As you know I have spent some time in the Diablo 3 beta over the past couple of days. Of course I am new to the series and new to the genre so this article will be somewhat basic. With that said, I think I have enough gaming experience to give you a non-biased view of Diablo 3 in an ongoing series of post over the next few weeks.
Diablo 3 Beta – Installation:
In its present form, the Diablo 3 beta is only available as a download from Blizzards Battle.net. I should note that the game was available for download almost a full day before I got the email from Blizzard. If you haven’t checked to see if it is available on your Battlenet account, you might want to check!
Overall the installation was relatively painless. I simply initiated the download from Battlenet, pointed it to the proper location on my computer and walked away from my machine. I should mention that the Diablo 3 beta download is 4.3 Gigabytes. Make sure you have plenty of room on your destination drive before you begin the process.
While my download was flawless, I do know that Razor’s download stalled out around the 17% mark. He never explained what he did to get it finished but he was able to complete the install. Most likely it was his crappy internet service but who knows.
Diablo 3 Beta – Character Selection:
Once I got to the character selection screen, I did a quick check on the classes and something about the Witch Doctor jumped out at me. Knowing nothing about the class I just grabbed one, gave it a name and started playing. Once I was actually in the game I was immediately disappointed. My Witch Doctor looked nothing like the badass on the character selection screen. Nope mine is a skinny, partially naked guy. No fancy headdress and zip for gear. This is normal of course but I still felt let down.
Diablo 3 Beta – Game Play:
From what I can tell actual game play is near identical to other titles in this genre. Point and click to move (or click & hold). You can map abilities to five hot keys not including the mouse. I do like the fact that I can hover my mouse over an enemy to attack instead of having to click on them.
Collecting loot is as simple as walking over it, and interaction with objects and NPC’s is straight forward and simple. There are plenty of directions given during NPC dialogue so I never really felt lost. I knew almost immediately what to do. All in all the learning curve seems mild. I may grow to regret that statement later but for right now that is how it appears.
Like I said at the beginning, this is just a basic overview. I will get more in-depth as I progress with the game. I have already purchased Diablo 3 so it will be my focus for awhile.
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