"Diablo III Open beta weekend impressions" Topic

The "Open beta weekend" was as close as you can get to a proper demo these days in an age where most companies just want you to pre-order blindly 4 months ahead before there is a chance reviews will trash their product.

Fans of Diablo have been waiting for 12 years, the game has supposedly been in the making for 8 – and it looks and plays as if it was thrown together in months. Fans of the past Diablo games may become disappointed as this title doesn't really offer anything better than Diablo II, has the graphics of Blizzards recent Warcraft adventures and doesn't really have any people from past Diablo games aboard for this project.

It may still be classed as a decent pastime, and will probably sell a lot of copies. But imo, it suffers from the same underwhelming impression that Starcraft II provided. Blizzard/(Activision) are simply not able to top their previous game and what you get is a somewhat dumbed down experience (as if Diablo needed streamlining), happy colorful graphics and a rather tired and worn out story.

Full review and 40+ pictures from the 3 hour long demo can be found on my blog:

link

I wasn't overwhelmed by it either, but had so much fun playing Diablo 2 at LAN parties with friends we are going to buy this nonetheless. some little touches are new, aside from the graphics. not so sure on the wow style auction house, but if you are only playing with friends it's no big deal. not ground breaking, and nothing to justify the development time, but then they were busy ruining wow in that time instead.

My first impression is that they are catering for the WOW crowd far more than the Diablo fans – even going so far as to tie it in with WOW with subscription deals. Armour and equipment also seem to have been designed to appeal to the WOW players, rather than being a continuation of the old Diablo style. This rather puts me off, because the two games should have a very different look and feel to them, rather than being clones of one another.

One of the things I remember about Diablo II was the real world arms and armour; if one wanted to make their Amazon look fittingly Greco-Roman, a player most certainly could!

But the armour sets presented on the Diablo III website are all high fantasy/WOW esque in nature, without a "real" looking piece amongst them (unless one counts a hood). For me that is a great dissapointment – and does not even feel like the Diablo world I came to love at all.

That's not a good start really.

Besides, I still get the old Diabloesque kick from playing Titan Quest (Diablo style in a truly Greco-Roman setting). Sadly and ironically, Diablo III just isn't offering me anything I'm not already getting – but is instead offering me things I don't want at all! (Plus, there's no Amazon class anymore and the replacement offerings just aren't calling to me). That's not a good way to win me over really.

I will no doubt still play a true trial demo if any such thing is released, and it may well turn out to be a great game, but at this point I am… underwhelmed.

Agree about the armor (and everything else as well) :-/
It's not a product for Diablo fans, I bet the executives thought that no one remembered Diablo 2 so they would spend all time and effort to make it appeal to the WoW crowd and make it an easy transition for them.

Diablo 2 is still a great game and holds up well even today so it's not a complete disaster if one has to go back and play the previous installment. But I get very tired looking at what Blizzard has done here, first Starcraft 2 split into 3 games for BS reasons – and now Diablo 3.

I actually disagree. I've been enjoying testing it out. I will agree with you that some of the later armor designs I've seen get a little outrageous, but I haven't seen any of them in the beta.

A lot of the "how it looks/how it should look" pics you've linked are two or more years old. Don't know of anyone who's seen that far into the game recently.

The gameplay is actually much faster-paced than WoW, and many things are handled differently. Did they steal a few things? You bet. But made it too much like WoW? I don't agree. The small portion of the game that the beta encompasses has been appropriately dark and creepy. I am very interested to see the rest of the game.

Tried it…made me wonder if the guy who made Torchlight worked on the new release. The first town's layout feels a lot like Torchlight.

I think some of the atmosphere is missing. At least the haunting music is still there to some degree.

The Titan Quest guys are making a new project along these lines anyhow…already in on the kickstarter for it. Will be much cheaper too :)