My 2 centslike impressions from the beta:
First off; I was mighty curious to satisfy my curiosity that still lingers in my body from the addiction I had, 10 years ago, with D2. D3 is one of those games that I do not want to play because of this 'fear' of the addiction taking hold of my spare time once again, and I do not want that. Even though I am now fucking mature.
So, I can say that it was good to play the beta, because I now longer am curious, and I feel like I am not missing out on anything when I won't buy this game.
See, on one hand, it is almost exactly the same. And I have been there/done that. Even the graphics feel more like an 'update' than a new thing.
I played monk, which had me resting on my left elbow while my eyes glazed away into some deep point in the screen while I still clicked away enemies. The first 10 levels of the monk weren't really fun.
At this point I begin to compare with D2: at my first glance I do not like that you can only have 2 skills on your clicks in D3. Whereas in D2 you could switch between hotkeys. Now of course this is because you will get all of your hotkeys at a later level, and it's a balance thing; you have to choose, etc. WIth all the rationality put aside though, I could not help but FEEL that I missed something.
The Demon Hunter felt more fun, though. Without going into the details, there already is a bit more micro management going on with evasing, rolling, setting traps and choosing which skill to kill which monster with. And I think micromanagement is key to fun. In the beta it is non-existent because of the utter lack of difficulty, I understand that. But they also took out putting points into your character (dex/str/etc). Which I always liked to do, and it just gives the 'next level reached!' a little more satisfaction than 'just' putting a point in a new skill. You got some extra's for it back, blacksmithing, sagecrafting and the runebinding.
So to conclude what the beta felt like: I didn't feel the urge to start new characters. It doesn't feel much different than D2 while playing, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but at this point it almost becomes a question of: do you like this and this? than D2 is for you. Do you like this and this? than play D3. As if they can co-exist along each other without the latter being a big improvement over the other. Just with a few differences in between. I am curious to how the different characters will pan out in the later levels, but I won't find out for myself.
