Yeah, I’m a Yeti…
It’s been years since I played D2 with Chronos and other Dopers, and we did have a great group of guys working together with gear and such…it would only seem logical to start up a D3 guild (did we have a guild?) or grouping on the same server (was there more than one server?)…shit…I don’t remember that stuff…I DO remember running around with my Javazon killing millions of cows over and over and over…
D2 didn’t have formally-defined guilds, so I guess we were as much a guild as any group of players that play together regularly is. And we played on either US East or US West, varying from season to season depending on which end of the country had more of us at the moment.
Moo moo moo Moo MOOOO!
It was even more fun with a trapper… About two minutes of running around panicking and Mind Blasting while muttering “Why won’t any of you die!?”, then one dies, and then about a half a second later, they all die in a gigantic mooclear explosion.
You should brush up on your water law knowledge.
really? 15th of may? geez, that’s still about 2 months to go.
I hope it’s worth the wait! 
had a thought - is the skill system setup in such a way that it would be easier to incorporate gamepads? i hate games designed for gamepads first before keyboards, but it kinda make sense to have the option of playing Diablo with a gamepad. hmm.
The big problem would be targeting; you use the mouse to indicate your target a lot, and the gamepad would be suboptimal for that. I’m sure they could do it, and if you read some of the news coverage, Blizzard is thinking about bringing D3 to consoles, so I’m sure it will be there eventually. But I have not seen a Game Controller option for controls in the beta so far.
Diablo 3, huh? I guess that’s enough to bring me out of the woodwork. Punha messaged me on another board telling me to get my ass in gear for this, so I know he’ll be playing. I bought a gaming laptop that I was assured would play the game, but I only have a 4G wireless hotspot at home. If I need more, I guess I’ll be looking for places I can hang out at with free wifi.
You should not need more than 4G can provide.
I ordered a new iMac for this; the amount of mousing in the demo is making it clear to me that I need to go trackpad.
I’m sure that 4G would have enough bandwidth, but doesn’t it have non-negligible latency? That would be a more significant issue, I’d think.
Blizz says the beta test content is non-confidential, so here goes.
I’ve been in the beta for nearly two months now.
I’m extremely pleased.
I thought the game felt finished when I first downloaded it, Feb 1. It had that familiar Diablo feel - mow through waves of demons, loot popping, something new every few minutes.
My one complaint was that it felt a bit too easy - but Blizz had a reassuring post stating that what we could play in the beta was easy mode, and that nightmare, hell, and whatever difficulty tier 4 was would kick our asses. So I’m happy there. 95% of the DII I played was hardcore mode; I like the challenge, the danger and the risk of losing everything.
I am a bit behind on the beta currently - they went through a couple of wipes, but next weekend I’ll be back on.
I just gotta say - as a hardcore DII veteran, this game feels right. I am eagerly waiting the full release, when I can go past lvl 15 ;D
I’ve been quite disappointed with it.
To me the main draw in D2 was character customization, the ability to play the same class dozens of different ways. I like being able to, having to, make meaningful choices about my character’s advancement. In D3 there is literally no meaningful or lasting choice you make about your character other than its class.
As you advance your character you make no choices about your character, you pick no stats and select no skills. While you can choose which skills you have equipped at any given time you don’t get enough different abilities for it to matter, and you earn more slots at around the same speed as you learn new abilities to put into the slots making that sole decision you can make, which abilities to use, seem like even less of a choice than it is and it’s not much of one. Especially since you can change your mind whenever you want and many of them are gimmicky nonsense on the level of uselessness of Blaze or Grim Ward.
Skill runes are supposed to improve the feel of customization but they don’t work for many of the same reasons the skill selections don’t work. You make too few total choices and those you make can be changed whenever you want making the choices have to impact. You also have to unlock skill runes as you level so you don’t get any choice for a while and when you do it’s usually between the one or two good skill runes and the many useless ones.
