So, how are you guys liking the full release of Diablo III? Aside from some initial realm stability tech problems, it seemed like the launch went pretty well. Do you feel differently about the game now that you’ve put in 4 or 6 or 10 or 12 hours, beyond the limited Beta content?

This article contains no spoilers. There aren’t any spoilers in terms of plot details or the like in the screenshots, but most of them show things that haven’t been seen thus far in Blizzard released media, so if you want to see every area for the first time with your own eyes, don’t click to view them bigger.

Treasure Goblin trail.

As I type this it’s been 22 hours since the Asian realm went online, 15 hours since the European one, and 6 hours since the US server. I started playing with Elly shortly after the EU server went up, and so far I’ve put in about 10 hours, all with a Wizard who is now level 22.

I started playing in a two-person game with Elly on our live stream about 90 minutes after the EU servers went up, played about 5 hours straight then, put in another hour after Elly crashed, and then just did about 3 more after a break for dinner and decompressing. In total I’ve put in about 9 hours of non-rushing play time, and my Wizard is level 23 and most of the way through Act Two.

This article contains a variety of quick observations and general pro/con comments (mostly pro), without going into any specifics that might be spoilery. You can read assured of not ruining your first play through.

General Impressions

I’m very impressed, on the whole. The game is much deeper and larger and more varied (there’s an amazing amount and variety of dungeon tile sets) and more difficult than I’d expected, and certainly more than the training wheels Beta content led me to believe. If Diablo 3 hadn’t been so long and widely-anticipated, I’d say that Blizzard choose poorly by only including early Act One in the beta (and the Guest Pass/demo), since that content is by far the least interesting material in the game.

Elly and I went long enough in our first session that we were both getting a little worn down and exhausted from hunger, so it felt tiring and grindy at the end. But after I logged out and cleared my head, and starting making some dinner while sipping some champagne (if not on D3′s launch night, then when?), I found myself thinking about the game, about what I’d done, about the areas I’d seen, about how awesome the end of Act One and the start of Act Two looked, and I found found myself laughing — and not entirely from three quickly-sipped glasses of bubbly!

Once I had some time to reflect, and wasn’t pressing grimly onwards at the end of a too-long play session, I could remember and evaluate the depth and variety of the play experience, and think about what it promised for the rest of the game. (Which I’d hardly scratched the surface of.) And that made me happy. (Only for a moment, though, I swear. I got right over it.)

The happy was mixed with relief; relief that this game I’ve spent so many years working to support, and building a community for, and writing about… doesn’t suck. Not only that, but it looks like it’ll be really good. Obviously it’s too soon to speak of the end game balance, item slot machine function, build variety, etc, but the actual quality of the content and presentation and structure is excellent.

The attention to detail everywhere is great, the amount of lore and tomes and little side quests and events is awesome, the writing and variety of character types and dialogues is good (for a video game), the monster types and varieties and assortments and abilities, and level designs change constantly and are nicely-varied and interspersed. The world feels fairly real as well, and big — you don’t (entirely) get that sense that’s common to games and bad movies that your character is the only *real* person in the whole world, and that everyone else exists solely to provide you with an obstacle or a tool on your mission.

The difficulty and speed of action is really well done. Even in the early going Elly and I noticed that things were a lot hairier than in the beta; we had about 33% more monsters than we expected in the early areas, especially the Weeping Hollow and the Crypts, and while it wasn’t exactly “hard” up to that point, it certainly got real once we reached the Field of Misery just past the Skeleton King, and the next levels after that were challenging. We even managed to die, largely through carelessness, on the last surface area of Act One to a boss pack of Beasts. Their charge attacks hit for a good 40% of a character’s health at that point in the game, and when four of them charge at once… well let’s just say you need to not offer a stationary target for more than a second when such enemies have you in visual range.

The difficulty increased considerably at the start of Act Two; the monsters dealt a lot more damage, they had new types of attacks, sneakier movement styles, and they had a lot more hit points so they weren’t dying as easily.

Click through for more on items and the economy, monsters, and a few other quick hits, and it remains spoiler free. (Everyone hurry up and get through the game so we can talk about all the monsters and skills and strategy and stuff w/o spoiling things!)