News | 4/13/2012 at 5:01 PM

Blizzard Gives Away Free Diablo 3 Beta Keys and Shows Off the Barbarian

With only a few weeks away until its release, Blizzard will be initiating another huge release of Diablo III beta keys, giving the lucky beta-testers a chance to play the game before its upcoming May release.

Here was Blizzard’s statement directly from Battle.net:

We’re in the process of sending out 275,000 Diablo III beta invites to our opt-in testers. As it’ll take us a while to notify all the lucky invitees, we recommend heading to your Battle.net Account Management and seeing if you’ve received a Diablo III beta license. If you have, you’re good to go! Download the beta client and use your Battle.net account and password to log in once it’s installed. While you’re logged into your Account Management page though, don’t forget to create your BattleTag. You can choose this permanent account-wide nickname by clicking on the BattleTag “Create one now” link on the left side of your main Battle.net Account page. Choose wisely as there’s no current ability to change it. A BattleTag is required to play Diablo III, and so whether you get into beta or not you should pick one while you’re there.

Keep in mind that with such a large amount of invites for our test hardware we fully expect a strong possibility of stress test issues, such as an inability to log in, disconnections, and potential lag/latency. We’ll also be testing our queuing system, which you may see when attempting to enter a game.

Thank you for your continued help, feedback, and patience as we approach the May 15 release.

Fans have been eagerly awaiting Diablo III’s release, which has been quite a while now. This will be a great way to make the fans happy and test out what the game holds for all of us without keys. Though still in its beta stage, this game should still impress the pants off the pickiest of gamers.

As an added side bonus to your day, a new "Barbarian" class video has just surfaced on the web, showing off just what kind of carnage the character can and will do for you in May. We posted our own "Character Focus: The Barbarian" article discussing the Barbarian's strategies not too long ago (more recently the Demon Hunter class), making this video compliment the article perfectly. Check it out!

This shouldn't be the last of the character videos that will be uploaded, so be sure to check back in with us frequently to see what else might surface. And remember: Diablo III will be releasing come May 15th, so save up your munnies and try out the Barbarian class asap!