[Delraich]

After being a lucky winner and getting a beta key on Thursday evening, I activated it right away! After following the instructions it starts downloading the game. Slowly and painfully, I watched the bar creep along...1%, 2%, 3%.....like 1 hour later 10%.... and I'm like... man... I ain't playing tonight. So yesterday morning I fire it up again, and it is just taking ages. I did notice that you could play even though it wasn't fully downloaded, but because it only said "playble" rather than "optimal", I was determined to wait until it had downloaded properly. By 10pm yesterday it was still on 90%, so I was like, screw it, I'm not waiting anymore. I hit play and the game froze for ages and eventually said you could not join a game at this time. I kept trying without success and eventually gave up. I think there was an issue because MrFool made a post about a known issue. So finally, just after midnight, it finishes downloading and I figure I may as well have a go. Bam, straight in no problems - yeah. Decided to start with a Barbarian. Chose him, named him "Bob" and started playing.

The following is my opinion based on a few hours of playing on one character (Edit: I did all the quests again so that I could get a few screen shots which took about an hour or two). I also maybe have generated expectations based on previous WoW experiences that were purposely avoided in this game, but will mention them anyway.

The first thing I noticed is that there is no character customization in terms of graphical appearance. It's male or female, that is it. I have to admit i really like choosing my character's appearance but I guess it will be covered in armour and that will make you look distinct. Not the end of the world, but it would have been cool to have this in my view. The graphics of the character didn't look that high rez and he doesn't "breathe" or make any movements like the WoW characters that make them look more "alive" (Edit: OK, on paying a bit more attention, it seems I was wrong here - he does make some movements). It also fills quite small amount of your screen - like a little blocky dude (Edit: maybe its because of new armour or maybe because I am more used to it, but it seems better today - see screen shots below). I might need to fiddle with my settings though, because I simply accepted the default ones, and I am sure this won't be an issue in the real version. I didn't see a way to change the zoom (e.g. like if you move the mouse wheel in SC) or change the view of your surroundings (like when you drag the background around in WoW), feature that I assumed would be part of the game (maybe I have missed it). I also had a fair bit of latency (ranging from around 100-200 up to 850), but this is probably a beta server issue.

Screenshot of character


So onto the game play itself... In the beginning you only need to know how to left or right click. Your left hand doesn't need to do anything. You can left or right click on the ground and your character will go there. If you left click on the mob it will attack it with the move bound to the left mouse button. If you right click the mob it will attack it with the move bound to the right mouse button. Adventuring is fun and at a nice pace. I found it pretty straight forward, spamming left click on basically everything in front of me and interspersing this with right clicks. The quests are easy to follow and the game play and menus feel very intuitive. Mobs drop loot of various grades, mostly grey and white, but also a fairly decent amount of blues (which I think are uncommons in D3). Picking up the gold didn't feel as "smooth or impressive" as I would have expected, but thinking about it, I don't really have a better suggestion. You get this text saying "3 gold" with a rectangle around it and you need to click on each box to pick it up... meh... maybe you should automatically pick up gold drops, I don't know. (Edit: playing it again today you can run through the gold to pick it up so you don't need to literally click on each box saying 3gold or whatever). The mobs themselves are cool and have nice and varied abilities. It is fun exploring the environment, and the mini map works well so that you don't miss out on clearing any area. During the game I was wondering about why I couldn't find my portal stone and then when I won it after doing a quest I was like... aha! The portal works well and it "does what it says on the can". Puts up a portal, you can go to town and sell some stuff, and then back into the portal to where you set it up in the dungeon. Another thing I couldn't find, and still haven't found, is the auction house - is it working in the beta? Edit: OK, its on the front screen where all your characters are. Had a quick play with it and so far, unless I'm missing something, I think it could do with some tweaks. When it comes to selling stuff it lists all your items including the stuff your characters are wearing. So unless you remember exactly what your are wearing or what you want to sell, you could end up selling the wrong things. When it comes to browsing for things to buy, the default search seems to be by what your character can use. I wanted to search for items in general because I wanted to see how much they are selling for so that I could decide how much I wanted to price my items. I would like to have a general option where you can see all armour without it filtering it by the name of your characters. Don't want to judge too fast because I didn't spend that long on the AH so maybe I missed something important.

Interacting with the environment (e.g. pulling a lever to drop a chandelier on a group of mobs) is a good touch, and it will probably help strategically when the game gets harder (e.g. you will probably have to drop a wall on the mobs to soften them up before going in), but in the beta you can just walk in and kill them no problem. Ironically, you can actually die (I think I was getting a bit too complacent)!! I was fairly close to the end and I got to these 4 pillars and wasn't sure if i was supposed to kill the pillars or the mobs. I ended up killing half of each and then died... doh.

Where I died the first time around


I didn't die on the skeleton king but my health did get pretty low and needed to chug some health potions. It was a fun battle and you needed to chase him around the room a fair bit (while dealing with his minions). By this point in the game, I had 2 extra abilities from leveling so it wasn't just spamming left and right click. You also used you left hand now for pressing one of 3 buttons (1, 2 and Q). 1 and 2 were extra abilities (e.g. ground stomp and leap attack) - can't remember if these are their proper names. Q is the health potion button. Eventually my understanding is that you will need to press 1, 2, 3, 4, and Q after you have activated all 6 skills.

Skeleton King



After a certain point, you can start leveling your blacksmith NPC. You need a fair bit of money (maybe 1k or so), and you need the materials from salvaging the blue items. After this, I made some really good blue items that were much better than any of the drops I got, including from the skeleton king. And it was pretty damn cheap to make these items (like 2 essences and couple of hundred gold or something). I definitely recommend this guy. The only snag is that I probably could have used these better items earlier on (I made them after killing the end boss) but anyway...

Chest and Inventory


Overall, I had a lot of fun playing the beta and I enjoyed it enough that I want to play it again with the other characters, so I see this as a very good sign!

Quick Comments

	nirvAnA:	Bob the barbarian!
	Volition:	Excellent write-up!