Diablo 3 Open Beta Weekend

As you may know it is Open Beta Weekend for Diablo 3 right now, so anyone who wants to try the game out can head onto battle.net and download the client to  try out the game. If you've had any doubts so far about purchasing the game now may be a good time to test it out and see if you like what Blizzard has done with the franchise.

Personally, after having playing the beta a month or so ago, I liked what I saw. The art style is genuine Diablo universe, there's been a nice mash up of the classes, and the spell sets are simplified, yet still seem to be interesting enough to play. The main focus is once again on getting the items you need through various sources like monster drops or chests, but this time there's the third option of crafting your own items through the Blacksmith's workshop, where you can disenchant (or as it's called 'salvage') items for the materials they give and then use those materials to buy items from that particular NPC. You can also upgrade the workshop for a price to get access to better items.

One other difference is the health orbs that pop up every now and again and somewhat relieve the need to stack hundreds of potions at a time. At the same time those orbs pop randomly from enemies and more frequently from bosses, so you can't rely solely on them to be safe in the game.

Lastly the main selling factor for me is the game Lore. It was a dark and enticing story from the beginning, with the first Diablo game, and then with Diablo 2's brilliantly choreographed cinematics and extensive travelling, each Act bringing you to an entirely new world in the game. Since the Beta is actually limited to lvl 13 which pretty much covers 90 minutes of gameplay or the first quest chain in Act 1, you won't be seeing much of that until May the 15th when Diablo 3 is officially released. But for a taster this weekend can help you make up your mind weather you actually want the game or not. 

Blizzard's Don't Ask Don't Tell Policy: Mists of Pandaria Beta

Your take on what a Panda Taster would actually taste like? I'd say sweet and sour. 

World of Warcraft Annual Pass and Mists of Pandaria beta When will access to the beta be available?

There's quite a controversy right now around the World of Warcraft Mists of Pandaria beta Annual Pass deal with regards to the Terms and Conditions of the deal. As you may know part of the contract was that you'd get access to the MoP beta as soon as it was available. Or at least that's what many of us were lead to believe. But does the Annual Pass contract actually say anything about when will you get access to the Pandaria beta?

Here's the part of the contract that deals with the MoP beta access:

Unfortunately the contract never mentions when access to the beta will be granted. It only states that Blizzard will flag your battle.net account so you will automatically receive a beta code.

Understandably a lot of the WoW fan-base has been frustrated with Blizzard's choice to postpone access and release beta codes to Annual Pass holders when it deems fit. According to the official statement the beta will be handed out in waves, according to the age of your World of Warcraft Account and also how early did you sign up for the particular deal.

The fact that screenshots have came out of people with beta access, who don't even have the Annual Pass further aggravates the situation. What do you think. Did Blizzard make a huge mistake with this one?

On a side note people have suggested that if you're running Apple's OS X you stand a better chance of being invited to the beta, regardless of weather you have the pass or not. So if you're running WoW on a Mac go to Battle.net and download the small piece of software that will automatically assess your system specifications and upload them to Blizzard's site.  

WoW: Mists of Pandaria Beta to start soon

According to the Warcraft Facebook page, the World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria beta is going to be starting pretty soon. What's going to happen is, players will be invited in waves, based on how long they've had a WoW account, and also based on how early they got their Annual Pass. As you know everyone with a WoW Annual pass (that is a one year non-suspendable subscription) gets a free mount (Tyrael's Charger), Diablo 3 for free (coming out May 15th) and beta access to Mists of Pandaria.

Battle.net info post 

So log-on to Battle.net and update your system specifications info and check the Warcraft Beta option to make sure you're not overlooked when the time comes to dish out beta codes. You'll need to download a small program that is going to evaluate your graphics card, processor, among other things. As with code giveaways I'm sure there will be plenty to go, but in the meantime your best bet for the Mists of Pandaria Beta, if you don't own an Annual Pass, is to upload your system specifications to Battle.net and hope that your rig is unique enough to warrant Blizzard's attention. 

In the meantime the Non-Disclosure Agreement on the WoW: MoP media event fell so here's some more reading for those who are interested to know what to expect from the early stages of the Beta:

GameTrailers Scarlet Monastery and Scholomance Heroics, the new Zones and class, all stuff I'm going to cover, when I can get my hands on it, which should be within a week or two if we trust Blizzard to not keep us waiting for too long. 

