Et preview fra Kotaku.

http://kotaku.com/5340558/diablo-iii-impressions-hands-on-with-the-barbarian

We just played Diablo III. For fifteen painfully brief minutes, our lady Barbarian tore through hordes of Fallen, clicking them back to the Hell they came from. It was good.

The Gamescom (and Blizzcon) demo of Diablo III featured at Blizzard's booth features the three announced classes: Wizard, Barbarian and Witchdoctor, with male and female options for both. I opted for the Barbarian, what I assumed would be the easiest, most familiar introduction to Diablo III. That assumption was correct. Blizzard doesn't seem to have mucked with the successful formula of click, kill and loot in the newest Diablo.

Our short journey started in the desert.

The demo begins in the Sundered Pass, a dusty zone that smacks of Lut Gholein's desert lands in Diablo II. Of course, the deserts in Diablo III look far better than those featured in the previous game, with visible winds carrying clouds of sand across the plains, dust storms kicking up around us. The land is similarly populated with tiny desert creatures, snakes and insects that get trampled underfoot.

Our main quest in this desert land is to head to Alcarnus, as given to us by the lady Asheara, to see just what the hell is going on in that town. Since Diablo's back in town, things in Alcarnus aren't going too well. You know, demons and stuff.

That's what stood between us and Alcarnus—a hellish hot spot we actually never made it too. Instead, we ran into a few side quests. One sent us after the bounty of a man named Husam. The price on his head was high, so we took his head. It really only took one good whack from the maces we were dual-wielding. After some backtalk from Husam, we bludgeoned him until his head popped off.

We started off with some good equipment, two maces, an axe, a shield, plus full armor. We also had an Adventurer's Backpack, which brought our Barbarian's inventory to a cool 28 slots. The inventory screen should look familiar to Diablo fans, but the newest version is far more streamlined. When hovering over unequipped items in your inventory, you'll see a pop up window with that item's vital statistics and the item you currently have equipped in that slot.

That made it a lot easier to see if the leather pants we picked up at one point were better than the "lucky" leather pants we started out with. They were. A right click equipped them, draining our character's luck, but upping her armor.

We were also equipped with two Barbarian skills, Ground Stomp and Battle Cry. The former was hot-keyed to the "2" and, when enabled, stunned everything around the Barbarian. Helpful, when Fallen are surrounding you and Fallen Shamen are tossing fireballs your way. The Battle Cry, on the "1" key, increased our armor class temporarily. If we were playing a multiplayer game, that Battle Cry effect would have been passed on to our party members. But we were doing this quest solo.

The Barbarian's other skill, Cleaver, was mapped to the right mouse button. Click on it, and our lady brute did a two handed attack on two enemies at once, as long as they were side-by-side. Again, handy when surrounded by Fallen and Sand Wasps. Those Sand Wasps really suck, by the way, ejecting a quartet of mini-Wasps at our hero. Nasty.

We ran into a few other nasty things in the desert, the most annoying of which was the Desert Dervish, a spinning tornado of a beast with a strong knock-back attack.

The demo offered a few side quests on our way to Alcarnus. We ran into a "Crazed Miner," who offered us the quest, "A Miner's Gold." All we had to do was defend the miner while he raised a treasure chest via a pulley system. When he started, swarms of Fallen came after him. If we were successful in defending the miner from the swarm, we'd get half the gold. It really wasn't a challenge for the Barbarian, as Ground Stomp made that defense quest a simple task.

After that, we were quickly bested by a massive Fallen attack, as Shamans and other beasts piled upon us. It seemed like the demo ramped up the difficulty quickly when the "Thanks for playing" popped up. We could still play—and revive the dead Barbarian—but a Blizzard rep kicked us off.

From graphics to gameplay to interface adjustments, Blizzard seems to have delivered with Diablo III. The game looks fantastic, dripping with atmospheric detail and gorgeous visual effects. But honestly, it's the user interface changes that are most exciting. Blizzard has made the process of looting and equipping much more efficient, letting the player focus on the action.

We'll have more hands on impressions of Diablo III from Gamescom—and soon from Blizzcon—in the coming days.

