Því miður er greinin mín á ensku, en þið getið búist við að þær verði allar þannig.<p>
<br>Greetings, people. I'm the long-time Blizzard fan known as Royal Fool. I happen to run an Icelandic fansite called Blizzard Leikir. Don't know if you're interested, but I might as well show off a bit. =)

Now then, what to say about the Beta? I received it yesterday in a rather fancy FedEx envelope. I quickly admired the golden CD and popped it in my drive and booted up the install. I was surprised how quick it was; only about two-three minutes. After that I booted up the game.

There was no Blizzard logo to greet me, only a straight jump to the game menu. I checked out the options a bit and decided to take advantage of my “über-setup” (Well, only a GF2 card and a 1200 mhz Athlon, but it would do the trick).

Next up was Battle.net. After downloading a quick patch (According to some other testers, they had problems downloading it, but I didn't experience anything of the sort) and continued on to register an account and login. And lo and behold! The new Battle.net interface is simply astounding. Mere screenshots cannot show the graphical quality of the skies in the background, the rolling toolbars and quick-responding channel menus and buttons. Needless to say, I just stared at the interface for a minute or two before going on. I then entered a game (Using Blizzard's match-making feature, which works rather well) and decided to try out the Undead. After a short loading sequence, I was plunged into the game. I greeted my opponent and tried to fiddle with the Undead a bit.

The Undead are a mix of the Zerg and Protoss from StarCraft. They can only build on "blight", (Just like the Zerg slime), but they also summon buildings (Like the Protoss do). They have to haunt mines in order to gather gold from them, which adds another strategic element when expanding your settlements. The Undead also have specific units for mining gold and chopping trees; Acolytes and Ghouls, respectively. However, Ghouls are also adept at fighting, making them very valuable for towns that are starting out.

I'm not going to tell you more about the Undead here, as I really didn't find more out about them in that game. After nearly two hours, my opponent dropped out, and I decided to quit.

You can expect more diaries in the coming days.


Takk fyrir.