Risen Evil

I was surprised to see that Blizzard had done something that they had never done before this past weekend: hold an open beta (abeit temporary, but open nonetheless). Even better, the open beta was for Diablo 3, one of the most anticipated games of all time, in my opinion. YEAH!

So, now that I'm ready (no, I didn't forget), let's talk about it. I'll say before I mention anything that I have never played either previous Diablo game or any expansion, so forgive my noobiness.

The 5 available classes to choose are the Barbarian, Demon Hunter, Monk, Witch Doctor, and Wizard. Of these, I had time to try out three of them.

The Demon Hunter was probably the class I played the least of the three. They remind me a lot of the Archer from Gauntlet (hell, this entire game reminds me of Gauntlet, but with more RPG thrown in). For the few levels I played, I could fire bolts from my crossbow and use a special ability with left click that chained to multiple enemies. Even at low levels, this game was surprising me with how cool some of the abilities were right off the bat.

The Wizard I played a bit more, but sadly I'd say I didn't play him enough. A couple friends that joined me playing the game were able to cast large area spells and shoot what appeared to be black holes in a line in front of them. Other spells included an ice beam that you could channel as long as your power lasted, a wand blast, and a close-range group of electric charges. Spellcasters really interested me the most in this game, as they have an incredibly wide variety of magic in their arsenal compared to the classes of World of Warcraft (though to be fair only having 5 classes with all the magic in WoW would be pretty boring compared to the soon-to-be 11)

The Witch Doctor, on the other hand, I played the most. Not only did he have an area slow effect that slowly did damage and a blowgun with darts, he attacks his enemies by throwing pottery at them with spiders inside. Let me repeat that: He attacks his foes by THROWING CLAY POTS THAT CONTAIN SPIDERS AT THEM. Awesome. I was able to reach the first rune on a couple abilities as well, allowing me to augment my spider pots to have leaping spiders that can attack opponents further away from them, or to allow my gun to shoot 3 darts at a time instead of 1. Every ability in the game has several runes like this that can customize them to your playstyle in thousands of ways.

As far as the story and lore goes, again, I haven't played the previous games, but any game that involves annihilating the undead and destroying demons is more than enough for me to try. I did pick up that there is something apparently horrible going on underneath a cathedral that originally imprisioned Diablo, one of the 3 prime evils, and while I have heard that the player killed him in a previous game, something is still going down.

From what little I played of this game, I'm very impressed. Each game blizzard makes is well worth the wait, and this one is seemingly no different. I'm looking forward to May 15th, as should everyone else who's anxious to explode some minions of hell.