Hm, can't really say the game feels more enclosed than D2 did. While overworld levels could be quite large they were also often very empty (act 1 and 2, I'm looking at you...) and very uniform in general appearance despite the supposed randomization; I feel the levels I've seen so far strike a good balance between exploration and level design-driven progress; you don't have to run back and forth TOO much to map out the whole area.
I enjoy the skill system more now that I've hit level 10 and unlocked more stuff. It looks like the game might actually be a lot of fun. I have a mercenary now too, and I enjoy the repertoire the hero and the merc share between them. Overall there's a LOT of speech in here, much more than I expected. The lore is very enjoyable too. Graphics is great on the whole. Could perhaps have been even more detailed, but shit, it's been long enough of a wait as it is!
Only played mage so far. Well, alright then, wizard! The freeze beam is quite effective early on, then it sorta loses its punch once you gain the exploding orb thingy. It's simply a lot more effective to damage several foes at once. The spark spell gets very effective too when you are able to rune it, but before then I prefer to stick with magic missiles.
Overall difficulty goes up and down a lot IMO. When you get towards the graveyard I felt the game was quite hard, but then after saving and quitting for the day and relogging the next day, suddenly I was almost wading through monsters. I'm wondering if my skills hadn't been scaling up properly in strength as I dinged new levels or somesuch! Anyone experienced anything similar?
Anyway, after hitting level 10 and gaining the mercenary, regular monsters became total cake. The skeleton king guy whacked off half my health initially, but I was able to heal up with orbs without too much trouble. That was on the second attempt. First attempt was rudely interrupted by me getting thrown back out to the menus; first time ever that happened. Fortunately there's a checkpoint right outside his chamber, so I hardly lost any progress at all.
His uberdrop contained a yellow polearm, which neither I nor hireling could use... Meh/bah!
I pulverized it and got a Fallen tooth (and some dust or whatsitscalled, I think) out of it.
Mac Diablo 3 is just hopelessly impossible to play on my Macbook. Too friggin' slow! This game absolutely needs Ivy Bridge graphics, or maybe even better to run decently. I whacked all the settings down to lowest except for shadows and clutter, which I kept at second-to-lowest to not turn them off entirely and at 800*600 (lowest rez would go on my Thunderbolt Display at least) screen updates still chugged BAD.
I got some desynch issues too which did not happen on the PC, making me wonder if the game isn't weirdly CPU-constrained too with just a laptop dual core CPU. Could of course just have been a bug with the Mac client; who knows or maybe issues with disk paging. From my experience, OSX is just horribly awful at anything involving disk I/O, and me running full-drive encryption on a 2.5" 5400RPM HDD surely doesn't help either.
Safe to say, I did not play long on the Mac. Just to confirm that it works, and it did; sorta. PC is where it's at, though, with this game. For sure. Still, game drops frames for no apparent reason. Disabling vsynch doesn't help, I just get tearing on top of the drops. Poor optimization I assume, as it happens even when there's absolutely no on-screen action whatsoever. *shrug*
Very much looking forward to the final release, I must say. This game looks like it can REALLY rock, and will probably kill off any wish for me to play WoW for quite a while. ...As well as any other game I suspect!
