Diablo III Delayed to 2012 – Beta Report
Sean W. Gibson / Sep 29th, 2011 2 Comments
Last week Blizzard Entertainment CEO Mike Morhaime posted that Blizzard management was making the call to delay Diablo III until “early 2012” much to the chagrin of fans of the game. Internally at Blizzard Entertainment, Morhaime stated that they were originally aiming for a late 2011 release, but felt the game wasn’t ready and needed more time to live up to Blizzard’s standards. As we all know, Blizzard Entertainment is famous within the game industry for not announcing release dates nor living up to promises for games – the line they always share is that “the game will be released when it’s done” – and that has worked just fine for them for nearly 20 years of game development.
After playing through the beta twice now, we at Gaming Illustrated applaud Blizzard’s move to delay the game because quite frankly we agree that it’s not close to being done. Although we typically gush about Blizzard Entertainment games, Diablo III’s beta had an altogether vanilla feel to it as compared to other times we’ve played through betas, such as most recently with World of WarCraft Cataclysm and StarCraft II. Diablo III frankly doesn’t quite live up to the hype at this point, so we’re hoping Mike Morhaime and the folks at Blizzard see what we’re seeing as well. In this article we’ll outline the things we hope to see improved in the next Beta build, or at least, built into the game by release.
Suggestion One: Improve the Graphics
Perhaps the biggest let-down so far are the graphics of Diablo III. While they aren’t bad by any stretch of the imagination, they certainly aren’t next-generation. We had the inside information that Diablo III’s specs would be right on par with StarCraft II and by goodness, they were right. Although we recognize that the Full Screen Anti-Aliasing is currently OFF and not able to be turned on at this point, the graphics just aren’t what they should be. Perhaps with the Anti-Aliasing we’ll see a big jump, obviously in the realm of the jaggedness of the characters. While there are some nice “wow” moments graphically, such as when some monsters spawn into the playing realm or backgrounds in certain areas, there’s just nothing that screams that what you are seeing is a step forward for PC gaming. There has to be more improvements, sharpness and special effects within the game. Diablo is a game that should put you on edge and it was rare for that to happen while playing through the entire beta. More “special effects” would certainly help and we’d like to see a lot better details on the monsters and NPCs in the game.
Suggestion Two: Make Act I (or all acts?) Longer
Diablo 3 - Delayed to 2012
The part Act One we played through, purportedly the first third of the act, was extremely short. While we understand we are playing the first iteration of the beta for the game, this portion of Act One was definitely on the short side and could be played through (if you know what you are doing) within an hour. It’s unfortunate to think that if all acts are equal and Diablo III is only going to ship with four or five acts (rumors sometimes say seven), that this game might have a fairly short campaign. Doing the math on a four act game, if each act takes roughly an hour (yes, subsequent acts later on *should* take longer) we see that Four Acts multiplied by three hours each is twelve hours total. Frankly, we’re slightly worried that Blizzard is banking on the “replayability” factor for the game and short-changing the single player story mode and forcing the player to play through the same story two or three times (at higher modes of difficulty) to get the full experience, coupled with what looks like a lot of multiplayer modes. We hope playing through the first time on Story Mode doesn’t take 5-10 hours … we’re hoping for a 20-30 hour experience at the very least. We don’t think it’s outside the realm of reason to expect something much bigger and grander than the previous edition of this series.
Suggestion Three: Make the Game Scarier
[Spoiler Alert] The entirety of Act One didn’t really impress in terms of being scary or horrifying you in any way … but the game did build nicely once you got on the mission to brave through the Cathedral and fight the Skeleton King. Getting through that level was a lot of fun and it was finally during a boss battle when we were thinking, finally this is feeling like a next generation Diablo game. We finally saw a nice variety of monsters, some of whom appeared out of nowhere. A lot of the fun of playing through the game is to be on edge and tense as you walk through various levels. Having a group of monsters jump out at you and attack is a lot of fun and something we expected a lot of in this beta but didn’t get. What we did see a lot of amounted to running into a gaggle of skeletons or risen dead walk around aimlessly waiting for you to attack – which amounted to no fun at all. Unfortunately, we just didn’t see much of what was really fun in Act One as it stands right now. There was a nice build up to the battle with the final boss of this portion of Act One, but there should have been more of that earlier on. We really think that there should be a big splash in terms of a grandiose battle early on.
Suggestion Four: Make the Game Harder
We fully understand that this is a Beta edition set on Normal mode and like many of you out there, we played through Diablo II countless times and “Normal” mode is pretty much meant to be the starter area. That said, Normal mode really felt like Easy/Noob mode and for anyone that has played Diablo in the past, you’ll shoot through the entire beta section of Act One without even really needing more than one or two health potions. We think that the game isn’t balanced yet for Normal mode since we never ran out of mana at any point in the game or found any mana wells or potions. But on the surface playing through now, the game was super easy to play through on Normal mode.
Suggestion Five: Customizable Characters
As it stands now, your character will level up and have their stats augmented automatically. This takes away from the customizable aspect of other Diablo games of years past. It feels more like WoW does now where you just level up and that’s the end of it, which isn’t really something we hope to see in Diablo. Also you can’t really alter the look, voice, or pretty much anything involving your character outside of the spells or abilities used in your slots. While it looks like there are some “professions” that you can learn (blacksmithing?) we haven’t seen enough to really make us feel attached to characters we create and play with. Some of the one-liners were pretty good though, so we’re hoping for more inclusion of banter.
Overall Assessment
While we have focused on some of Diablo III’s opportunities to improve, there is a heck of a lot to like in the game. There were some good “Oh it is ON!” moments which gives us hope this is all going to be tied together really nicely. There are some good elements and so far we like most (but not all) of the character classes. The point here was to agree with Blizzard’s assessment that the game isn’t ready to ship now as it is and to help give gamers a much more tangible reason as to why since Blizzard Entertainment CEO Mike Morhaime didn’t go into full detail. As weeks go by we’ll still continue to chime in with beta impressions and gameplay videos. However, we just can’t help but think that what we were playing lacked that “Wow Factor” we’re used to from Blizzard titles, basically, it’s a beefed up Diablo II with some WoW elements built in. We’re hoping that future iterations of beta releases give us a lot more.
Sean W. Gibson
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