While not still in college myself, I was enjoying the tide of students crying because Blizz is having open beta weekend the week before a lot of people take finals. Made my morning. =)
Seeing a beta test with such a potentially big audience (I'd say that a game as anticipated as D3 would get quite a seizable amount of people participating in an open beta), I would be willing to bet my hat(…) on the fact that we'll see D3 go free to play very, very soon.
With the game due out in three weeks, my guess is there's very little "beta" about this. Anyone have an educated guess when the game is sent to publishers for production? A day after beta ends? Already?<p>I think this is more like a demo or a way to get the game installed on millions of computers so that buying it is as easy as possible (a click away). I don't know about their publishing relationship but perhaps they get a better cut on electronic sales and this definitely helps increase those.<p>That said I'm downloading it now :)
This timing coincides with another open beta – TERA. An 'action' MMORPG that requires active dodging from the player and cursor targeting (instead of tab targeting like most traditional MMOs).<p>Diablo 3 beta will be easily completed in a day, all 5 classes, so TERA is a good second game to play around if you find yourself gobbling up the D3 beta too fast.
They recently released a few developer diaries that are worth watching: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYe_eNG5Cz0" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYe_eNG5Cz0</a><p>It's impressive how much effort is put into a game like that compared to the web/mobile apps I usually build. Tempting, really