D3 Public Beta Has Begun

[Lewwyn]

I don't know how many of you have been following the development, but Friends and Family Beta for Diablo 3 has been running the last two weeks. There's lots of content up such as beta run-throughs with different characters. Only parts of Act 1 though and the level is capped to 13. It looks awesome though. And now the public Beta is live. If you have a Battle.net account you may be invited! I haven't been yet.

News Linky

[Zed-F]

I think you had to have requested beta access in order to be eligible.

[Lewwyn]

I think you had to have requested beta access in order to be eligible.

Yes. You need to have a battle.net account, a game with blizzard (WoW, Starcraft, D2) registered to that account, and then you have to opt into the beta process. It's pretty simple if you go to the Main page, click beta, click the to opt in link and then sign up by creating a Beta Profile and giving Bizz your compy specs.

Hmm that sounded a lot more complicated than it was...

[T-hawk]

Here's a first impressions post. (From a site that isn't about video games, which are often the best places to find direct and unhypey opinions.)

http://boards.fool.com/diablo-iii-beta-i...48384.aspx

[Lewwyn]

Well, he didn't tell me anything I didn't already know. I'm a bit frustrated that I read the whole thread and he never said if he was having fun or not.

[Tyrmith]

Here's a stream of a guy playing the entire beta, he seemed like he was having fun (then again that's pretty much how day9 is always). The guy is a professional SC2 caster, so keeps relating stuff to SC which is pretty funny. Obviously there's definitely spoilers in the videos.

Start of the cast - Him starting the game as a witch doctor, lots of him exploring menus figuring out how stuff works. Switch it to HD to make the videos look better.

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5 - He explores the crafting interface at 10:44

Last video
with lots of fighting/End boss @13:15


He also did a stream last night as a barbarian playing in co-op with a monk (which I have to say is remarkably smoother than I expected), but recorded video isn't uploaded yet.

Other things of note RB people will probably be interested in-gold stacks account wide, it's fairly easy to transfer items between characters, you can convert items into gold or crafting materials essentially when ever you want (no need to go back town to sell stuff), and you can teleport to New Tristam whenever you want although it has ~10 sec cast time. It reminds me of WoW where they looked through the game to eliminate stuff that was deemed "un-fun" and repetitive for no reason, and got a bunch of old-timers irritated at them till they started playing for awhile. The game does look pretty easy on single player, but I guess only easy difficulty is able to be played so far in the beta. Once you add a second player however monster health and damage goes up substantally, at least doubled probably more.

[Lewwyn]

Dude whatever Day9 is on... I'm afraid to try.

Day9 kept referencing the load times and I did want to share this article for all those worried about lag and latency. This article gives me a ton of hope that I can play from China on the US servers without a problem. I've heard from a lot of Euro gamers as well that they are having very little issue connecting to American servers. Anyway, the more I hear the more pumped I am.

[Tyrmith]

Dude whatever Day9 is on... I'm afraid to try.

His energy level is.. a bit different from the norm, but for me at least it's far less annoying than some casters I've seen. If you're interested in SC2 at all he's extremely interesting to watch, as he is really good at cutting away at an issue and describing why something is good or bad tactically/strategically in the game.

I'm interested to see what they do balence wise for the characters. At least in normal blizz has seemed to do a pretty good job of making the characters seem powerful, though I haven't watched the demon hunter which I've heard has some trouble.

[T-hawk]

Once you add a second player however monster health and damage goes up substantally, at least doubled probably more.

The big cracks in Diablo 2's balance emerged when players discovered character builds capable of solo fighting against these multiplayer-enhanced monsters. That led to the whole silliness where the most efficient approach was to find a full game and play solo in it. So now a character is not really truly strong unless it can handle monsters at 5x or 8x their original supposed stated stats. I'm very interested to see if Blizzard can get monster balancing right for multiplayer, and if so, then resist the urge to unbalance it again with the inevitable buffs and items that will come with patches and DLC. WoW and all MMORPGs balance it by making higher bosses impossible to solo or raid with fewer than 5 or 20 characters, but Diablo has always been devoted to the idea of feasible solo play.

[Zed-F]

A lot of the motivation for playing solo in a 8-player game (well max 4 players now IIRC) is gone now since loot is instanced per-player and can't be ninja'ed. Now if you are adventuring in a multi-player game it is quicker/more profitable to just stick with the group (and it lets you get away with stacking MF more easily too.) Of course going solo lets you do something different from what the others are doing but you won't get more loot that way in general.

But as for the balance issues we saw in D2 with synergistic multi-attribute bosses providing the only real challenge and everything else being cake? So far we have no evidence this has been fixed; if anything it seems potentially worse than ever, based on the beta. We'll have to see whether that changes once we can see the full game.