Diablo III/Reaper of Souls Hands-on Previews

Some early hands-on impressions pieces have emerged from this weekend’s BlizzCon, starting with this preview on the PlayStation Blog that covers the game and its bundled expansion pack, and how they’ll look on the PlayStation 4:

Let’s get the obvious stuff out of the way first: Diablo III looks good on PS4. The demo I played didn’t stutter or hitch once the PS4 version runs at 1080p and 60FPS or better throughout, as confirmed by Production Director John Hight when I spoke with him on the show floor. Everything looks tack-sharp, and plenty of extra bits have been added or tweaked in Diablo III’s PS4 version. Just wait ’til you see the glow of a freshly dropped health globe reflected in a pool of stagnant water.

Diablo III’s DualShock 4 controls are still being tweaked and perfected, but the touchpad implementation today was largely gesture-based, swiping left and right to switch to different inventory and skill subsections. It’s pretty hard to improve on the perfection of Diablo III’s radial menus as they are on PS3, but DualShock 4’²s touchpad makes for a suitable change of pace, if only to mix things up once in a while.

DualShock 4’²s light bar glows a different color for each player. Paired with existing on-screen indicators, it provides that much more instantaneous visual feedback handy when things inevitably start getting out of control on the battlefield.

And then we head over to IncGamers for two separate previews on Adventure Mode and Nephalem Rifts:

The Bounties I experimented on ranged from (almost instant) to (two levels down) in terms of how findable they were. The easiest one was a random Purple Wraith in the Festering Woods, who attacked me as I appeared on the Waypoint. That’s just luck in the monster’s location, and I might have needed to explore the whole level to find him, but you get the idea. Other Bounties might require more searching, but their icon shows up on the map once you’re within a few screens of them. That’s what makes them so farmable; even with the slow premade character I was racing through levels just looking for the icon on the map, and with a powerful character in good gear, with a movement skill, Bounties will be farmable at a very rapid rate.

The clues even point you to the right sub-level. I got Digger O’Dell for a Bounty in the Forsaken Cemetery. That’s a very small area and I figured I’d find him in three seconds. What I found instead was the quest target icon on one of the three crypts, with Digger located randomly down in that level.

…

When you enter a rift you gain a progress bar on the right side of the screen just below the minimap. It says percent of monsters killed, and steadily increases as you kill more of them. The counter goes by kills, not some weighted system of monster hit points, which makes it count up much faster on some levels. I got the Act 3 Scorpions in an Act 1 Jail tileset on my 4th level, and with them appearing in big bunches of 10-20 my % killed counter was jumping up 2 or 3% with each group, which I was one-shotting with a great AoE Crusader skill.

Once you reach 100% the Rift Guardian appears. The devs stressed this during Friday’s panel, and they weren’t kidding. It explodes into life the instant you kill that last monster, and it doesn’t matter what you’re doing at the time. I saw my first while in an Act One Jail dungeon, and when I was in the middle of fighting a boss. One of the minions or some trash monster in the area triggered the 100% and suddenly I had the boss and the Rift Guardian at once. Some strategic repositioning was soon required. (I ran like a bunny.)