Diablo 3: Armour Sets Preview

With Diablo 3 coming out on the 15th of May, it's time to take a look at the armour sets that will be available in the game. They all look pretty epic, keep in mind that these are dyes of one armour set per class. There is bound to be more options.

In the D3 Beta for example each class of gear comes with a different visual style. That is a studded leather vest looks entirely different from a wizard's robe. There's bound to be more variability in the end-game content but these are the ones that are available for now.

If you want to skip all the recolours, keep on clicking on the right-most thumbnail in the album. You'll get through the list quicker and won't have to see ten versions of the same model.

Ultimately what I'm eager to see in the game is the unique-level gear. I have some fond memories of finding unique items in Diablo 2 that came with their own unique 3D model. Names that come to mind would be Undead Crown, Lidless Wall, the Brain Hew great axe. Some of the best 2D art on the items was also reserved for the unique-level gear. 

Blizzard Announces Release Date for Diablo 3: Pre-purchase Available

The wait is over! Blizzard has just announced that Diablo 3 will be coming out two months from now. The game is now available for pre-purchase at the Blizzard Store so you can start playing as soon as the servers go live. The official date of the release will be May the 15th.

Battle.net Front Page

Apparently the Anual Pass deal is still available where, if you have an existing World of Warcraft account you can get Diablo 3 for free, if you subscribe for 1 year of World of Warcraft. On top of that with the deal you'll get a Tyrael's Charger mount for all your WoW characters past present and future, and access to Mists of Pandaria Beta as soon as it is available. Take note that if you agree to this deal the payments will be monthly or every six months depending on what you prefer, but the contract cannot be cancelled or frozen for any reason. 

The news about Diablo 3 coming out comes shortly after Bethesda started a countdown to a major announcement on their web-site, so Blizzard's CEO came out with the statement, I guess in a hope to 1up Bethesda's efforts. After all two equally expected RPG's coming out at the same time, would be a disaster for Blizzard. This further fuels our expectations that Bethesda might be cooking up something really amazing. Or it might be just that Blizzard's acting paranoid. Either way here's the statement about the Diablo 3 Release Date from Blizzard's CEO, Mike Morhaime:

"After many years of hard work by our development team and months of beta testing by hundreds of thousands of dedicated players around the world, we're now in the homestretch.  We look forward to putting the final polish on Diablo III over the next two months and delivering the ultimate action-RPG experience to gamers worldwide starting on May 15."

The Diablo 3 game client is already available for download.

Indeed it has been almost twelve years since the Diablo 2 came out. It's been a long wait, but based on my
experience from the Diablo 3 Beta it might have been well worth it. As I've mentioned before the game is going to come out without the PvP arenas, since the developer didn't want to delay the game any further. The Player vs Player capabilities will be patched into the game at a later point in time.

Diablo III Will Come out Without PvP Around June

Blizzard just announced that Diablo 3 is going to come out without the PvP arenas to avoid any more delays in the release of the game. According to the developer, the PvP is just not good enough yet. So they're going to be patching all of the arena maps into the game after some time. That said, Blizzard hasn't even announced an official release date yet, all they're saying is they're looking to the second quarter of this year. That means Diablo 3 should come out sometime in June 2012.

The news once again comes from GametTrailers Facebook Page and SideMission Some more speculation on the actual release date: Side Mission

To be completely honest, I'm not at all bothered by the news. I've never looked forward to PvP in Diablo, as long as I can play the full single-player campaign.

On a more positive side of Diablo 3 news, yesterday was patch day for Diablo 3 beta, and now the Hardcore Character mode is available for testing. If you happen to have the beta you'll need a character who's at least level ten to unlock the mode. As usual when you're creating a Hardcore Character, Blizzard will give you the fair warning that you only have one life and they will not under any circumstances resurrect your hero if it happened to die.

There's also going to be a new difficulty called Inferno, after the usual three - Normal Nightmare and Hell. Now that's something that I'm looking forward to. To access it your character will have to be level capped at 60, while all of the monsters inside will be level 61. For your troubles in Inferno duifficulty you'll get the best gear in-game and the best part is the drop chance of the first act monsters and bosses will be the same as that of the last boss. All enemies being level 61 means that you won't have to grind any particular area, instead you can just replay your favourite parts and still get the best drops.

What to expect from Mists of Pandaria: Preview

What is behind a great MMORPG? Blizzard's World of Warcraft stands tall as the leader on the market for Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games, but is there something that's missing recently? With the Mists of Pandaria expansion that's up and coming in the fall, the outcries of the WoW fan base have been louder than ever. Sure there's always been dissatisfaction among the fans whenever a change has been introduced to the game, but this time it seems the angst has reached an all-time high. So what can we honestly expect from the expansion?



