Diablo III Previews

More previews are coming out for Blizzard’s attempt at perfecting the hack’n’slash genre, Diablo III, courtesy of some hands-on time spent with the title during the closed beta. We’ve rounded up a few more of them, starting with this piece from RipTen, coming in a handy pros and cons format:

What We (or just Dave) Hate:

The Streamlining (dumbing down) of Skills and Gameplay

This one is purely subjective to your tastes. If you’re a pansy like me, you won’t mind the fact that you don’t have to dump a certain amount of points into strength or agility, therefore saving you from sitting up all night worrying if you’ve gimped your character.

If you’re a nerd like Dave, you’ll probably turn red at this change, and throw your D20’²s square in the forehead of the person closest to you. Yes that’s right, stat points are no longer governed by you, the in game logic takes care of that every time you level up. It’s not only stat points that have been streamlined, but your abilities as well. You’ll only be able to select 2 usable abilities until level 6, then only 3 until level 12 and so forth. You’ll unlock a new ability every level early on, it just becomes a game of mix and match, catering your abilities to work well with your partners. It’s also worth noting that a number of each classes abilities are simply awesome and fun as hell to use.

Though this can leave the early game feeling quite tedious and repetitive, soon enough you’ll be tossing RPG lingo at your friend, coming up with exciting new strategies. Taking a cue from Torchlight, you’ll also have access to a Cauldron and Nephilim cube, which allows you to sell or breakdown items into crafting materials anywhere, at anytime. You will never have to walk back to town to sell anything. ever. Dave maintains that Torchlight’s pet system handled this much better and bitches at me every time we play that they’ve streamlined the looting far too much and that Diablo 1 was addictive because of blah blah blah, that’s usually where I stop listening.

Once again, this will either make you happy or furious depending on your tastes. Oh, and there’s a WoW style hearthstone as well. Fuck walking anywhere.

Then we move on to Tom’s Hardware, with the first part of their hands-on (more is promised to come shortly):

To be honest, there’s one aspect about Diablo 3 that I’ll have to disagree with: the constant Internet connection. Sure, I get that the game offers features which require a constant connection, and I get that Blizzard doesn’t want anyone hacking into the game. But as I’m sitting here typing out this first segment, the servers are down and I’m locked out of the game. There’s no playing Diablo 3 whatsoever, not even the campaign itself. The only thing gamers can do is wait or tool around with the options. Is it not possible to allow gamers to play offline, and have the game re-sync the info once an Internet connection is re-established? That doesn’t seem to be in the cards, unfortunately.

…

As previously stated, I chose the (male) Wizard as my introductory class. I’m a big fan of casting magic from afar, and this class is perfect for that kind of distanced assault. When starting a campaign, players can choose to keep it invite only, open it up to friends or open it to the entire Battle.net collective. To some degree, it’s fun to explore on your own – you’re not following behind other players who have stormed an area and chopped down every enemy in their path. Then again, having real players pop in and help you take down a horde of zombies is a great experience too. Blizzard gives you the option of playing either way, and you can even browse for games hosted by other players simply by clicking on “Public Games” and pulling up an in-game browser. And for those who don’t care to play with loot hoarders, there’s nothing to worry about here — whatever falls on the ground is yours, and yours alone.

And conclude with another at Games On Net:

The crafting ingredients are quite neat: in town you can use them at, say, the Blacksmith’s to craft new magic items for yourself, but you can also collect pages of a Training Tome and give it to the Blacksmith, to unlock new crafting recipes at his forge. The same process can be repeated at other vendors as well.

There is of course no mention of Diablo III without a discussion of its always-online play, and there’s no denying that Diablo III is an MMO in almost every sense of the word. Every game is potentially a multiplayer game – although you have to explicitly flag it as open and public, as it’s invite-only by default – and even if you’re playing on your own you cannot pause the game, so if you want a break you’d better go find a quiet place to rest or just log out (waiting the obligatory ten seconds of course). I encountered one net connection bug while playing, which saw all my pets stop moving, chests become unopenable, and terrain failing to load ahead of me as I reached the limit of my locally cached area. During this time I was also unable to exit the game, and had to wait a minute or two before the client realised it couldn’t find the server and forced me out.