I was able to play the Diablo III Open Beta that was only available last weekend. All you need to do is create or login your active Battle.net account and download the beta client. Although 2 days of testing was not enough, I did managed to get an impression of the gameplay.

At a first glance you’ll see that the graphics of the game is a bit cartoonish or somewhat similar that from World of Warcraft. Although they still remain it in a fixed isometric view, you still cannot adjust the camera angle, but you now can zoom in your character during the game, a helpful feature when taking screenshots or even capturing video footage.

Audio wise, the ambiance and music still give that eerie and dark feel to the game, there are now more voice overs in the game, and the voice acting is really good.

Now for the gameplay, it is nice that Blizzard still follows the if-it-ain’t-broken-don’t-fix-it formula, the core gameplay is still the same, but Blizzard made some tweaks in the game. Stat points are now evenly distributed according to character classes, skills can be acquired in certain level progressions and they won’t upgraded with skill points like from before, instead you can customize your skills with certain runes,  you will be able to unlock more runes as your level progresses giving more variety on your skills.

A new equipment crafting is introduced in Diablo 3, you can gather materials by dismantling any equipment with stat bonus that you found in the game,you can also invest money to increase crafting level to open more varieties of equipment to be crafted.

The best feature in the game is the multiplayer, up to four players can play in a single game, the same feature from the previous game.

Since we already showed the good stuff, now here’s the bad part; as you know Diablo 3 is required to have a constant internet connection, even on single player. This can be bad as in some cases you have a poor internet connection or there are latency issues on the server, you’ll be experiencing lags and delays on your gameplay (whether it’s on singleplayer or multiplayer) and players who only after the single player mode (let’s say some of them don’t have internet connections at home) will be disappointed with the internet connection requirement.

So overall if you love action RPGs and/or you are a long-time Diablo fan, then you should definitely get this, but if you don’t have an internet connection or a slow connection or if you don’t like having to connect to the internet while playing single player mode, you should avoid getting this. Diablo 3 is scheduled to release on May 15, 2012. Check out how to pre-order the game

You can check out our gameplay footage on the Diablo  3 Beta.