nsane.forums Posted August 1, 2011 Share Posted August 1, 2011 Blizzard is expected to release a beta of Diablo 3 later this year, but a group of journalists were recently invited to the developer's California headquarters to get an early look at what the rest of us will be playing. According to reports, the game is as deep and polished as we've come to expect from Blizzard, though it doesn't come without a few hang-ups.Chief among said hangups is the fact that the game can't be played offline. As Eurogamer reported, the game will save your characters in the cloud and utilizes a banner system to display your in-game exploits and experience. But the cost of these online features is that the game will always have to be online in order to be playable.The beta itself covers the first eight levels of the game—which apparently can be completed in around an hour if you rush—and lets players use each of the game's five different classes. Kotaku has a great rundown of how the classes are shaping up. The barbarian class utilizes frenzy instead of mana and features abilities such as the power to transform into a giant, powerful beast; the witchdoctor can summon everything from firebats (described as a flamethrower with bats in it) to creatures that can turn enemies into chickens; the wizard can slow down time, coat its skin with protective diamonds, and even has an alternate form; the monk is powered by spirit and features a wide array of martial arts moves; and the long-range demon hunter gets its power from both hatred and discipline, which aid both offensive and defensive abilities. In short, it looks like the five classes will offer up quite a few options to players.A life without skill points One of the biggest changes this time around is that there are no longer skill points. Each character has six skill slots, and both skills and slots upgrade automatically as you progress through the game. You can swap skills in and out of slots as you like. The idea behind the change is to make each decision have more impact. "Would you rather make 20 small decisions or three big ones?" Blizzard's Wyatt Cheng told Joystiq. "What we find, especially when it comes to defining your character, is that three big ones is more interesting and compelling." There is a rune system, however, to give players more customization options. Runes add effects to skills and can alter their strength, which should allow for a lot of freedom for higher-level players.There's a story in Diablo? Diablo 3 will put a larger focus on narrative when compared to the previous games in the series, but the developers are attempting to do so in a way that's as unobtrusive as possible. Instead of simply reading text-based quests to get story, there will also be lots of audio that lets you listen in to what's happening without interrupting all of the hacking and slashing.New Tristam concept art courtesy Blizzard EntertainmentThe beta begins in a place called New Tristam, a town built upon the ruins of the town from the original Diablo. It's a mining town, but when it's struck by a meteor and beset by undead creatures, it ends up in need of some help. You end the beta by defeating the skeleton king, another nod to the first game, who just so happens to be the source of all the undead baddies. With regard to the first chapter, Eurogamer explains that "like everything else about Diablo 3, its narrative has an effortlessness about it that belies how carefully put together it is."No mods here In addition to the fact you'll always need to play the game online, one other detail popped up during the preview: according to PC Gamer, Diablo 3 won't support mods of any sort. Unlike StarCraft 2, which embraced mods, they will be prohibited in Diablo 3 duo to a "variety of gameplay and security reasons." No date has been set for when the beta will be playable by the rest of us, but Blizzard has said to expect it at some point this year. View: Original Article Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Administrator DKT27 Posted August 1, 2011 Administrator Share Posted August 1, 2011 I believe many are eagerly waiting for the game. :) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
myidisbb Posted August 1, 2011 Share Posted August 1, 2011 no doubt like all diablos it will be rushed 6 months too soon. now for the online cloud excuse me. it is called a freaken server. god i am sick and tired of the frekaen word "cloud" its a server. period. just like in diablo 2 and wow. you dont see them saying play wow on a cloud. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
