Diablo 3 open beta is open. And Beeting.

[Anery]

I have never played a Diablo game, so I went into this without any fan boi spectacles and without any opinion. I was pretty impressed. The SCII engine seen through a totally different type of gameplay is still pretty impressive and that gameplay can be pretty fast paced, perhaps not as fast as Torchlight (my only benchmark) but then the game makes up for that with depth - in its fights, in its skills and in its story.
I played as a Witch Doctor, which was great fun. I was summoning zombie dogs, vomiting burning bats and blowing snot through a straw at my enemies. Everything did die pretty quickly and I was rarely challenged but somebody has mentioned that it was the beta settings down low, which is fair enough.
I think I will probably buy it, maybe not go crazy and get the CE but almost definately pre-order.

[deject]

Honestly I don't really care about Diablo 3 at all. If it turns out to be the game of the century then yeah I'll buy it but nothing that I have seen of it really interests me that much.

[Grimmie]

Deject, have you turned into Buzzmong?

[HereComesPete]

Well I believe the barbarian to be overpowered.

[Mr. Johnson]

The monk punches way too hard, actual monks don't punch anywhere near as hard.

[Roman Totale]

Diablo III Beta Patch 17 – v.0.11.0.9327

General
All characters have been wiped. Items, gold, auctions, achievements, followers, and artisans have also been wiped, and Beta Bucks have been reset to 50.
Cross-game chat is available! Beta participants can now keep in touch with their Real ID and BattleTag friends, no matter which Blizzard game they're playing.
Please note that some restrictions do apply for BattleTag chat:
You can only send BattleTag invites while logged into the Diablo III beta client
You can only receive BattleTag invites while logged into the Diablo III beta client

Bug Fixes
For a full list of documented game and service bugs, please review the Known Issues sticky located in the Beta Bug Report forum.
Players should no longer be desynced from the server after watching or skipping a cut-scene
Projectile spell effects should no longer be invisible when casting them
The Auction House should no longer lag and generate ERROR_1 when attempting to switch currencies
The Auction House should no longer display your amount of Beta Bucks as 0 unless you actually have 0 Beta Bucks

So there.

[deject]

Deject, have you turned into Buzzmong?

you wound me sir!

[HereComesPete]

My characters haven't been wiped. I've run the braburpian through to skelly bloke about six times now to get him to the max level of 13. I'm probably ruining the starting area for myself but they keep giving me more achievements and I can't help but try and get every single one!

[buzzmong]

Deject, have you turned into Buzzmong?

I resent that slight against my character!

*also not excited about D3*

[Dog Pants]

Okay, I've a couple of questions on this before I make my decision whether to pre-order/wait and see/not bother. How many people can play in a multiplayer game? With Left 4 Dead and Magika I was always the fifth person so never got a game. Secondly, is there a way of playing with 5puinkers of different levels? Since we all have varying amounts of free time we can assume we won't all be the same level. If we do have to be to play then I can't see 5punky games happening.

[Roman Totale]

Unfortunately it's only 4 people a game - down from 8 apparently. Not sure on the different levels things though.

[Dog Pants]

If you can pal up that's potentially less of a problem.

[Thompy]

There's no level restriction on grouping as far as I know. You can play at any point in the game as long as you've reach/surpassed that point on any given difficulty. You can therefore play with someone at an earlier point than you, but they can't jump ahead to your point in the game. The story won't be tremendously long (but more than adequate, especially if you bum around town crafting or auctioning housing a lot), so it shouldn't be too much of a barrier. Whether you want to replay part of the story "just" for bashing up monsters with a friend is another question, but that's the whole point of the game to the majority of fans.

Edit: or hmm, top result, says in the snippet "If you want to jump to a later point you need to make or join a game that begins at that point." but I can't find it on the page or anywhere else.

[Joose]

Secondly, is there a way of playing with 5puinkers of different levels? Since we all have varying amounts of free time we can assume we won't all be the same level. If we do have to be to play then I can't see 5punky games happening.

Im not sure on the specifics, but I do remember somewhere in the early days of the beta one of the people reporting on it was saying that they were a much higher level than their mate they were playing with, and it worked well. How exactly, I've no idea. I don't think they went in to detail, so it may be that it "works well" because the high level guy can go around pwning everything and power levelling the lower guy.

[Dog Pants]

If the story isn't long does that mean you're just repeating the same levels over and over though? Also, if I were to play a level 12 character teaming up with someone else's level 18 does that mean that either I'll get battered all the time or that the other guy will rape everything? Neither option is much fun.

[Thompy]

Well, monsters don't scale with levels. If you were high level in the beta, and played through an early quest with that character you would indeed rape things severely.

There are four difficulty levels. It's basically a new game+ as you start the next difficulty with your current character, with all the gear and levels they might have obtain. It's the same story four times though, yes. To die hard fans repeating dungeons over and over to get loot is the main purpose of the game. I can see myself doing it a little bit, probably to get better gear to beat the highest difficulties, but I will bore of it soon enough.