Ok I'm finally done with the early access beta. All beta rewards completed.
Played for about 18 hours in total over the weekend.
Beta connectivity/login issues:
After the beta went live, their game login/queue mechanism was messed up where folks were put on queues for more than an hour. Adding to that was the frequent disconnections and getting punished further by lining up at the dreaded queue again. At some point I had 108 minutes of waiting to just get into the game's main menu where you select/create characters. Further, you have another queue to get into a game "session" which was comparatively better. Things were back to normal with < 1 minute queue timings (or instant) from the end of day 1. I hope Blizzard has learnt the lesson and will plan accordingly for the public beta next week as there will be tons of players trying to login.
Positives:
- The first thing that comes to my mind is the grim and eerie environment. Loved this!
- The map is huge. The beta gives limited access to quests in the first area (Fractured Peaks) but there is still much to explore and there are plenty of world events and side quests to spend time on. You will not be bored.
- BGM and sound effects were amazing! The death animations + sound effects are done well.
- Combat is great and killing quest bosses/world boss (Ashava) were not a cake walk. Died few times and had to strategically plan. Blizzard would announce world boss spawn timings for the weekend session.
- Drops are well balanced. I got about 4 legendaries in 18 hours, items for other classes were less than 10% dropped, which is good. Was able to steadily build the character.
- Skill tree is exhaustive, distribution is good and manageable.
- I did not party much but interaction with random players, trading, emoting were nice.
- Tons of item transmogrifications and character customizations (appearances)
Negatives:
- Bugs are expected as it is beta, so there were frequent disconnections, getting kicked out when trying to return to town (loading screen and gets out), some areas were buggy and not accessible.
- This is more of a hassle than negative. Mounts were unavailable for the beta. Although you'll have access to the stable and its master, cannot buy a mount. So had to walk a lot from place to place, even with waypoints.
- Story (from whatever revealed so far) has some twists in place but I was able to guess many things.
There is still so much more, so I'm looking forward to the full release!
Here are some screenshots. Meet Scarlet the Sorceress.
