single try to do though.

Second I really am not that fond of how they have the control scheme set up on this. I don't want my primary attack linked to the exact same button as my movement and I most especially do not like the fact that I can't change it. Its rage inducing when you click to shoot someone and your just a micrometer left so instead of shooting you run right into their face. And before anyone says anything I know you can hold shift to not move but I think its silly that we even need to do that. They just need to let us change it.

My last negative gripe is the crafting system, I think I saw this mentioned here earlier but it just strikes me as completely silly that we have to pay for what we make especially given that you have to spend thousands of gold to get new recipes out of him. I understand a gold sink is necessary but that's just waaaaay too much.

Now for some positives:

Despite it being a bit too easy I absolutely loved the way the Demon Hunter played, all of the skills flowed and worked very well together. There was never any clunkiness or pointless abilities thus far and it was extremely easy to pick up and learn.

I'm enjoying the story so far a fair bit even if I don't get what all this obsession with the fallen star is.

The voice acting for the characters is good and its nice to see a lot of the old characters.

I actually really like the rune system on your abilities, its very useful and it lets you customize them to your own personal style.

The dialogue between you and your companion is fairly good and better than what I was expecting it to be and my Demon Hunter is awesome.

I'll have more to come soon, I'm working on a Wizard and I plan to try a Monk and a Witch Doctor after that.

 

Stutters so bad for me I can't even play it. I'm wondering if it's trying to load more shit while I'm playing, since I chose to hit Play when it was available instead of waiting for the other quarter to finish downloading. It'll give me 50+ fps for a few seconds, drop down to 4 or 5, then back up, and repeat every 4 seconds or so. Annoying as shit, and supposedly a common problem from looking on their forums and online. Maybe just a broken as hell server load since they're stress testing, but if so, it's a good reason to not have to play the goddamned game on their servers. If we play on our own shit, ping and shitty servers don't come into play. I want to play a PC game on my rig, not fucking stream it, if I wanted that I'd go watch OnLive.

 

Ah see bro thats a mistake, no matter how aggravating it is you need to wait until green. While a lot of Blizzard games are technically possible to play in the yellow stage they play like dogshit.

 

Blizzard's handling of their Stress Test weekend has been incredibly sloppy.

 

Really? Because it seems like a perfectly typical stress test weekend to me.

 

LOL.

^^This.

It's a STRESS Test. That means they are intentionally pushing the servers to the max, intentionally finding the issues and the bugs by overworking things. Stress tests are never simple and clean and easy and smooth for all parties involved.

Ever.

As to the difficulty discussion: Honestly, I agree with you.. to a degree. But I said the same thing about WoW, and SW:ToR and just about every other beta I've been in "Tooo easssyyy."

And then when they release the game, it's more difficult.

Plus, there are more difficult game modes. This is just the first 1/4th of ACT 1.

It's newbie-island territory. The difficulty will ramp up later. Anyone else remember the sewers in the second D2 city? Act 1 was cake for just about anyone. But the sewers could be hard for the unprepared/non powergamer.

 

The problem is that Blizzard didn't make it clear enough that it was a Stress Test. They mostly said "Open Beta!" and so everyone who hadn't really been paying attention said "heck, I'll give it a try" and then promptly got pissed cause they couldn't play the game. They should have made it more clear that it was primarily a Stress Test in order to avoid negative reactions like what you're seeing in some places (not that I think it'll hurt first day sales or anything).


I've been playing a Monk. It's, all right. I never played the original Diablos (they just weren't appealing to me at the time. I was playing Command and Conquer and Total Annihilation) so I can't say if it's vastly different and whether it's better or worse. All I can say is it's something I'd used to kill some time, but not something I'll be rushing out to pay money for any time soon.

 

Let it fully load, same problem. Micro stutters of like 1/4 of a second every few seconds. Very noticeable, enough to give me a headache and make me not want to play the game. Updated drivers, deleted then reinstalled the entire beta without stopping it in the middle, few other things I tried and didn't fix it.

Played for awhile anyway just to get the feel for it, and I can say I'm underwhelmed. Making the area you can collect gold so small that you feel the need to keep +gold grab distance items really?

I dug through the menus and figured out how to configure my hotbar the way I wanted, but I'm still unclear on how the skills work versus the melee weapon I have equipped as the Witch Doctor. Does that bad ass sword I just got increase my damage at all, considering I'm blowing poison darts out of a blow gun? Skills don't have enough info to go with them, in contrast to the player info panel, which tells you crit chance, heal regen, lifesteal, etc, etc. Might be fun to play through it for the story, but I just don't see the big deal about a top down viewed in 2012, barely okay graphics for even a console title, game anymore.

 

You just have to go into options and enable the ability to see your damage dealt, under gameplay.

Also, enable Advanced Tooltips.

 

Diablo III feels more like a fusion of World of Warcraft and Torchlight than a sequel to Diablo II, which makes a lot of sense when you consider that Torchlight was made by guys who worked on Diablo II. I love that the archaic skill tree system is finally being replaced with something better.

Also Torchlight is awesome and you should play it.

 

See I can understand your frustration with it I honestly can but I'm just not quite willing to knock it for being like that on a Stress Test Weekend because it played completely fine for me in the actual beta. Now if its like that when it launches Ill be right there with you but for now as I said Im hesitant.

 

Advanced Tooltip toggled to 'on' in the Options, will tell you the percentage modifier of weapon damage that your abilities do. One of the rare exceptions for ability usage is the Demon Hunter being unable to use shooting-type abilities when equipped with a non-ranged weapon.

 

Thanks for the tooltips..er...tip

I can knock it. It's a cause of the game being server sided because of Blizzard's DRM, protecting their cash cow auction house bullshit. You really think the game won't be glitchy as shit when it launches and ten times more people have access to their servers? I'm totally against server side games unless it's a MMO/MOBA or multiplayer FPS.

 

Normal is going to be a joke, period. Just as Blizzard has made the intro to everything in WoW (heroics/raids/dungeons/leveling) a joke; the only difficult content is heroic raids and only before their first couple of nerfs. Its difficulty is lacking in order to draw in the big customer base. The level jumps in game difficulty between the casual player just grinding and the serious D3 guy going into hardcore is going to be ridiculous. It definitely will not be a pushover come then.

As far as the lag you all saw on the stress test weekend, I wouldn't expect it to stay.

This is a game whose beta has been out for nearly six months now. It was delayed in order to work out the severe kinks in it, the bulk of which involves high amounts of players attempting to play at once and the havoc it wreaked on the servers.

I'm not too excited for D3. I think I'll beat it, play a bit into hardcore and maybe beat it then be done with it. But I do think it will run smoothly and play as well as D2 did.

 

Sigh you just can't let me have my optimism for once can you ? I know your right I was just taking a crack at optimism for a change of pace.

 

I pre-ordered the normal digital diablo 3(Don't need the fancy collector's edition) and I'm immensely excited to play it. I've been waiting years for this to come out and I played the beta and really enjoyed it so I can't wait. The only thing I dislike about D3 is the real money auction house but if I guess I'm not using it than it won't effect me much. ONE WEEK LEFT! YAY