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Can't play the Mists beta right now? How about Diablo III?
If you're having a little trouble with the Mists of Pandaria beta for one reason or another, Blizzard has just announced a hotfix for your issues: the Diablo III open beta weekend is happening from Friday, April 20 to Monday, April 23, closing things up at 10 a.m. PDT. Anyone with an active Battle.net account can sign up, download the client, and make their BattleTag. This open beta weekend looks like a big testing ground for the BattleTags system as well as Diablo III's architecture on a large scale.
Diablo III's opening cinematic revealed
If your jaw hit the floor when you saw Diablo III's Black Soulstone cinematic, then you'll definitely want to check out Blizzard's latest offering. Revealed during the Spike TV video game awards, Diablo III's official opening cinematic slots another piece of the lore puzzle into place. Set before the Black Soulstone video that saw an overwhelmed Leah confronted by demon lord Asmodan's impending apocalypse, the opening cinematic introduces a familiar face as the girl's uncle: Deckard Cain himself. The video sets the scene for the very beginning of the game and is the first thing players will see on launching the game, so thankfully it can't really spoil anything. If this video and the Black Soulstone cinematic are any indication of the cinematic quality we can expect throughout Diablo III, then the game has certainly held onto its roots. For news and updates Skip past the cut to watch the full video, and stay tuned to our weekly Not So Massively column every Monday for news and updates as the game nears release.
Diablo III game designers talk Inferno difficulty and twinking
Diablo III is not an MMO by any stretch of the imagination, but it certainly has some strong online elements like previous installments. It also has a lot of expectations to live up to, several of which are discussed in a recent PC Gamer interview with Wyatt Cheng and Andrew Chambers. Both designers discuss the challenge level of the new Inferno difficulty, which is aimed at max-level characters in good gear who have already completed the Hell difficulty level. They confirm that while it's meant to be brutal, it can be played and beaten solo -- although having a friend won't hurt. And speaking of getting by with a bit of help from one's friends, Cheng and Chambers both agree that twinking out new characters is a time-honored part of the game's tradition; their job as designers requires them to find ways to ensure that twinking is a fun process for players. It's the sort of interview that can leave fans wanting more of the game before it's released -- which ties in nicely to the fact that you can pre-order the Book of Cain (a collection of in-universe lore and artwork) on Amazon right now. And you can even take a look past the break to see what the book looks like.
Is it time to kill the global cooldown?
OK, so I was playing some Diablo III beta last night. Since this is a site that covers World of Warcraft, I'll just say that the little snippet I managed to play through before passing out was such that I could describe it in superlatives. But one of the things I noticed when playing was that the barbarian class plays absolutely perfectly to me. There are attacks that gain you the resource (fury) that you then spend on larger, more punishing attacks. You can spam those fury-gathering attacks; there's nothing limiting you from making them. You could hammer the keyboard all night if you wanted to. And it felt good. This is when I realized that I hate the global cooldown. I guess it's double kudos to Blizzard that it got me to accept the global cooldown for seven years and then got me to despise it with another of its own games. Looking over the list of class abilities not affected by it, I find myself starting to wonder if it even serves a purpose anymore. Or is it just a holdover from the game's original design?
