even I as a non-Brit can easily find it for below £30...

Bahahaha - Nope!

The only 'troublemaker' as far as i am concerned is Blizzard because they are ruining a great game concept for their own financial gains.

Methinks we havent seen a fraction of the problems arising from this yet.

Alot of clueless people will buy this game day one - just to find out of the limitations, resulting in the game devs getting even more flak from ticked-off fans - thus increasing the chance of a dungstorm or two (decreased stock values, etc) hitting Activision. I hope their (Blizzard's) decision regarding design choices will haunt them for years to come.

I might be wrong, but i personally hope they get burned for this.

To me D3 is an interesting experiment and it is in some ways a logical progression of how the game industry is now.

I have no problems seeing how it is always online, even is you would like to play it as single player only. They are trying to emphasise a larger co-op then before (in my opinion at least), and the auction house can only work if there are strong regulations. There can be argued how large impact AH will have on the game, personally I will never buy anything there, but would not mind trying to sell stuff I would not need. Both of these are reasons why D3 will ever be patched out of always online, they are to ingrained. If someone is waiting for this, it would be better to see if the experiment fails and wait for Diablo 4 instead. Personal I think it will not fail, and that D4 will then probably become more MMO oriented.

The stress tests and betas have showed that the player who have tried do like the game, there are a few who did not, or experienced lag or issues because of it, but they are a minority and the tests so far seemed to be successful. I would also imagine some issues have been resolves because of the tests, which is the reasons to hold them in the first place...

Keeping assets server-side can also be beneficial for the producers. Again, you would not 'own' your game, but then it is all about licenses anyway (which I have no problem with...)

From experiencing the beta, I am looking forward to this game now, I think it is really really good. Also I so not like how the issue is presented almost as a war, with lines drawn. It is not at all. Blizzard have never hidden the nature of D3, if you do not like it, then just don't buy it, end off - vote with your money etc. However, liking D3 do not meant that you would not like Grim Dawn pr Torchlight 2, it is not a case of you have to have either or - or that it is a statement getting either precluding you from the other. I will have all three in the end, and judging from how things look, have just as fun with either of them. In a couple of years i can let you know which one I enjoyed the most.

LAN is a mark of the past, that's a fact. So is playing D3 single player. Even D2 was so boring in single player I barely managed to finish it.

I think you did not play the beta then. I agree, the style is a bit different (it was made by creators of WoW) but they've managed to keep that nice atmosphere from D2. Unfortunately the D1-feel is long dead, that was something perfect.

Can't argue here, but actually I like those cooldowns. Previously you could stay in one place and just spam potions. Now you can't do that and you have to plan your battles.

Actually the game is very dynamic and you can feel the power of every single character. I prefer to play as a caster, but I really enjoyed playing as barbarian and monk as much as a sorceress.



After this first heavy sentence I was going to reply tl;dr; but your post was actually quite interesting :)

You've used a bad wording though. Blizzard don't "experiment", they "do". Fans will still buy it. They have earned a huge reputation, they are one of the two developers (the other one is Rockstar) I'm ready to pre-order anything they release.

From my experience I can tell one thing: great majority of people who complain how bad the game is, how much they don't like it, how they've changed everything which was good in the two previous parts never actually played it. It's just complaining for the sake of it.

I'm glad to see such a profound understanding of networking.

Yeah. Most of the time I played D2, I played it in singleplayer. You can't take your own experience for a fact.

Seems reasonable enough to me, if you don't know if you like the game by that point, you probably shouldn't be spending $60 on it.
Well, they are over, the used to be a pretty good company, but lately they've pretty much given up on that. The starter editions are nice, but the poison pills on the rest of the game aren't. Ever since WoW, I just don't think they're the same company.

But, they are hugely successful even now, so they aren't likely to go out of business anytime soon. But I do love how people are eager to figure out how Blizzard is going to further dominate their playing experience.

I always assumed boycotting would be more in reference to Blizzard than to any one game. Diablo 3 is a game I'm not going to buy based on its own merit. I'll make that decision once and then move on. To boycott, the way I understand it, would be to research and never buy any blizzard product ever again based on one or more issues.

So with that understanding out of the way, I'll not be buying D3 for multiple reasons. (DRM being the biggest). But if Blizzard were to release another game that had no DRM, I would base the buying decision on the actual game itself.

I suspect D3 is the next DRM bump based on it name. Steam was born with Half-Life 2. A title so big people did not care what the requirements were to play it. So, I fully suspect that D3 will sell record numbers no matter what the devs do as people have been waiting for this for a long time. And most likely, we will see MORE always on DRM as a result of its success. (funnily, HL2 did not live up to its hype and it doesn't look like D3 will either).

They can paint the box as pretty as they like, but if its full of crap, I'm not gonna buy it.

Perhaps he's a griefer. You try griefing in singleplayer and see how you like it.

Hard to claim I'm boycotting it seeing as how I've been done with Blizzard since they announced they were jumping on the consumer-abuse bandwagon with StarCraft 2. Still, never really thought they'd take it this far.

Well, I hate always-online requirements as much as the next dude, but I played the open beta and it's definitely worth it. Plus Blizzard games are so well-egineered and packed with content, you know you're getting your money's worth.

Just so long there are no connection issues, I'll be happy.

You're a griefer in SP too, you get a bunch of perfectly healthy deamons and you start stomping on their plans, even killing them in the end. Bastard.

Not to defend Steam, but from what I've gathered around the web, HL2 was one of the best-received games of its time. And the big difference between HL2 and D3 is that HL2 had a full-featured compelling single-player campaign. What D3 will come with seems to essentially amount to something like single-player WoW.

I'm staying true to my no-DRM policy, even if it's Diablo 3. Fortunately, it seems like Diablo 3's pretty disappointing, according to all my friends who have played it through the betas.

I won't argue the sales numbers, but I think i would argue "best received". I wasn't saying it didn't sell copies, but the physics in the game didn't play the HUGE part they advertised and apart from that, it was standard FPS fair. Not a horrible game... but not a great one either. I picked it up in the clearance bin for 5$ and used NOSTeam to play it. Worth 5$. IMHO, it was worth about $20.00. But not worth $60.00 + tolerating DRM.

But this was what I meant when I said it didn't live up to its expectations. I saw far too many folks that were disappointed with how short the game was, how it lacked a compelling story, the puzzle elements were extremely oversold, it was pushed back because of the big "leak" and then Steam was introduced.

So, just to be clear, I'm not saying it was a bad game... I'm saying that if any other company started an IP with the actual Half Life 2 game (exact same game)... the ratings would have likely been in the 70s rather than in the 90s. Which is to say that its title bought it some grace. And I expect the same from D3.