Det er så fedt. Giv mig nu det spil!

Camelo og jeg har indset at vi burde have fyldt bilen op med benzin og kørt til Köln i går, så vi selv kunne have gamet Diablo 3! Mon ikke der tages revance næste år, hvis der altså stadig ventes på D3.

Jeg tager med drenge, så koster benzin lige 1/3 mindre.

IGN preview

http://pc.ign.com/articles/101/1015815p1.html

Even though Diablo III is presumably over a year away from a release date, this game absolutely oozes polish. It runs at a silky smooth framerate (at least on the PCs Blizzard brought to Gamescom), the animations of your characters and magical effects and the deaths of enemies are smooth, detailed, and full of character, and the combat gives you a great sense of weight and impact. This was my first time getting to actually play Diablo III, and as a big fan of the previous games, it was very much along the lines of what I was hoping for.

Huge swarms of enemies rushed at me in a desert environment as I chose the Witch Doctor, the Necromancer-like wielder of weird magical arts and summon abilities. To turn monsters into a bloody paste, I had only a limited number of skills, but they all proved useful. I could toss fiery skulls into the air which detonated wherever I happened to hit the attack button, giving them a flexible and welcome range. The explosions also caused a fair deal of area of effect damage, making them ideal for wiping out packs of jittery fallen or skeletons or whatever other kinds of beasts decided to bunch together. With a piercing howl a menacing specter erupts from the Witch Doctor's body, which works to horrify enemies and send them fleeing for a limited time. To my side could be called zombie dogs in battle, which I think we can all agree are the best kind of dogs. Then finally, I could pitch out a corpse spider attack, which causes opponents, when killed, to erupt into ravenous swarms of sickly green arachnids that skitter toward and inflict violence on whatever's near. Using the dogs, corpse spiders, and fire bombs all during the same fight led to some satisfying scenes of destruction.

As tends to be the case in Diablo games and others like it, there are quite a few bad guys to absorb your punishment. I was attacked by hyena-like creatures, misshapen salamanders that popped out from beneath the earth, floating specters capable of unleashing deadly whirlwind attacks, giant demons carrying long jagged swords, four-legged ice mages, toxic bees, fallen guardians who could drive their minions to all attack at once, and slithering lizard people in crypts beneath the sands. The Witch Doctor's posture isn't exactly upright. Instead it's almost comically hunched so that you could mistake him for the gnarled branch of a tree if he wasn't moving. While he didn't seem very powerful with melee, his mana recharged pretty quickly in this build so it was no problem to launch a near constant stream of fire skulls and horrify the area when things got too dangerous.

It took me a few minutes to realize I wasn't spamming potions during all the fighting. I did have a few healing draughts on my hotbar (which, by the way, also accommodates skills, a change from Diablo II I barely even noticed), but in about 20 minutes of play time I only used one. That's because some enemies will seemingly randomly drop health potions on the ground. You don't pick these up. Instead, you just walk over them and they instantly restore your health as well as, to my surprise and delight, the health of my summons. Gold also seemed to be auto-collected from the ground as the Witch Doctor walked over it.

The only real quest in the version I played was to reach a town, which I didn't manage to do. I explored the sandy wastes for a while, admiring the environmental detail until I came across a portal that warped me down into some warrens. Blasting my way through these dark passageways eventually brought me face to face with a named demon who, as you might expect, could absorb more damage than the standard and blue-named other baddies. He dropped a nice yellow headpiece, which I used a scroll to identify and then equipped.

I didn't get a chance to try them out, the barbarian and wizard classes were also playable here. The barbarian's hacking weapons which crackled with visible magic energy seemed to have a solid sense of weight behind them, as if they were actually striking the monsters instead of just passing through them and subtracting a numerical amount. Play with the wizard, on the other hand, was done mostly at range, and seemingly the most effective tactic was sending forth a line of explosive balls of magic energy that traveled in a straight line and detonated upon impact.

It'll be interesting to see what, if anything, Blizzard reveals at Blizzcon about Diablo III, but regardless, things are certainly looking really good for this long awaited title.