Diablo 3 Beta Screen shots: Witch Doctor

His name: Zazu.  It just sounds right.  (Click image for larger images)

Fire bomb toss

Fire bomb explode

Run like da wind in spirit form

Upkeep: Rez Homies

Me an my hommies

Diablo 3 Beta Screen shots: Wizard

Her name: PointNClick, cause that's about it lol. (Click for image in larger size)

Yes, the wand bubbles, aren't particles grand

Your classic frost nova

White Queen

Tornado! Tornado! Tornado! Tornado!

F'n aye, lighting, f yeah chain lighting

Diablo 3 Beta Screen Shots: Demon Hunter

I named him Geth...cause yeah... Mass Effect KICKS ASS! (click to see larger image)

The use of particles in this game is very well done.

Wings bitches.

Nothing says love like a flaming arrow to the face.

And then he says to me "You wanna be a bad guy?" and I says to him "YEAH BABY YEAH! I wanna be a bad guy!".  And he says "Then you gotta get a gimmick, see?" and I says to him "I gotta gimmick, baby, high EXPLOSIVES! For I'm the Mad Midnight Bomber What Bombs At Midnight WHAHAHAAA!!"

Shadow dash, look at 'em go, zoom zoom zoom!

Diablo 3 Beta Screen shots: Barbarian

I named her "Ulga".  Click on images for larger size.

Bar-bars have an excellent A.O.E. curb stomp.

Step 1) find crazy.  Step 2) launch an axe at crazy.

SUPER JUMP!

The physics of this game are impressive.  Nearly everything breaks, shatters, tears, explodes.  It's all very pretty.

Yes, Wizards get death beam.

Shit!

Yes it's legal, so here! (Diablo III First impressions from it's Beta)

Since the confidentiality clause of the Diablo III beta has been lifted, I decided to copy pasta my thoughts from the beta forums here.  Maybe later I will nab some screen grabs...  Maybe.  But now, enjoy some hot steaming copy pasta:

"Overall, it looks and feels great.  It "is" Diablo, which was something I was a little worried that it might not be when the first screenshots were released.  The overall feel is great, the gore is perfect (very great eew factor on some of the enemies presented), the transitions between dungeons, caves, and open areas are very nicely done.  


The level advancement is quick.  Very quick, in fact, compared with the amount of level progression shown to be available in the future late game to the speed at which one reaches lvl 13.  Just quick enough to feel a little too hasty.  That and if the beta is the entire first act, the game feels very compressed and constrained, almost to the point of lacking substance relative to previous Diablo games.


Diablo two took forever to finish each act, as they were broken into several sub acts which some areas took the better part of an afternoon to fully complete.  If this was the whole first act, it only took a couple of hours to finish solo, about 50min (or shorter) in co-op as everyone just races to the end goal of killing the skeleton king.  I know in previous Diablo's that would be a good part one of Act I, but if that is all of act one... I worry for the rest of the game.


 Now I realize this is the beta, and I'm really hopping that it's only the tippy tip of the iceberg, but if each act is relatively the same length, then it's going to be a rather quick and possibly short lived game.  I really hope my instincts are just wrong on this.  I would hate for this to be a 5-10hr casual game.  I long for the previous Diablo style of being a hard core 30-70hr plus game.  What I'm trying to say, is that I hope this game doesn't severally suffer from a lack of muchness.


Back to the good,  the use of particle effects and lighting are stunning throughout the whole game.  Everything is just wonderful (and some times disgustingly so) to look at.  Each class feels unique and has appropriate pros and cons.  Everything is mostly balanced and just needs minor tweaks here and there.  


One of the big things I enjoyed was the slew of abilities your given to choose from.  It's not a choice between what's most dps blah blah blah, it's more "what is the style that you enjoy".  THAT little extra bit of customization, to have 2 or 3 of the same class in a party and each one with different abilities, was nice.  And changing abilities was no hassle at all.  A small cool down, but it wasn't too penalizing, allowing you to swap for situations on the fly.


 Crafting is pretty straight forward and simple (it just needs to have more "class specific" items to fill in the giant level gaps.  Like first class equipment, such as ceremonial dagger/mojo/source/wand, are strange.  Some don't even start until lvl 16-20.  Starting one at  lvl 6 and you don't get any upgrade until lvl 24 seems a little excessive, leaving those players with little luck in finding rare items in the dust).  Good number of enemy types in this first section, I hope it keeps evolving along those lines throughout the game.


Absolutely love the use of physics engine.  Love how the levels crumble and explode all over, very well done.  I enjoyed the spoken lore as you kill each enemy type.  Hearing the various characters describe them in detail was very  nice (and done in a very delicious Eternal Darkness style, which horror-esque games lack these days, which is a damn shame).  Voice acting's good, ambiance is good, story is good so far, conveyance was clear and to the point, I do want to know what happens after the skelly-bones king.  Yeah, so far so good.


And as a final side note:  Getting a feel for the Monk class makes me very excited for the next wow expansion."


--N00basaurus

A Quick Thought on the Subject

I'm typing this from a moble device, so please bare with the auto-correct awkwardness.

More and more rumors and speculation are coming about from the next generation xbox, the so called "xbox 760", and one has me particularly unhappy.  It's the rumor of DRM.  Or digital rights management that might be built directly into the console. 

This has been a long time thing getting more and more out of controll, and no one has really done anything about it.  The theory is this: people buy game, people turn around after x time and sell/trade in game, digital rights companies gets no profit one that 2ndary trade in.  Most of the time the 2ndary trade is done at 1/2 of less orriginal price, but that's never brought up.

To "some" *cough* E.A. *cough* companies, turning in several games you no longer enjoy for a new one, is akin to piracy.  So they do junk like only allow you limited installs on P.C. games and junk like that.  And it really is junk.  It's harder to point at with p.c. games but now rumered for xbox, it lightened some complications.

(note: Blizzard's battle.net solution and steam are pretty damn swank in this topic, kudos to both and those like it).

The biggest of which is DRM sevearly limits the lifetime of a videogame by reducing it's shelf time.  This may not really be bad for a quick one-shot game, but there are quite a few games that pump out DLC.  Games like rockband, Call of honor battlefield, and x named dance games will have drops in dlc sales as players can no longer pick up dead shelfed used copies of the core game and purchase the subsiquint downloadable packs.

The technology (and profit grubbing butthurt compaies going QQ)is starting to lead to a greed run to a "rent to play" set up where no one really owns the game.  You have X-time to play where x is the number of days and you have to pay full price to play each time.  You might even have to pay to store your saved data, then pay more to retrieve it.  As some one who still owns a plays a fully working Dream Cast (and older systems), this scares me.  It really does.

I sort of understand the "why" but punishing your once dedicated customers is not the way to go.

-N00basaurus

Tick tock America, Tick tock.