Diablo 3 - Beta Tidbits
 

Diablo III is still the biggest news around the 'net and here are a few more items.
Gaming Illustrated has some very early impressions of the beta, though there isn't much detail:
From the where-do-they-get-these-people department comes a GameSpy article that asks, should Diablo III be first-person?
For my money, he misses the whole point, by the way.
Joystiq reports that Blizzard's Jay Wilson is posturing for the inevitable console release, saying it feels better with a controller:
Lastly, IGN has a series of videos that show the entire Beta act from beginning to end.
More information.

Gotta love a guy who has never played any Diablo before getting invited to beta test D3 and then acting like he knows what's best for the genre. Can you imagine a Barbarian's whirlwind or tactical placement of a Sorceress' frozen orb in first person?

Oh well. Ignorant people are ignorant.

I remember a certain Ashley Cheung from Bethesda writing a blog entry regarding Blizzard's choice to maintain Diablo III's isometric perspective.

I think he called their design decision "conservative" and not innovative for not willing to consider making D3 first person. That was all very amusing.

Hellgate showed how well this gameplay formula can work with a different perspective.

I wouldn't say it was necessarily "better" - but it was definitely a much more engaging and visceral experience in terms of combat.

I don't think it would work quite as well in a pure fantasy game, where ranged combat is less common. But the "over-the-shoulder-view" worked very well also.

D3 IS conservative in some ways, and I think it's a legitimate observation.

"game lends itself to a console"

already seems to have been designed with console in mind imho

This is really amazing. A retard got his hands on Diablo 3.

And there's one thing I don't understand. Why in the nine hells would it be innovative to make a first person Diablo? First person games have been in the market for decades now. FP camera is not as innovative as it was 30 years ago. except for people who think Halo and CoD were the first FPS games ever.
I wonder if he would call it innovation if Infinity Ward created an isometric Call of Duty. Would it be innovative enough for him?
If that's the definition of innovation today, please spare me the innovation bullshit. I prefer the old, conservative methods, where FPSs remain FPSs and RPGs remain RPGs and innovation is not defined by removing good old things, but by adding new good things.

That's subjective, of course. I didn't think very much of the couple of hours I played of Hellgate - it certainly didn't make me want to continue playing. Perhaps it just didn't work well for me.

Well…it's more of a value judgement than an observation, but valid nontheless I suppose.

I was actually pointing out Cheung's idea for the hypocritical irony rather than making any particular point of truth about D3's design.
The blog entry came out during the heated debates following Fallout 3's release. Given Bethesda's history of creating games with a first person perspective, it would have been a nonsensical expectation for them to use an isometric perspective since "that's not what we they do well" - to misquote a Todd Howardism.

Thus, one could argue that Bethesda in sticking to what they knew and what they had done in the past, were adopting a similarly conservative approach lacking in innovation. Yet, this didn't prevent Mr Cheung from making his ironical comments regarding D3's design. Again, I thought it was all quite amusing.