I figure my first character will be used strictly for magic finding as I was the case for D2 to fuel my other characters with items and wealth. However, now that I see there will be a fairly large cooldown on Teleport even with the passive 20% reduction through Evocation, I'll have to go over each tree and watch some videos in the future in the event that I am not in the beta.

One thing to keep in mind is that it seems all armor can be worn by every character assuming they met the level requirement. By that I mean, my wizard can wear chain, as can my barbarian, as can my monk. However, the appearance of the armor always changed to suit the class. So for example, my wizard playthrough has a relatively highly leveled up blacksmith, so I craft everything with her, then put it in my stash, and every character can pull the gear out and equip it, and the stats of the armor didn't seem to change. Makes me wonder why the status of crafters in the game aren't persistent across characters.

Weapons were different, and there were obviously some weapons that could only be worn by certain classes. However, things were still very flexible. My wizard could wield a 2h sword, or a hatchet/shield combo, or a wand and an orb. There were only a few things like hand wraps for monks, and shivs for demon hunters that were very class specific.

Indeed. The 3.5 hours was only for what was available in the beta. It *might* be the entire first act, but I suspect it's probably a subset of the first act.

I'm in the beta. For those of you that were lucky enough to play the game at Blizzcon over the last couple of years, it's close to the same playthrough. Ends with the same boss, etc... It's about 3 hours of gameplay depending on how fast/thorough you are. There was some cool stuff I hadn't seen before, such as the starting town. It was interesting to see the blacksmith upgrade process in action.

I thoroughly enjoyed my monk playthrough of the beta last night. Looking forward to playing through with another class tonight.

I'd have to question the motive behind that feature though which is really what this is all about. Putting something "always on" just for the sake of doing so is problematic.

Right, and I totally agree that requiring online in a game that has zero online components is just asshattery. I hate when DRM gets in the way of my game playing, always.

My point is, that when there are enough features in the game that are either benefited by, or can only done with an online-only connection, and those features to me as a player outweigh my ability to play offline, I'm much more ok with it.

The line between single player and multiplayer is being blurred more and more. I love this change. I love games like Demon's Souls. I hope this continues, and if it means I can't play offline, I'm fine with that.

Actually Demon Souls is the perfect example of how always-on connectivity should be implemented. The gameplay experience is definitely enhanced by being online but it also falls back gracefully to an offline state in case of connectivity issues, server problems or etc. That's how they should all do it.

But look at it from the game makers perspective. I have x amount of time to put in y "always on" feature. If I have to always make sure there is a safe/clean way to disable y on non-online machines, that's time that directly comes out of feature z. You are basically putting in a mechanism to lessen the experience for some of your player-base. Not only that, but because developers are spending time on lessening the experience and not working on feature z, the online players are being hurt as well. At some point you just have to say, "eff it. This is an online only game." The value added for offline play is just not worth the opportunity cost.

I'll step into the hornet's nest and play devil's advocate. I look at games like Demon's Souls. That's for all intents and purposes a single player game, where the passive multiplayer connection really enhanced the game. Perhaps not an ideal example, as you can play through disconnected as well, but in my opinion the experience is lessened. In the case of Diablo 3, I can see how always having a stocked auction house can be beneficial. But more then that, if "always on" connectivity in that game means that I don't get f'ed over by item dupers, hex editors, etc then I'm all for it. It's all a matter of net gain to me as a player. If the number of neat features that require an "always on" experience outweigh the inconvenience of not being able to play the game on an airplane, I'll buy the game.

That said... I never try to play games on an airplane. So I don't value offline play all that much.

you are actually running with that line of reasoning? thats how you are understanding this?

Thank you for saving me time. I was going to write a ramble about how silly his line of thought was. You did with far fewer characters.

Yes please!

It's sort of a weird line developers have to walk. We did numerous things like that in our games and our forums were filled with rage about bugs (that were put there intentionally by us to combat piraters), etc... and I wonder if in the end it really helped us.

