Watch people play the Diablo III beta

[Ohio Joe]

Looks like Blizzard has begun their family and friends beta for D3 with no NDA (this appears to be intentional, so it should not stop) and people are streaming themselves playing.

http://kotaku.com/5837895/watch-people-playing-the-diablo-iii-beta-right-now

Catching people actually playing is hit or miss but there are plenty of links.

[Ohio Joe]

1. So I watched some guy for a while

He seemed to be in an open game as people came and went. He was playing a monk and seemed to be kicking ass pretty handily. Most monsters just seemed to stand around and/or move very slowly and he took very little damage. Over a period of 25-30 minutes, he leveled from 6 to 8 and strangely did not seem to do anything during level up... He just got new spells that he tried out... He did not appear to have any spell points to distribute (I believe stat points are automatic but I thought spell points were up to the player) but maybe I missed it. He had what appeared to be a Horadric cube that he kept putting loot he did not equip into... After he completed the quest for Mad Leoric's Crown, he got access to the armorer and I think he was using the excess loot in the cube to have him forge items of better quality. A lot like crafting, where you get to choose an item... Say a Hood... and it tells you what properties come standard and how many random. I assume as he grows, and gets better stuff to work with, he can make better and better stuff.

The game ended with a message from the server that it was coming down till 8:00pm pacific for a patch and a wipe of characters... Bummer, heh.

[Systematic Chaos]

2. Droolfest.

Gonna get this, no question.

[Ohio Joe]

3. I did see that... No more leveling skills

Lots of good new info from the beta here:

http://pc.ign.com/articles/119/1192549p1.html

We will have to do some slaying when this comes out :D

[Occulus]

4. Day one.

I have (and love) the first two. They're classics. And every last bit of media I've seen for the third installment tells me they've kept true to everything that made the first two great, updated things that badly needed updating, and just in general made the concept better.

By all measures, this is looking to define what a sequel should be in the same way Portal 2 did. I'm very much looking forward to it.

As an aside: normally, online-always really pisses me off, but in this case, it makes sense. There were serious issues with the item trading system in Diablo II, and making the game battlenet-exclusive seems to be an intelligent solution. I do understand the objections to requiring an internet connection, but I also understand the issues Blizzard has with game characters being stored client-side. One solution would be to create a strictly single-player game mode, with no rankings, item trading, stores, or such, but I doubt Blizzard will put that much time into it unless the idea is promoted by lots of players (which isn't outside the realm of possibility).

We'll see what happens. I'll be getting it in any case.

[Ohio Joe]

5. Well... D2 did store Battlenet characters server side

It was only open characters that were stored client side. This did very little to prevent cheating, duping, map hacks (so freakin useless in D2 but widely used) and other cheats that were/are common place.