toyo Posted August 1, 2011 Share Posted August 1, 2011 Meet the future of gaming, and the biggest bump in the sweet piracy road (for now): the damned cloud. Bizzard are thinking so high of themselves as to move to the cloud even what should be very possible to be played offline. In the end, who cares about the billions of gamers with slow or unstable connections, they would probably pirate Diablo III anyway :frusty:They're smart enough to offer those "banners" with your in-game achievements as a reason for the cloud move, instead of just making it online-only, like the uninspired move from Ubisoft.We'll find a way, Blizz!PS: Diablo III will have a Auction House a la WoW, but you will have the possibility to use real money to buy items :mellow: Blizz will also charge "nominal fees" for any transactions. Of course, this is just a Beta version, but there's no reason to believe this "feature" won't make it in the final version, Blizz are known to polish a game for long months, so as far as we can tell, the game might be pretty over by now and they're just testing and making finesse changes. Paying $$$ for virtual in-game gear was never a good idea, but they seem to go with it nevertheless, just to make some additional cash. (Source) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LeetPirate Posted August 2, 2011 Share Posted August 2, 2011 Well this settles it then, now I absolutely have to pirate it to teach them a lesson. And to think I was planning to buy D3 just so I could own all 3 but screw this always online rubbish. Sure the ability to save your progress to an online water vapour powered server is great but it should remain as a feature and not be mandatory. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Administrator DKT27 Posted August 2, 2011 Administrator Share Posted August 2, 2011 Blizzard: Sorry, You'll Have To Be Online To Play Diablo IIIDon't call it World of DiabloCraft, it's still just Diablo III, Blizzard's upcoming massively single and multiplayer action-roleplaying game, but like World of Warcraft, Blizzard's now saying you'll need a persistent Internet connection to play at all. Blizzard executive vice president of game design, Rob Pardo, delivered the bad news (well, for some of you anyway) at an invite-only preview event, claiming all the stuff they're throwing into the game "requires" placing gamers on an Internet leash. Some of that stuff reportedly includes a friends list, cross-game chat (voice) courtesy Blizzard's Real ID system, online storage of characters, persistent parties, player-versus-player and public game matchmaking, dynamic joining or leaving in cooperative play mode, an item stash shared across multiple characters (up to 10), an auction house, achievements and stat-tracking, and a vanity system (something to do with visibile banners) that'll display your achievements to other players. I know, there's a bit of the usual smoke and mirrors here, whereby Blizzard's probably really pushing the online-only thing "to thwart pirates and cheaters," but couched in "to make your playing experience more seamless." It'd be simple enough to sort the online and offline components into separate play columns and temporarily disable the online bits and bobs in an offline situation, just as StarCraft II does. Simple enough, but not secure enough, apparently. Not that it'll thwart pirates (or cheaters). They've apparently been circumventing Blizzard's anti-theft, anti-cheating measures for years, including running illicit versions of World of Warcraft and StarCraft II. Blizzard boots them periodically, but they're a moving target. No system's foolproof. But perhaps I'm being too hard on Blizzard. At what point does a game become online-only? No one balks at World of Warcraft's online-only play requirement or complains about their inability to play it on a plane (though many aircraft now have airborne connections almost fast enough to do so). I'm no fan of online-only software, since the Internet still has reliability issues, but it's more dependable than satellite television (where the signal's impeded any time a major thunderstorm rolls through) and to be perfectly honest, I never actually played StarCraft II offline. View: Original Article Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
myidisbb Posted August 3, 2011 Share Posted August 3, 2011 should be able to do a private server then just like wow Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nemesis Posted August 3, 2011 Share Posted August 3, 2011 could it be possible to change the address of the "cloud" server back to yourself and then save to a destination on your computer?? im curious as to how pirating this game will work. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LeetPirate Posted August 3, 2011 Share Posted August 3, 2011 could it be possible to change the address of the "cloud" server back to yourself and then save to a destination on your computer?? im curious as to how pirating this game will work.Like this:step1. download skidrow release.step2. read nfo file.step3. install game and crack according to nfo.step4. laugh at blizzard for being utter retards by pushing away customers with their stupid always online garbage.step5. laugh at blizzard each time you launch the game as a tribute. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nemesis Posted August 3, 2011 Share Posted August 3, 2011 could it be possible to change the address of the "cloud" server back to yourself and then save to a destination on your computer?? im curious as to how pirating this game will work.Like this:step1. download skidrow release.step2. read nfo file.step3. install game and crack according to nfo.step4. laugh at blizzard for being utter retards by pushing away customers with their stupid always online garbage.step5. laugh at blizzard each time you launch the game as a tribute.lol. I meant how they (skidrow) would do it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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