Diablo II Beta Signup - Opened Today (4/4/01)

[Guyver]

Did you signup?

I know I did...

Guyver

[Kruzin]

I will now.
From what I understand, it will be a random drawing on who gets to test the x-pak. Might as well get my chance in

[cerb]

Yet again, for those of us that live outside of the continent of North America, we have to sit and wait for our turn.

Oh, well. Guess I'll have to put up with playing Black and White in the mean time.

[cerb]

I got in on the stress test for D2 when they finally decided to get around to us. Pity the actual game came out only about a fortnight after the stress test started here, and the server we got to play on had pings that occasionally got as low as 1500ms. :P

[az]

hey they'll be adding new servers to the realms and start a second asia realm, so all our pings are belong to us again

sadly i'll not be able to play at 800x600... my system barely manages 640x480

AZ

[Paulr]

How many of you guys really thought that Diablo II was a good game?
I just got really annoyed with it.
After all that waiting, all that expectation the game eventually hit the shelves optimised for a dying API (Glide) and graphics/resolution that were top of the range some 18 months prior.
The game itself played well enough, but after completing it I haven't been compelled to go back and play again, even with other characters.
With the original Diablo I went back and played again and again, taking each character through each level of difficulty, D2 has never made me want to do that.

[Scytale]

They may set up us the server, but all your ping are still belong to everyone. I don't see anyone going to abandon their lvl 80+ characters. Maybe if Blizz would have decided to implement cross realm transfer.

Anyway, no xpack beta testing for me though. Bloody racists.

[Scytale]

Paulr, the game runs fine on a G400 and although 640x480 I think it looks very decent. It may not be perfect but neither am I, so we have a nice matchup there.

[az]

Well, since the expansion will feature 800x600 optionally, the graphical aspect should improve a little... but you're right Paulr, the game just failed to live up to my expectations, i think mainly because it was too bright, played very choppy on my system, i knew everything about it before it was even released (jarulf's guide did ruin d1 for me - shoulda learned from that experience), annoying people annoyingly hunting for exp while annoying me, and lack of good moosic/sfx... and well.. d1 looked... crisper

i'm sad to say this game wasn't half as good as it could have been, given the idea and the team behind it...

AZ

[az]

I must admit I still play it sometimes, even though 10 fps (with occasional drops to 1 frame every 3 seconds and peaks at 15 fps ) are sometimes a pain in the (_!_)

But i guess it's just not fair to judge d2's performance on a p183MMX w/ 64MB EDO and a Millennium 1...

So maybe I'll play more this summer after the xpack is out and i have a new system...

The one really fine thing about every Blizzard computer game is Battle.Net - their games wouldn't be worth half that without it IMO... And up to d2 they all had that special something... I hope they manage to give us this something with the xpack

AZ

[cerb]

D2 ran fine on my system, even using Hardware D3D (that perspective thing made me giddy at first, but I rather liked it in the end)

I thought the gameplay was pretty good, but the code was very poor at times. I used to play at work with a couple of other guys across a lan. I had a faster pc (athlon 700 compared to their celeron 500's) so I ran as the server, and there were times when I basically lagged out and was killed because I couldn't do anything! It was all to do with loading new rooms/items/enemies - we'd go through a portal, start walking around the room and then bang! I'd freeze, but the other guys wouldn't notice anything. Was rather frustrating. :/

800x600 would be nice, although I still play games like Q3A at 640x480, so I don't mind that res so much.

I don't know if the Expansion Pack will get played among my friends as much now, due to Black & White being as good as it is. Plus with Tribes 2 out, as well as Team Arena, it's going to be pretty tough for Blizzard this time around.

Wish they'd hurry up with Warcraft3, though.

[Paulr]

I must admit Diablo II was a game the G400's could be proud of.
When D2 hit the shelves, within hours people were posting about choppy performance, game slowing to a crawl etc.
I never saw this once with my G400MAX - not ever.
I'm convinced it was an NVidia issue, the 3DFX & Matrox owners didn't seem to have an issue.
But at the end of the day, 640x480 - what were they thinking of!!

[Guyver]

Hmmm,

Tough croud...

A group from work still play this regularly every Wednesday night. We've each tried all characters, and played it through to nightmare mode. Now we are all playing through nigthmare mode. There are 5 of us, and we still enjoy discussing it the next day.

The nice thing, is that it runs reasonably well on a mix of systems, with a mix of connect rates - from my gigahertz PIII on cable, to a PII-233 on cable, to a Duron 700 on 33.6, to a 750mhz Athlon on 56k. It just works.

Ah well. That's why there are so many games out there. So that each of us can find what we like.

Guyver