Diablo III Beta Impressions

On the flip side however, your choice and customisation levels are somewhat reduced from before: the new skill system no longer allows you to spec into whatever you want, but gives you a new skill at every level and instead forces you to choose between which ones you wield at any given time. It’s too early to tell how this will pan out over the course of the entire game, but from the beta levels at least there’s certainly considerable differences in playstyle depending on what skills you are equipping, and I often found myself longing for a quick-swap button along the lines of Diablo II’s ‘W’ key so I could bring up a different set of skills.

In a nod to Torchlight, the Cauldron of Jordan appears quite early in your inventory to allow you to sell items without having to return to town, and there’s also the addition of a new Nephalem Cube that allows you to break down your unwanted items into crafting ingredients. Town portal scrolls have been canned in favour of a Stone of Recall which can bring you back to town at any time, but it seems that the combination of the Cube and the Cauldron means you’ll very rarely (if ever) have to return to town except perhaps to use the shared Stash (having found a Bo Staff for my Monk while playing as my Witch Doctor, I can confirm that the shared Stash is awesome).

The crafting ingredients are quite neat: in town you can use them at, say, the Blacksmith’s to craft new magic items for yourself, but you can also collect pages of a Training Tome and give it to the Blacksmith, to unlock new crafting recipes at his forge. The same process can be repeated at other vendors as well.

There is of course no mention of Diablo III without a discussion of its always-online play, and there’s no denying that Diablo III is an MMO in almost every sense of the word. Every game is potentially a multiplayer game - although you have to explicitly flag it as open and public, as it’s invite-only by default - and even if you’re playing on your own you cannot pause the game, so if you want a break you’d better go find a quiet place to rest or just log out (waiting the obligatory ten seconds of course). I encountered one net connection bug while playing, which saw all my pets stop moving, chests become unopenable, and terrain failing to load ahead of me as I reached the limit of my locally cached area. During this time I was also unable to exit the game, and had to wait a minute or two before the client realised it couldn’t find the server and forced me out.

It is thanks to this I can tell you that the game uses a checkpoint system in each quest, which is where you restart from if you are booted. When creating a game you can actually choose which quest you want to start of out of any you have completed, which is neat for multiplayer where people might be on different quests. I managed to grab a few hours of multiplayer, and it works almost seamlessly (as you’d expect for an MMO), although the increased difficulty of another player on the server was never really felt. This is of course just the first part of the first Act (on normal mode, as Hardcore and Inferno aren't available yet), but it felt distressingly easy at times as a solo melee Monk, and another playing jumping in with their Demon Hunter to add ranged DPS to the equation just made it even more of a walkover: poor King Leoric never stood a chance. One of the best features of the Diablo III multi is that items now only drop for you, so if you can see something on the ground then it’s yours, and you never have to fight over who gets it.