                                             Mists of Pandaria Preview Trailer

Here's a list of the changes:

- new continent in Azeroth
- new race, shared by both the Horde and Allience - Pandaren
- new class - Monk
- a completely new Talents System
- abandoned stats 
- new levels of duifficulty for dungeons
- entirely new Vanity Pet Combat System and random exploration vanity pet encounters

Seems like a lot, but Blizzard has shown a tremendous dedication to putting out new content in a timely manner, when it comes to World of Warcraft. Starting from the last point on the list, the new Pet Combat System is something the several million WoW players have been stupefied by from day one. The associations with Pokemon are inevitable. From the point of view of my current experience of WoW I could never imagine myself standing in the middle of Stormwind, engaged in an epic duel between a Mini Diablo and a Mini Tyrael. But then again I could not imagine myself, back when Wrath of the Lich King first came out, chasing after achievements just for the sake of it. In hindsight I've got a couple 85 characters and one of them has pretty much every achievement that doesn't require raiding. I made World Explorer in a single day, right after I got my Red Drake mount. I've also spent countless hours (unsuccessfully) fishing for a Sea Turtle mount in Northrend.

The Music of Video Games

In the beginning there was 8bit music. There's the Super Mario Brothers theme, forever stuck in my head for one. Any other song I have to take a break to think about, but the Mario music I can bring up in my mind at any point during the day/night. Just think about it and it instantly starts playing. My gaming 'career' started out with coin-slot arcades and NES games and their sounds are going to be forever burned into memory. So let's look at some of the most popular music themes in video games and where they came from? 


Even before Mario came out, there was Pong and Tetris, whose sound was made entirely out of bleeps and beeps with equally simplistic visuals. With the more complex slot machines and the NES, though, came something entirely different - games now had 'themes' and a score, a tune that you could actually whistle to. Later on games would develop more and more complex soundtracks as the technology caught up with the artists.

Nintendo 8-bit: We've already mentioned Mario, but some other games deserve a special notice as well, like Bugs Bunny's Birthday Blowout. Now this is an NES game that was a huge frustration for a lot of people, but what I remember from it was that it was challenging, about as abstract as a Picasso painting, with enemies being in lines of floating orange puffs, cans of soda, coffee cups and drills. The music is a classic example of Disney, and it fits great with the game.

And then the 90s came and brought new and exciting hardware and software opportunities for game developers! Both game visuals and sound would never be the same. 


The Years In-Between: 80s Speed Metal and Heavy Metal FAKK: There's a bit of asynchronicity in that statement. 80s metal in 90s Video Games? More likely than you think. The early 90s computer game scores were mostly melodic and atmospheric backdrops for the gameplay. We've already covered the Diablo music score already in a previous review, so we're just going to skip that one. I'll just say that it's one of the most fitting and simplistic, but still involving music scores I've ever seen in a game. Diablo II follows suit with a classically medieval theme. But that's Blizzard, they like to do things properly. Elsewhere in the gaming industry the situation with music and art in general turns more and more chaotic as the hardware slowly starts to take over the game-design process. Imaginations run wild with the possibilities, and there's more than one mediocre or plain uninspired titles coming out as the will to experiment with the tweaks and tricks of the new technology overpowers the process of actually creating a compelling game. It's no surprise then that the music here varies from anywhere to anything. Despite that right at the beginning of the millennium came one of my all-time favourite games Hitman: Codename 47 with an amazing soundtrack by Jesper Kyd. A couple years later Hitman 2: Silent Assasin added some more of the best quality scores to the video games scene. I've yet to play Contracts or Blood Money, but something tells me I'm going to enjoy them too (Jesper Kyd was hired for the work on the compositions successively in all four games). 


And nowadays they come in special edition cases, with a beefed up price tag along with a DVD of the lead designers talking about the production. World of Warcraft is a fine example of that, since that's been a part of the special edition box-set, ever since the original game came out. 

