Diablo 3 - Incredibly Early Impressions @ RPS
 

John Walker gives some Incredibly Early Impressions of the Diablo III beta over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun:
More information.

Hurrah for Leonard Boyarsky's influence…

I never got into Diablo or Diablo II. I enjoyed Titan Quest a lot though, along with Darkstone and Nox. Hopefully Diablo III will be better than the Sacreds and Dungeon Siege 3, which I couldn't get into at all.

I really loved Diablo, but never got into Diablo II. Don't know why. Perhaps I was simply younger when Diablo came out :-)

Oh god, I'm going to have to get this aren't I? God dang it, I was hoping for more of the same like in Torchlight so I could ignore this game.

I really don't like the fact that I have to be online to play a single-player game, but for this one…..ehhh whatever. I'll cave it's not like if I didn't buy it they would give a rat's ass. Everyone and their mother is going to be getting this one……literally my mother is getting this game. We had a blast playing online in D2. It was one of the few multiplayer games where I didn't have any hiccups playing from Taiwan while she was in the U.S.

I feel the same as you. Too much hack n slash for me makes the game mundane. The more Diablo III seems like a RPG the better.

Did Blizzard hint at all when release might be?

I'm of the same opinion. Loved D1 but couldn't get into D2. The atmosphere was so much better in D1.

Add here the "third musketeer" - me. :)
D2 had better cutscenes, but I simply wasn't hooked by anything. Ok, maybe I didn't learn to enjoy repeating endlessly so called cow level…

I was a very late comer to Diablo 2. I picked it up one day at Target maybe two years ago as an impulse buy. Heard so much about it, so why not?

D2 did nothing for me. I just didn't get the appeal. All this gothic gloominess setup, then a wacky fast paced click-fest. Felt almost like some browser flash game. Thought I was the only one who didn't like D2.

Keeping an open mind about D3 and will likely try it out.

I would like to play this game. We should make an RPGWatch gang when it comes out

I was much younger when I bought Diablo 2, and had fun at the time…
Altough I enjoy action RPGs, I'm not looking forward for this sequel: I just played too much of these hack & slash games (Diablo, Sacred, Titan Quest, the first two Dungeon Siege, Thor, Silverfall, etc.) to still have fun.
If a demo comes out I'll try it, but I don't buy it at day one for sure.

D1 definitely had better atmosphere then D2. What made D2 great were the skill trees. At the time this was an amazing and incredibly fun idea. Today everyone has skill trees, and now it's easy to look back on D2 and see just how flawed their skill trees really were. But if you were a gamer back when D2 came out, they were just one of the greatest things ever. The fact that just about every action RPG afterwards copied them only further drives home that point.

So I wouldn't necesarily recomend D2 to a modern gamer. I mean it does a great many things right and many would probably still love it, but gaming has evolved a lot since it first came out. But if we were still living in the year 2000 there would have been few games that I would have recomended more.

I gave up on WoW due to hacking issues (just one time too many and I'm STILL getting phishing emails), I see no reason why D3 would be any different. Even if I don't give them CC info, I don't want to spend months playing a game, just to have my characters stripped and deleted by some gold farmer from China (or Toledo).

I WANT to play this game, but I don't think I'll risk Blizzard's security incompetence.

I'll be trying this out, definitely. :)

But I won't expect much more than DII. I just don't think there is significant room for innovation, but we'll see…

I got hacked in WoW less then a year ago, and it was a pain but Blizzard customer service responded really quickly and my characters were completely restored in about 2 days. Now I have an authenticator which makes it very unlikely that I'll be hacked again. So it wasn't a happy experience but it wasn't like I lost my character or equipment. Hackers also have no way to get your credit card info off your WoW account.

Although I hate the idea of a real money auction house, it will probably dramatically reduce the profitability of gold/item selling by flooding the market. Right now the black market nature of gold selling drives the price up a lot, but the rate of return per hour is still so low that it's only worth doing if you live in a poor country. Cut out the black market, and I doubt it will be worth doing for anyone. This should dramaticaly reduce the amount of account hacking. Whether it will be worth the cost is a completely different question.

I'm an on-again off-again player. Every time I try to come back over the last three years (FIVE times!), my password has been changed and my toons deleted. Just waaaayyy too annoying.

Most likely your own security incompetence. Being phished is YOUR responsibility, not Blizzard's. You just have to have a clue about what the internet is.

No, seriously. If you're phished, it's your own damned fault for not giving a damn to learn about the internet.

And for me. I remember the first time I encountered The Butcher and nearly had a heart attack. Diablo 2 might have been a better "game" but it felt like a game, rather than an atmospheric trip into the underworld.

That does sound like there is a problem on your end. When people hack your account they generally aren't actually breaking into blizzard's system, they are breaking into your system and finding out your password. You may have a keylogger or something similar installed on your machine.

Either way getting an authenticator will solve your problem. Blizzard sells them at a loss so they are incredibly cheap (I don't even think they charge shipping) or if you have a smart phone you can download an authenticator app for free. THey will ensure that your account does not get hacked. Just don't lose the authenticator!

I've never opened a phishing email, so that had nothing to do with it. I do, however, receive at least 2-3 of them EVERY freakin' day.