The greener grass
Sometimes – okay, quite often – I'm rather jealous of my good chums over on the world-conquering PC gaming site/shopping list Rock, Papers, Hot Gun. I enviously eye their devoted millions-strong audience, weighty peer credibility and enormous paycheques, and think "If only Podgamer could have lasted more than three and a half hours without everyone stabbing each other", and other such wistful regrets.
Then I remember that if I was on RPS I'd have had to devote part of my one precious and irreplaceable life to playing Diablo 3, and everything's alright again.
A few of my favourite lines from this morning's Eurogamer coverage:
"What all the Diablo 3 Error messages mean, and what to do about them"
"UK launch video, images, Iain Lee, people in wizard costumes"
"Though the downloader may show 100%, please allow some time for it to fully complete."
"The server is full. This is likely due to high login traffic. The only solution is to keep trying to log in."
"If you're still running into this issue, there may be an error in your foreign language appdata files. Some players have found a workaround, but please be aware the steps they provide are not something we can currently support."
"Error 3004, 3006, 3007, or 300008 – There are a number of possible causes for these errors."
The future of videogaming, there, viewers. No thanks.
Ah well there you are, you’ve made yourself obsolete because no console gamer needs you to tell them how to make the damn thing work ;).
The most terrifying thing about it is that it's not even remotely unexpected. Blizzard have been saying for months that the game would be saddled with this rubbish, and millions of people went out and bought it anyway.
Not only that, but apparently you have to be online all the time to even play the single player version.
Fuck always on DRM. Fuck Blizzard.
Apparently error 300008 is caused by extraneous zeroes.
I'm pleased to see they are spending no effort at all to try and market this to people who have never played Diablo 2. Because that could have only gone one of two ways: irritate me, or tempt me and thus irritate me in the longer term.
What's that, dear paying customer, you'd like to be able to play this game offline? Hahahahahaah! Good one! Don't you know that piracy is evil and killing the industry?
*Meanwhile, back in sanity-ville, hackers work tirelessly to offer a non-broken, internet-drm-disabled version of the game that people would pay to buy, but get it for free instead.*
Click too little, and your mans don't pick up the things and he gets dead.
Click too much and my mouse break.
This games is not doing it for me I am not feeling it.
@Lenny
Almost everything in Diablo III is server-side, the client is effectively just a dumb client even in single-player. hence the (don't laugh) online lag when playing single-player. As a result I would be astonished if a hacked server emulator ever appears.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamesblog/2012/may/16/diablo-3-pc-game-review
It's bugged. The combat knackers your fingers. Single player campaign is short and linear.
4/5
To be fair to the graun, 4/5 translates to an 80% score – which, considering we're talking about a Blizzard game, not to mention the almost industry-wide adoption of the 7-10 review scale, is getting up there with the Cleansing of the Temple.
I'm a die hard PC gamer but won't be touching D3 with a barge pole. Always on DRM is bad enough, though I could perhaps overlook it if the game was good enough. But the single player campaign being run almost entirely server-side? Fuck that. I don't want lag in a single player game and I also don't want to pay for a single player title when I can't be sure it won't stop working in 10 years time. At least other always-on DRM could be disabled with a patch, but there's fuck all you can do if a vast amount of the game is stored remotely and Blizzard decides to shut down the servers.
Have a look at the Diablo 3 fans ripping into John Walker for his article “How Diablo III’s Solo Experience Reveals A Hollow Game”. He makes a valid point about how lag in the single player game almost ruins the experience and how losing the connection and losing half an hour to an hours play. And then he gets ripped to shreds by fans for being unprofessional and being a lunatic.
Shit, I thought I’d seen some rampart loonys back in my time as an Amiga zealot!
For the multiplayer component these are acceptable issues. This is just the price you pay for trying to play something complex over the internets. But for single player? Anyway, at least for now gamers who like the Diablo structure have options. I’m not cut up about what Blizzard is doing with Diablo 3 because I can play Torchlight. But if the whole industry moves to server side only single player? Then that’s it, I’m out.
Crashed when I try to load the first level. 3/5. Anyway, don't fret about Podgamer because you have Free App Hero. Sorry, I mean the Free App Hero Twitter Account, Sorry, I mean the cheese biscuits post.
This is why I mostly gave up on mainstream gaming and support indie games instead. Kickstarter, 8bitfunding and other sites are a godsend for gaming. I don't experience these sorts of issues with the vast numbers of freeware, retro remakes or indie games. Emulation is about the trickiest and even that doesn't seem as bad as D3 is looking. Shoddy and expensive experience. And I was a very keen gamer forking out for AAA titles of the day before I gave up on it long ago.