Chopin (Wikimedia Commons)

Classical Music has been a staple of Japanese media, intended for the Western market, since forever. Or at least since anime... Remember when animes had traditional Japanese scores? Well not-quite anymore, with a few exceptions. Nowadays it's catchy J-Pop themes mostly, but with J-RPGs and more recently MMORPGs it's strictly classical themes, for the purpose of creating a sense for expansiveness, and a feeling of a complete universe in the game. With WoW it's typically epic scores, themed based on the different races of the game. The night elves are characteristically mellow, the dwarves are standard medieval with a pinch of honey mead and a cosy fire, I don't particularly remember anything special about the Draenai space alien music, but I'm sure it matched whatever purple crystal laden settings they had (also space-demons). What's special about WoW is not so much the noteworthiness of it's scores but the way they work perfectly with each different zone, dungeon and battleground. Still some dungeons, especially the ambiance in one populated by owl-like druid things in the Shattrath area, seemed eerily similar to the theme of The Blood Tower from Act I of Diablo 2. Could it be Blizzard reused that one? The high-point of any Blizzard game these days is the tongue-in-cheek references to pop culture, so the music is no exception to that. In the Alliance settlement of Hellfire Peninsula you can listen to an extremely original interpretation of Chopin's Nocturne in C Sharp by Matt Uelmen.


Part 2: Will be coming up shortly!

Blizzard's Diablo: On Cutting to the Chase

Diablo is a Blizzard franchise since 1996, around the same time that Star Craft came out and a few years after Warcraft 2: Tides of Darkness. What makes it a memorable game is not so much the novelty, but the execution(no pun intended). Like any other Blizzard game, it's a re-discovery of the game-play mechanics of an already popular genre, in typical Blizzard  style less of the role-playing, more of the fun of slashing up enemies. 

The first thing you'll notice when starting up Diablo is the minimalistic interface, no convoluted D&D rules involved in the character creation, no customizable character backgrounds. In fact it's as simple as choosing a character class and a name. Later on you'll be able to assign some points to your character's statistics and skills, but for now don't worry about that. If you've ever played anything like Baldur's Gate or Fallout of the same era, you might be a little disappointed at first, but everything that it lacks in the area, Diablo makes up for in atmosphere and style. The art is heavy and dark, the music is classic medieval lute, whenever you're in the small town that makes up the starting area, and a suspenseful ambiance, when you finally venture into the  catacombs beneath the nearby church.

The story of Diablo revolves around the town of Tristram, which has recently been visited by what appears to be a demonic power, infesting the cathedral and the endless layers of catacombs beneath it with scores of demons. Pieces of  both the overall lore of the world and some personal stories will be revealed to you as you interact with the dozen or so non player characters around the town. There's a blacksmith, an elder who is also a healer, an annoying kid who'll sell you some interesting gear, gathered from who knows where for a reasonable price and a witch, settled in a hut on the outskirts of town. The game itself is based on completing quests for the locals, and most of all hacking and slashing your way through hordes of the various demons and minions of Hell. There are treasure chests to hunt down, ancient scrolls that give you new abilities, and scores of items and artifacts varying from honest to God junk to items that only drop from a specific boss, or as a reward from a quest.

Finally you'll face Diablo himself, after you've trudged through more than a hundred different levels of Catacombs. As you progress deeper and deeper, at first you'll be adventuring in the catacombs of the church itself, then in a mixture of ancient tombs with dirt walls and finally into Hell itself, with alkes of lava and fire demons. Every level, except for Tristram is randomly generated and enemies don't respawn, but in case you feel that you've not quite gathered enough experience for the final battle you can always restart the game from the character screen which will randomise the levels you've already covered and reset the enemies. Additionally to the main chapel entrance every now and again as you go deeper you'll find a shortcut that conveniently leads you back to the surface, only at a different location, one may be hidden in the graveyard next to the chapel, another may be in a bunch of rocks nearby, and they serve as a sort of check-points that make it a little bit easier to go back to town whenever you need to re-stock on potions, identify a magic item, repair your gear, etc. There's also portal scrolls that will bring you back to the town from any point in the game, and then back to where you left off in the dungeon, before they close up behind you.

All in all the game feels epic from end to end. Weather you choose the warrior, rogue or sorcerer class, you won't have to worry about micro-managing your character, and that only leaves the satisfaction of plowing through hordes of skeletons, zombies and demons. Still, both the first and second Diablo games have a fascinating and rich lore, further expanded by the book series, written by various authors throughout the years. Weather you actually enjoy that sort of writing is another thing entirely. Personally I've never been a fan of video game novels, but I've met plenty of people who've read the series start to finish and can tell you exactly what happens to each King, Prince and Demon in the tale.

Diablo has been appraised universally as one of the most popular RPG's of all times. The third edition of the game is currently in invitation-only Beta and is expected to be released sometime in early 2012. The original game is available for download on the Blizzard Store for a token price.