Diablo III: Reaper of Souls Closed Beta Preview, Part Two
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AusGamers has slapped up the second installment to their multi-part series of articles based on their hands-on time with the Diablo III: Reaper of Souls beta test. This time around, the author focuses on the increased level cap of 70 and how that impacts the game as a whole:
Reaper of Souls, as stated previously, is an expansion providing a new campaign Act to play through in addition to a new character class to play with, the Crusader. It also raises the level cap to 70. More importantly it's an expansion that changes the core game to be able to accommodate the above, because if you take the opening paragraph as the basis for Diablo III character progression, adding a new Act would mean a necessary level cap increase in order to facilitate the minimum three times players would need to play through the entire campaign to reach Level 70.
When creating a new character in Reaper of Souls you'll immediately notice that you can now select and change the difficulty of the game to suit your skill, with the harder difficulties rewarding you accordingly. There are now five difficulties in the game starting with the baseline Normal, going all the way up to Master. The final difficulty level Torment, becomes accessible after you reach Level 70 and features its own tiered monster difficulty slider. Each individual increase in difficulty not only adds to the experience you gain but also to the rate of item and gold drops, and in doing so makes it more fun and rewarding to play the game at its most challenging difficulty level. The game, even in beta, scales the difficulty remarkably well but whenever things get too tough you are still able to drop the difficulty at any point, an option that is a clear winner over forcing you to get better items before going any further.
By handing over the difficulty choice to the player this means that you can choose to play the game at a leisurely pace where monsters pose no real threat but are fun to dispatch one after another. Or you could play at a white-knuckled pace, with a screen full or coloured elite enemies, fire trails, ice explosions, and pools of deadly poison. The fact that this can be achieved at any character level is exciting, which makes the idea of starting a new character in a different class -- for veteran players especially -- an enticing proposition. This means that Reaper of Souls can provide a challenging experience right from Level 1.
