Diablo III Beta: First Impressions
For all zero of you who are interested.
[Editor's note. I started writing this after first playing it in September. Then I forgot about it.]
So, after a furious weekend [circa Sep. 9-11] of computer-playing, I managed to complete the Diablo III beta with all five character classes. It was hard work, but someone had to do it.
So here are my impressions.
In a word: "visceral". Everything packs punch. Every ability and spell. Every hit and kill has a wonderfully satisfying "thwack" behind it. Corpses flying; blood splattering; stone crumbling; book cases exploding. Everything feels weighty.
Class I'm most unexpectedly impressed by: Wizard. I did not like the wizard when I played her at Blizzcon a few years back. She seemed under-powered and uninteresting. But after dispatching approximately 4,294,967,296 enemies by shooting LIGHTING out of my FINGERTIPS, I am a changed man. And the way the lightning crackles when disintegrating enemies? Magnifique!
Class I'm most unexpectedly unimpressed by: Witch Doctor. I fell in love with the witch doctor at Blizzcon some years ago for one simple reason: Flaming Skulls 'o Doom. Unfortunately, that spell is not available in the beta. While fun, the witch doctor just lacked the oomph of the other classes.
Class I'm most expectedly impressed by: Demon Hunter. Exactly as awesome as I expected.
Design decision I'm most disappointed in: Lack of level-up choices. The original Diablo had skill points, earned upon level-up, that could be assigned to the attribute(s) of your choosing. Diablo II had skill trees which were actually the inspiration for and predecessor to WoW's talent trees. Diablo III? Nuthin. No decisions or choices are made upon leveling up. Instead, you are given a fixed train of progression. You have no choice in which skills you get next, and have no ability to put points into particular abilities. Instead, you are assigned a new skill, and merely have the choice of whether or not you are going to use it.
Add on to this the fact that, in the beta, you only have two, then later three, skills that can be active at once, and there isn't a whole lot of variety in character builds. Of course, in the final game, you'll have a couple dozen skills from which you can choose six active abilities, then customize each one with a runestone. Blizzard has stated the number of possible character builds, and it's somewhere north of the number of elementary particles in the universe.
Biggest adjustment: The concept of "lagging out" of a single-player game. What do you mean I can't play by myself because I couldn't connect to the login server? Why do I need to login to a single-player game? Why do I have latency when I'm by myself?
Exhibit A for why Blizzard should just make the WoW movie themselves, as a CGI film: This trailer, unveiled at this years Blizzcon.
To wit:
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| Photograph or CGI rendering? Does it matter at this point? |
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