I got into the beta back in patch 13, and the first thing I did was sit my girlfriend down to play while I quietly watched and took notes. As a bit of background, she has played a bit of D2 with me, but has never made it past act 3 on normal difficulty. She does play a few other games on her iPad, but mostly of the take-care-of-a-pretty-horse variety. Also, she is not a native English speaker.
She chose the female monk and went to it. The first thing she mentioned was how much easier it was to know where she was going, and what she was supposed to do. She liked having the map on the screen and having the quest prompts ticking off as she completed them.
As soon as she got a few skills going (especially Lashing Tail Kick) she started loving smashing monsters. I was interested to find her saying phrases that were exactly in line with Jay Wilson's statements early on in development. At one point she said, "Ooooh, I'm strong!" She also mentioned at one point that she would play the game even if I wasn't there. My favorite quote though was when she encountered the little demon imps and in her sweet little voice said, "Come here babies so I can kill you."
Afterwards, I talked to her about how it felt and especially how it compared to Diablo 2. One of the first things she said was that she felt "powerful" in game. She also expressed that in D2, she never really knew what was going on, why she was doing what she was doing, and where she was supposed to go, but that in D3, she always understood what she was doing. We also talked about stat and skill allocation differences, and that really helped me to understand many of the D3 development decisions. She was able to pick up the game and play it without spending a lot of time reading or feeling confused.
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Now a few notes from my perspective.
After I played the game for myself, I became considerably less concerned about some of the things that I found annoying while watching her play. As a spectator, I found the on-screen quest information to be a bit obtrusive, and I was very distracted by the pop-up "massive blow" kill counters. However, as a player, I found both of these to be far less problematic, though I would still very much like to be able to turn the latter off.
Due to a surprising (and somewhat disheartening) number of technical hurdles and bugs (who wrote that launcher, yikes!), and to my pretty busy schedule, I haven't played as much as I would like. I can say though that both melee characters a lot of fun to play. I expected the Barbarian to be fun to play, and he did not disappoint. I was hopeful about the Monk beforehand, and after having played him, I would say that he will definitely be one of my favorite characters to play. I found his pacing, style and skills to be very entertaining. I don't think that either my girlfriend or I will ever get tired of Lashing Tail Kicking our enemies faces off.
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tldr:
-the developers were spot on in achieving their goals for bringing in new players, even to the point of getting my girlfriend to use the same phrases to describe the game that the devs have previously used
-barbs and monks are sweet
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- VonGimi
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Last active Fri, Jun, 13 2014 14:30:06
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Someone didn't read the thread huh?
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Thank God.... you hardcores ruined D3 for me so badly. D2 was amazing, D3 was slamming your head against the wall until it busted open... (your head, not the wall). One of my most anticipating games ever and it was completely ruined due to people with no lives crying. I don't think i've ever been so angry with the hardcore community, especially as they cried even more claiming it was still to easy. Clearly they will never be satisfied as they will cry when something is to hard for them to beat (like what happened with Yogg+0 in WoW where the hardcore community literally gave up and cried to blizzard about it being to hard), and than they will cry whenever they beat it claiming it was to easy.