The passive skills might help with the lack of customization feel. There’s an awful lot of them and you can choose up to three of them eventually. Playing with how they synergize together could be fun but you never unlock more than one in the beta so it’s hard to say for sure. Of course even then the ability to switch them out at any time always lessens the feel of customization.
In most games I’m excited by levelling up. I get to make meaningful interesting choices. I get to see how my choices play out and live with the consequences of them. In D3 I’m just basically indifferent to levelling up. Occasionally I’ll hit a level that has a new ability I want to try but that’s too rare to enjoy much.
But it’s not just the customization that’s weak. The overall gameplay has its issues as well. The combat plays more or less like D2 which is good but has a few basic issues that will hopefully be fixed such as the character stopping and attacking for some reason when you are actually trying to move and the poor UI for mapping abilities to keys introduced in beta patch 13(It was much better before that). Other issues seem more core to the design. The crowds of enemies you fight are too small. There’s no crowds of twenty, thirty, or more enemies to fight like you encountered as early as the Cold Plains, or even the Den of Evil if you were slow about killing the shamans. Instead you fight at most about six enemies at a time in normal circumstances. There’s only one area in the beta where you actually fight a crowd, a scripted random encounter, but even that ends up failing to give the same awesome feel of cutting down the huge crowds of D2 due to the fact that the encounter spawns enemies slower if you kill them slower and auto-kills all the enemies after a minute so you can potentially beat the encounter by just running in circles(I think anyways, didn’t bother to test since even with its faults it’s the funnest part of the beta and I didn’t want to waste the chance at playing it any time I encountered it).
The cutscenes are very annoying in a game where the gameplay style is all about replaying and rerunning the same area. Since the focus on multiplayer gameplay means you’ll almost always end up with people who want to skip them. Making them fairly common and in the middle of dungeons was just a bad idea in general for a game of this style. Putting all the story in the town and letting the players listen/read/watch it at their leisure and independently of the other players as in D2 was a much better way of handling it. In fact the way the story brings itself to your attention so often is itself fairly annoying. I know I’m somewhat unusual in that I don’t give a fuck about the story in most games, and certainly even less so in a Diablo game, but having the story pop up and just halt all gameplay for a few seconds every couple of minutes is just unpleasant. I again much prefer D2s style of being able to basically just play through an act without paying any attention to any story and occasionally talk to the npcs to hand in quests I was hardly aware I’d even done.
Then there’s the difficulty issues. The game is just too easy so far. It’s possible it will be harder come release but so far it’s so easy. So so easy. I can’t properly express just how horribly easy it is. It’s easy. Very easy. I played through all 5 classes to the level cap without dying. Without using a single potion. Except once when I misclicked and hit the potion button when I meant to hit the button next to it. Now it’s only the start of the game so yeah easy is to be expected, and in fact I’m not normally a person who even likes really hard games, but it’s just too much. Now it’s true Blizzard has made comments about how higher difficulties will be harder but since the game is using difficulties for content reuse rather than as a choice the whole game should be at least a little hard. Even the start. Comparing again to D2 if you charge into Corpsefire in the Den of Evil like a reckless shmuck you’ll almost certainly get yourself killed. It’s overall easy early on but possible to die if you aren’t careful or get in over your head. In the D3 beta there’s nothing like that. The enemies do such tiny damage and die so easily you’d have to fall asleep at the keyboard to die. Then it’s made even worse by the fact that almost all the low level crafting items give bonus HP. Hundreds of bonus HP per item in many cases. At a point in the game where the enemies are still doing single digit damage. And random magic items that grant 3 HP regen per second are extremely common early on. So it’s not just possible but fairly likely to end up with a character that can take hundreds, if not thousands, of hits from enemies their own level and regenerate more health per second then the enemies can do damage anyway.
This has already gone too long so I’ll shut up here before going on to trying to explain everything else I dislike, like using a matchmaking system instead of game lists, the enormous space wasting UI, the crafting system, and nearly everything else.
