Unproductive day so far as I went for a hair cut this morning—the hair dressers is the better part of an hour’s walk away—and then I’ve been watching Day[9]’s Diablo III beta gameplay that replaced the usual StarCraft II Newbie Tuesday yesterday. It looks like a reasonably fun game, and it’s cool to see they’ve kept the basic gameplay model from Diablo II because it was and is so good. Fun to have some of the same sound effects too. Now, Diablo III isn’t a spectator game so it’s hard to judge from here, but it does appear more than a little mindless. Sure you’ll be able to turn up the difficulty, presumably, but it didn’t really feel like Day[9] was adventuring: he was killing monsters but with instant sell from anywhere, infinite town portals and a button called ‘auto-equip’ and things like a ghost telling you to collect three orbs and place them somewhere, it really didn’t feel like action-RPG adventuring, more WoW style adventuring—i.e. rather shallow. Hopefully they’ll improve on that for the game’s release.

Edit 22/ix/2011: Also love the way Day[9] clears out everything before heading on to the next area, making sure he walks over every bit of ground etc.etc., just like I do. HalfLife 2 is a continual stream of breaking open boxes.