Diablo III: Reaper of Souls Hands-on Previews

A trio of new BlizzCon-based previews for Blizzard Entertainment’s Diablo III: Reaper of Souls expansion pack have crept their way onto the web this week, starting with this piece on AusGamers:

I didn’t get much of chance to learn more about the character, or his (or her) background, but I did take a look at one of the new features arriving with RoS, in the game’s Bounties. You get five within each act at the moment, and the five on show for Act One were all related to killing someone, such as (Kill Digger O’Dell) or (Kill Queen Araneae) — on the PC build of the game, I went after the Araneae who is a giant spider. Her lair is also, naturally, filled with varying sizes of other spiders (the smaller ones gave me the most trouble), and it was here I got to really play with a few of the tactics available as the Crusader.

By and large, if you’re a Diablo fan, the Crusader will fit right at home in your ability to play. As mentioned above, they have options for range, crowd control and melee, and so after being overrun the first time through Queen Araneae’s lair by the aforementioned baby spider mob, I took to using the Crusader’s Fist of the Heavens attack, which eats up 30 wrath but also fills an immediate area with a perimeter of balls of light, each of which continues to attack enemies in range for a short amount of time. It’s more of a trap-based attack, but is also good for just slowing down mobs to give you some breathing room — usually to let your Falling Sword cooldown complete, so you can drop the devastating move again to finish the job Fist of the Heavens started.

Followed by Shacknews:

The heavily-armored Crusader wields a mace and shield, with a passive ability that allows him to dual-wield a variety of other weapons. With such an ability, he plays like more of a melee-based tank, able to take loads of punishment while dishing out some major damage. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by large numbers of enemies in Reaper of Souls, which is where the Crusader’s magic proficiency comes in handy. The Triangle button will summon a ghostly fire horse, allowing the Crusader to quickly ride away to safety, while engulfing anything caught in its path in flames. He also has the ability to buff allies with an area-of-effect spell and call upon an elite ground pound attack that dishes out damage to surrounding foes.

As I played through the short 20-minute demo, I couldn’t help but immediately be struck by the PS4’s smooth visual fidelity, as it proudly ran at 60fps and native 1080p. Rundown environments looked gorgeous, as did the effects involving Malthael’s minions turning humans into undead enemies. I quickly became accustomed to the DualShock 4 controls, noticing a smooth transition similar to our initial Diablo 3 PS3 impressions. There was just as much button-mashing of attacks as there would have been with a keyboard, as enemies swarmed me throughout my playthrough.

And Gameplanet:

There’s no poaching or friendly rivalry between the PC and console teams, however. (We constantly find ourselves trying to solve the same problems, independently of one another,) says Day. (Whenever we identify things or find ourselves working on the same areas we combine forces like Captain Planet.)

The expansion also introduces a new class, the Crusader. The character is almost homage to the Diablo II Paladin. (The Crusader is a very much the embodiment of a tank,) continues Day. (The barbarian, in some peoples’ minds, filled that role previously, but only because he was sort of close to it.