Cut scenes … in Diablo? sigh
I’m glad to hear that sanity has been restored with respect to “pause” functionality, but it’s sad that it was ever an issue at all.
Oh how the mighty have fallen, Blizzard.
I am sure your objections are reasonable, but don’t forget that Diablo 2 was hardly a finished product when it was shipped. One of the biggest improvements to that game, the synergies between skills, was added to the game in one of the big patches. So I would expect them to address these shortcomings if they are commonly mentioned by players.
Given that Diablo 3 can only be only played online, through Battle.net, it will be easier to push changes like a MMO than when it was a single player game.
There are a few features added to reward players who stick to one build; when you kill elites or champion packs, you get a boost to your Magic Find and Gold Find, which lasts till you exit the game or you change your skill arrangement.
I am just wondering why not take a page from Lord of the Ring Online - having ‘sets’ of skills together gives you varying bonuses, such as having 3 fire spells boosting your fire resist, or some such.
Like most recent ARPGs, I think customization will come in terms of equipment, not skills. Lord of the Rings Online has Legendary Items which can be customized to fit your play-style, but those customizations aren’t cheap or easier to find.
And a very late patch, at that: IIRC, 1.09 or 1.10.
One thing I am looking forward to is an honest economy. In the early versions of D2, duping was so easy that people were doing it accidentally. They tried various measures to curtail it in later patches, but they were still working off of the same original framework, so they were never able to overhaul it completely. In this one, though, I’m confident that they’ve built it from the ground up to make duping essentially impossible.
Sadly that does seem to be the way they are going. There’s more equipment slots, larger inventories, the new loot-per-player system will make gear hunting with strangers much less frustrating, and it looks like there will be more random affixes. But personally I hate gear based customization. While I have no problem playing innumerable characters from new to level 80~ to try out different builds I cannot stand grinding to try to find good gear. Levelling up to acquire the stats and abilities required to see if my build will work is reliable, pulls you through frequently varied environments, and has many mini goals that are achieved consistently. Whereas gear grinding is a tedious repetitive pain in the ass due to being entirely at the mercy of the RNG gods.
Don’t be too sure my objections are reasonable; I am an incredibly, most would say unreasonably, picky gamer. And while synergies were certainly cool they were also poorly implemented and under used and many of the other changes that D2 went through in its lifetime made it worse overall for my taste. The addition of cooldowns, level requirements for uniques, making gambling much less useful, adding class specific items, and the stupidly overpowered uniques & sets that made rares completely obsolete and then followed up a few patches later with even more stupidly overpowered runewords that made the uniques mostly obsolete all while making hell mode harder such that said overpowered uniques, sets, or runewords were close to required all while the high level uniques and to an even larger extent runes were so rare that they would have been just shy of non-existent if not for the innumerable dupers.
It’s certainly possible D3 will get better as time goes on but it’s just as possible it will get worse. Cynic that I am I’m much more comfortable assuming the latter.
Under used? In my experience once synergies were introduced the only way to make an effective character was to maximize synergies. There were a few builds like tri-elemental sorcs which wouldn’t have much in the way of synergies but in general, you had to concentrate on one tree to be much of a threat in hell.
I think one of the big problems with Diablo 2 was that they made a game that was way more breakable than they thought. I mean, they had to add several patches just to drastically increase the difficulty of the game and characters were still waltzing through. So a lot of your complaints center around the fact that the characters were initially way too powerful, so they had to go about nerfing them in various ways.
I do agree about runewords, there were only a handful of uniques that were even worth wearing once you got to the late game. Otherwise it was all about HoTO, Enigma, Chains of Honor, Breath of the Dying, and so on. Hopefully they can balance such additions to D3 by making sure uniques (or their equivalent) aren’t obsoleted by some impossible to get runeword.
Bandwidth isn’t the issue with fixed wireless connections. The problem is dropped packets, latency, and simultaneous connections.