Diablo III

Having dumped even more time into the beta, I have developed even more thoughts regarding it.

Story: it's voiced and written well, and I can already tell that it's got that heartwarming Diablo feel to it, with ancient Hell lore ravaging the already-quite-ravaged lands of Sanctuary. I'm curious to see what trouble Deckard Cain and his cute little adoptive niece Leah will get up to. What really felt missing from the beta were some of Blizzard's classically-epic cutscenes, but I assume that's just because of, you know, beta.

Classes: I tried out each of the game's five classes through the beta quests, and the Monk was my favorite by a mile, although this could easily be an accident of the limited number of skills available at lower levels. The game's three physical classes (Barbarian, Demon Hunter, and Monk) all have a cool seesaw dynamic with their ability meters, but I felt like the Monk had the best balance of left- and right-clicking. I also got a Rune upgrade that made my punch move teleport to the enemy, which was awesome. Anyway, I'm super interested in how later-game abilities will mix up the classes even more.

Mechanics: I was a little disappointed to see the complete disappearance of stat points and talent trees, and the streamlining of the ability hotbar - no longer a freeform amalgam of your favorite abilities, but now one ability and Rune combination choice from each of six categories - took some getting used to. It's definitely a step down from Diablo II in terms of customization and complexity; on the other hand, you can change your loadout whenever you want (even in the middle of a battle), which is way better than never. And the abilities in general are fun enough to make up for the relative inflexibility.

Online: online activation DRM, for better or worse, is a fact of modern PC gaming. But I find it pretty disturbing that there's no offline mode at all, and the beta weekend was a perfect demonstration of why: server instability. Maybe you can get over the client-side connection requirement -- but what happens during the game's launch week, when server stability and capacity issues make it difficult for you to sign in to what is, very likely, a single-player game session? And what about when servers have to be restarted for regular maintenance, making it impossible to play? This isn't an MMO, and having the stringent connection requirements of one just seems wildly inappropriate.

Like I said, most of this bile is from the access issues during the beta weekend, which is honestly somewhat expected. Blizzard has built up a fairly good stability record with StarCraft II's backend, as far as I know, so it's not necessarily going to be a thing. But if it is a thing, it's going to be a pretty goddamn frustrating one.