This weekend was the Beta Open Weekend, or the Stress Test Weekend. This fact is already interesting. I do not know any other company with any similar initiative. This is not only great for them as a mechanism to check how good their servers can cope with the game and some hundreds or thousand players, but also because this works a demo. I would love to know how many players made the pre-order during this weekend. I am one of those.
There are lots of critics about this game. Most of them are funded. The characters don’t seem as dark or scary, but more comic-like, the magic system is more simple, the inventory items are smaller with less detail, etc. I defend that we need to be open to new approaches to the same game. If it is all similar, just an enhanced version with new enemies and new characters, that doesn’t get that interesting (my opinion).
We expect some issues to improve in the final release, but we can’t expect much changes.
I didn’t play much, but my main complains are that for two times that the game returned me a black screen only with a cursor when exiting (Mac OS X), and that it doesn’t have any logic to have a character (witch doctor) whose primary weapon is a jar full of spiders. And, as far as I could dig, I can’t have a standard weapon instead of those “magic” weapons. But probably I didn’t dig enough.
Now, waiting for the release in May.