To be honest I am pretty disappointed. I felt that the beta was a little bit ... boring, especially in terms of graphics. Why do all the dungeons in chapter 1 look the same? Why do I keep killing the same monsters? Also, I only took like 3 hours to complete the beta (which was meant to be the full first chapter) ... this is clearly not enough. Especially as there were only 4 quests and not a single side quest.
This and the fact that the difficulty level was ridcolous, really made me think about spending 60 dollars on this game ... and I was a total blizzard game addict up until now!
1. The dungeons were different. My favorite was randomly finding the Den of the Fallen on my Demon Hunter, but the Mass Grave was great as well, on my Witch Doctor. I expected an Unburried, but there was none, sadly.
Also, on every go, the dungeon was a bit different. In my first go, for example, there was a villager in the Cathedral who said something like "Help... It's inside me... INSIDE ME!", and then exploded into a zombie. In my second go there was a dead adventurer who's ghost rose and tried to kill me. Sometimes the random Urn of Souls event triggered, sometimes it didn't. It was different every time. The shape of the dungeons, their names and their amounts were different. What I felt was the same, though, was the types of rare monsters: It seems like there were only Teleporting and Nigthmarish monsters, though I did encounter a horde of Walling bats once.
2. It's not meant to be the first full chapter, at all. It took me 50 minutes with a group of 4 people. Apparently, there is supposed to be much more content in Act 1, at least according to some people. I'm guessing that Act 1 is finding the fallen star and discovering what it actually is(my guess: The other Lord of Hell, the weird one from the Black Soulstone cinematic).
3. We were locked to "normal" difficulty. I'd imagine "Nigthmare" and "Hell" to be a little more difficult. To be honest, D2 on Normal difficulty was also ridiculously easy, and there you could actually spam potions. Here, you cannot. Also, we've only seen the very start of the game; It might get more difficult as you encounter further bosses.
Also, this was a stress test, not free gameplay for you to enjoy. You liked it? Good. You didn't like it? Don't go bitching about it, because that wasn't the point at all. The point was to check how much their servers could handle, to prepare for release.
Anyway, I can certainly say that I've had fun in this BETA, though I would appreciate it if they made it more obvious that an item is for a higher level than you before you craft it: E.g, paint it in a red\gray color. I disenchanted all of the items on my 2 previous heroes(level 9 Barbarian and level 12 Witch Doctor) and made myself a crossbow only to realize that there is a difference between a Hand Crossbow and a Crossbow(the latter being two-handed). I felt like a total idiot, but I thought it would be no problem, since you could also craft hand crossbows... Well, TOO BAD! Level 16! Hahas!
I was a level 7 demon hunter at the time, btw. About 5 minutes before the BETA ended.
And there is a mysterious ship in the town xd.
Yeah, I thought that's what takes you to Act 2 when you're done with Act 1.
