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In retrospect, the original Diablo deserves and often received many unofficial titles - game of the year, slayer of social lives, destroyer of diplomas and arch addicter, amongst others. Now Blizzard North are working on the sequel to the ultimate "just-one-more-go" title. To see if the new battle.net servers for Diablo II could hack the inevitable load from countless thousands of players using the service at once, Blizzard decided to release a stress test beta, which we were lucky enough to be involved in. Unlike the previous beta the single player experience was short, online-only and just involved the Barbarian, although there was of course the added bonus of being able to adventure with friends (assuming they were lucky enough to get on the beta too).
Since the primary focus of this beta was on multiplayer we should probably comment on that first. In short, the multiplayer code is nothing short of excellent. On a 56k, gameplay was smooth and responsive with no noticeable lag during our entire session. Initially we inadvertently had a download running in the background and the only affect this seemed to have on the gameplay was a slight delay when shifting weapons around the inventory. Joining in a public game with more players running around felt no slower than when it was just us as a solitary Barbarian. While Diablo II doesn't exactly have as much data to send down the pipe as a game like Quake 3 Arena has, it still seems that Blizzard North have done all they can to make the netplay experience as smooth as possible, which is great.
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