The pirates experience is certainly lessened, which makes me smile, but at the same time, the rage on the forums certainly has a huge potential to turn off potential real customers. And, should a pirate deem to spend money on a future game, it seems unlikely they would spend it on a title made by the developer that released such a buggy game(in their experience, because of the intentionally placed pirate bugs).

I don't have any numbers to prove/disprove my theories, but it does frequently make me wonder. It seems like the only way this sort of thing can benefit the dev is to make sure that everyone knows that these bugs are a direct consequence of pirating the game. This seems like a nearly impossible task. Posting on a forum will only reach a small percentage of the piraters.

Just finished a two hour 4 player coop session. Didn't want to put it down, but life duties called. Quite possibly the most co-op fun I've ever had. We were busting up laughing the entire time. Discovering new spells (and accidentally killing your buddies while doing it) was very intriguing. It seems like there are a LOT of different spells. 8 elements plus 3 ways to cast each spell... and element order seems to matter. This will keep us entertained for quite a while.

Message to Brad: Them maybe you shouldn't have released it until it didn't require "post-release support". Moron.

I think that obviously he'd agree with you now. He's admitted in the past to making that mistake, and genuinely thinking the game was ready, before it really was.

As a developer, I can understand. When you are developing a game for so long, you tend to acquire tunnel vision. You tend to overlook the flaws subconsciously and only see the good parts of the game. Which is why outside opinion is so crucial during development. The beta for this game was a mess, and if there is a real criticism to be laid on stardock, it's not listening to the beta feedback they were getting. I don't blame him for thinking his game was more done then it really was.

At anyrate, I think it's admirable, if not peculiar they are dedicating this much support to the game. I'm not sure from a business standpoint it really makes sense, since the offended users have already gone and moved on.

As someone who always kind of liked Elemental, even with the flaws, this is great news.

Also very sad Greg died. He was a brilliant comedian. It's a shame he never hit a wider audience.

The timed mission thing with limited saves was my biggest frustration as well... until I stopped trying to be perfect at the game.

Seriously, the game gets infinitely better when you stop trying to play it like a checklist, and instead, just have fun until the times up. Once you have died a ton, started over a couple of times, and are leveled and are familiar with all the different timed events, THEN you can try and be perfect. The people that try to ace this game on the first run-through are the ones that have a miserable experience. It's sort of like trying to race through a Final Fantasy game. You might be able to do it, but the experience is so much better if you take your time.

Out of curiosity, who do you think IS the number 2 digital distributor?

I wouldn't at all be surprised if it was Impulse. Granted, the size difference between first and second place is probably huge, but I struggle to come up with a competitor that's bigger then Impulse.

Looks neat. Haven't heard of it before. I dig a good adventure game. It's been far too long.

"L4D3 will be released in Nov 2010"

That's the first, the second is, "L4D4 will be released in October 2010."

The third will be, "We've cancelled the Half-Life franchise, we are focusing our efforts on continually putting L4D in new boxes with incremental numbers."

Seriously, I love Valve, I do. I think all gamers do. But we are all dying for something HL related, and it seems like they are everywhere but there.

I've played it a bit since release, and a fair bit during the beta.

There are a few oddities. It seems like they took out the ability to create your own nation, which is a shame since all the customizability is what I loved in the beta and the game balance seems to be way off on anything other then the "Epic" gameplay speed, which isn't the default speed.

Aside from a couple of minor gripes, I've loved the game so far. I'm hoping as I dive deeper it gets more interesting. Truth be told, I bought this before I knew anything about it purely because Stardock made it, and they've never let me down.

Looks good! I loved the original.

Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory is an exceptional LAN game. The amount of time I've put into that game is absurd.

It managed to make leveling work and awesome in a multiplayer game. I can't think of any other game that's done it, let alone done it well. (My memory has been known to suck however.)

Definitely not a release since they just released it to 25 people as a very early alpha test.

I'm guessing it's a wider-alpha begin date announcement to pre-order people.