I had about 3 hours hours of play with the Diablo 3 BlizzCon 2009 build. The play was mostly broken up into 15 minute session, with a couple 30 min runs. I played each of the four classes in a portion of act two. The characters were already lv’d to around lv10.
Here are my impressions:
– Holy fucking shit it’s great.
– Witch Doctor seems over powered with his summons able to take almost all mob agro, leaving him free to deal damage from a distance free from danger.
– I died the most playing the Monk. Correctly timing his skills in combos seemed critical. This is no doubt part of the new play style being drawn up for Diablo 3. Less mashing attach and one spell, more balanced timed attacks with multiple spells interwoven.
– Spell interrupts seem unpolished, casts don’t start sometimes if you are melee’ing.
– The physics on the dead monsters have weight and feel “right”, bodies fall down, and rag-doll nicely, not like some games which heavily abuse rag-doll.
– Skill customizing with ruins/stones might be the best idea ever. It was not enabled in the build i played, but from how I was using skills constantly, being able to change your skills with mods should help to keep the game fresh.
– Good depth to the scenery around the level. Sometimes the scenery gets in the way of the game field covering the lower part of the screen hiding items, monsters and quest objectives.
– Move speed seems okay for combat the is no run/walk.
– The wizard had some fucking awesome spells, the Mirror Image spell had this incredible effect of the wizard splitting in two, you could almost feel the pulling and splitting.
– Barbarian two handed weapons sucked. I did way more damage using two single handed weapons.
– Mana regen allowed constant skill usage, you really had to spam skills to zap mana.
– Wizard had the best flow of skills I think.
– Largest mobs are around 15-20 monsters.
– Monsters required different approaches to kill, you can just see how much balance the Diablo 3 is designing when you have to change how you fight every couple minutes.
– Screen scrolling dropped frames every once in a while, shuttering a little bit.
– There was a couple here with their 2 children, one like 1.5 years old the other kid must have been 5-6 months. The childern were completely ignored so that the parents could play Diablo 3. Kinda disturbing.
– There’d are some tween girls being interviewed about their wow habits.
– Social awkwardness was at max.
If there was no walk/run, were there any powers that when invoked increased run speed?
Not that I saw/tried. I wonder if they will leave run/walk speed constant to prevent the unbalanced over spedup chars that could be made in d2 with items.
Case in point– my Assassin in Zyel who is difficult to see on the screen while moving. If you look at analogous tactics in torchlight, run speed is key for the trap based Vanquisher but it’s really difficult to get increased as far as I’ve found.
What was the issue with the monk? Just that he would get mobbed?
I wonder if, like D2 (speaking mostly of the Zy-El versions), that the classes that seem the toughest or imbalanced to their advantage at the early or mid-points ultimately end up being the weakest or least effective at the top levels.
I would find it marginally annoying if all classes moved at exactly the same speed. I think that the speed levels you were able to attain in Zy-El were too fast as it became impossible to control at a certain point, but I think that there should be something in the engine that allows some speed movement variance. Maybe short sprints can be done or if you are less encumbered you move a bit faster, and maybe some base attribute level determines your standard speed though having it super high doesn’t actually push you into some sort of super hero speed mode (since it just isn’t that type of game).
In other games where I have played the Monk class always seems cool but and in theory suck until they get to super high levels. Once attaining those levels they often have all these powerful skills but they end up being near useless going against creatures or characters that are able to and have developed super powerful items.
I think that for the most part they can actually become very bad ass ONLY IF the game isn’t ultimately based on items and the monks are not inappropriately restricted from using almost all items for their best skills to work (because the game creators use the old AD&D view that a monk should basically just run around naked).
As much as I hate to say this, AD&D (and its various incarnations) in my opinion is responsible for both ruining this class in many other games but it is also one of the few games that actually allowed a high level monk to be a bad ass in spite of the item restriction.
More than anything else, I just want to know when the game will actually be done and I will be in a position to actually own and play it. I think me actually having the money, time and equipment necessary to play the game once launched is more of a pipe dream than the game actually ever being completed.