Diablo 3 - Previews @ ActionTrip, Worthplaying

More Diablo III previews from the beta. From ActionTrip:

As I ran through the town I noticed flickering torches, trees swaying the breeze, rats running in the shadows, villagers standing in small groups discussing this plight and soft light glowing from the windows of buildings lining the streets. In short, environmental atmosphere was everywhere. While the graphics themselves were not the sharpest, most detailed to be found in a modern game (even though my resolution was set to max and I was running at 2650 x 1900 resolution) it did not matter as much because so much was going on as I moved about. The town felt alive and I found myself exploring each nook and cranny to see what visual or auditory surprises awaited me.

...and Worthplaying:

The skill system seems built for high-level play, but with the beta limitations, it is harder to tell how it scales. At the beginning of the game with a new character, you only have two skill slots, and at level six, you gain a third. This continues onward to a total of six slots in the endgame. While you may have numerous skills unlocked, you have to equip them in one of your skill slots to use them, and you cannot use any that are not equipped in such a manner. At the beginning, this means that you can control all of your active skills with your left and right mouse buttons, and even at level six, you can play most of the game using nothing more than a two-button mouse and a couple of keyboard keys. If the leveling up changes could feel strange to series fans, the skill slot system feels like a massive departure in that its simplification doesn't always seem better.

What remains to be seen is how the skill slot system scales in high-level play. Diablo 2 had more total skills per class and you could fill your action bar with them, but in actual gameplay, you only used a small handful of them. With six skill slots in Diablo III, the gameplay could come across intact, but that remains to be seen. In addition, there are many early abilities, such as auras, which add useful benefits, but in the early game, you wonder if you really want to "waste" a skill slot on them.