Be Excellent To Each Other

Depends how much of the game is in the cloud. If it's significant chunks of logic, I can't see how you could hope to pirate it. There's some WoW pirate servers, apparently, so I guess it might be possible; but it's a much bigger job than normal piracy.

Yes, indirectly, through the auction house (which lets you sell game loot for real cash).

Indeed. They could've, and should've, given it a completely separate offline mode at the very least. You can't go anywhere near their online "world" with your offline characters, fair enough, but you can at least play through the bloody game you've bought without connecting to a damn server.

The only excuse for not including this is how easy it would be to throw this portion of the game up on a torrent site.

The auction house is fucked if people hack the game and force r@r3 l3wt to spawn lots.

Hmm.

Is Craster posting from a slightly slower timezone than anyone else?

Either that or he has most of us on ignore...

I've got you on ignore.

HAH!

This game sounds incredible.

They'd have still made a fucking fortune off people buying it legit, buying Auction House shit, and people playing the offline warez version, liking the game and buying it fo'rizzle so they could play it online too /

Didn't D2 have separate online/offline games?

i am quite happy to logon when I first have a game, patch etc.... but then leave me in peace to play offline.

Great research on the price, there. Where exactly is it £49.99? Even from Blizzard themselves it's £44.99 and they're absolutely mugging you off.

Gradugin strikes! "Kingdoms of Amular"!!!

*buys subscription*

*immediately cancels*

Disgraceful.

The rest of the review is right on the (real) money (auction house), though.

The always-on internet connection is a ballache but it's clearly the model that Blizzard want and it's a case of either suck it up or refuse to buy the game.

I'm quite sure they could have an entirely distinct offline mode if they wanted to, and they can say whatever they want about all the stuff that 'requires' the always-on net connection, it wouldn't have been that hard for them to have an entirely rigid and totally sandboxed offline version, with the player understanding that anything and anything he accomplished in the offline version could never be moved over to the online version.

The online version does have a lot of cool extras, chat, parties, grouping, auction house, in the future guilds and PvP etc, but I agree that they're not telling the truth about the real reason for it, which is to eliminate piracy.

And make no mistake, this game is (famous last words......) going to be pretty fucking hard to pirate, because so much of the game world is generated by the server and piped to what is effectively a dumb client.

Blizzard want total control of their games, and quite frankly I think this is a look at the future, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the next-gen of consoles have something approaching this level of internet connectivity requirement.

Needs sound, totally NSFW with sound.

/
What the f**k is error 37?

Gamers really do deserve everything we get.

Act 1 of 4 done, playing at a normal pace, exploring when I wanted to and pushing on the with the plot otherwise. 5 hours 30 minutes.

Seems reasonable, I picked up 27% of the act 1 achievements, but a few were lost on the first night as they weren't recorded.
73% of achievements to go on that act, let alone the other three acts, then 4 more character types to play, all over 4 different difficulty levels. Longevity of the game as purely a single player game doesn't seem too bad to me on the back of that.

Longevity based on multiple replays and cheevo hunting has always seemed dubious to me. Let's see if you can be arsed at the end of this playthrough, eh?

Normally I can't, but replaying, random dungeons and loot hunting is pretty much the point of Diablo.
Same as in WoW, i've been through a few of the areas at least a dozen times.

Jesus I hadn't realised it's been 12 years since Diablo 2...I really must get round to finishing it.

And by finishing it I mean actually installing it and start playing it.

This really isn't floating my boat, I've killed the Skeleton King (the first 'proper' boss) and seen the story a bit on from that.

Haven't died once, haven't come close to dying once, and with the exception of a couple of encounters haven't felt engaged or excited.

My overwhelming feeling is one of boredom. The story is boring, the characters are boring, the world is boring, the combat mechanics are boring, and I just feel massively overpowered - it's like playing the 'new' WoW with a full set of heirlooms and already knowing everything backwards.

After the immersion, depth, involvement and exploration of WoW - Diablo 3 really does feel like slim pickings.

Is it an action game? Is it an RPG? Is it an MMO?

It doesn't seem to do any of them particularly well, and I'm already into 'forcing myself to carry on' territory.

Pfffft. It needs to get a lot better, and quickly.

It's Diablo. It's easy because you're playing it on Normal, which is essentially "story mode" and always was. The fun comes in playing it on harder settings and finding good loot. But if you're not into that sort of thing, you're probably never going to like it. I mean, it's practically identical to the first two games. Did you not play them? I guess some people like them, some don't. It certainly isn't WoW, though, if that's what you were expecting.

It's a dungeon crawler. I'm tempted to say roguelike but perhaps a little more mainstream than that, and obviously not turn-based (although it does have a hardcore roguelike mode with permadeath).

But yeah, it's definitely one of those games that gets better on the harder difficulty settings. I played through the beta on Normal and it was far too easy. It's just clicking on enemies. No challenge whatsoever and subsequently hella boring after a few minutes. It's significantly better when you have to actually think about what you're doing.

It's very clicky.

Looks good and ran smoothly on my fairly old Intel Macbook Pro with no fucking about with settings (I imagine everything is low though). Some of the scenery is beautiful and the enemies, from what I've encountered are varied.

I found it very easy and unchallenging but as WTB says it's just like 1 & 2 and I can always ramp up the difficulty.

After playing on the Guest pass tonight all I can say is I'm in no rush to go out and buy it, which is a bit of a shame.

This is the problem of living in a post Dark Souls gaming world.

Play Diablo III for free!

Brilliant.

I had the same experience up to the skelly king, not even close to dying. By the end of Act 1 i had died a couple of times and some of the fights had got a bit more challenging. The final boss of Act 1 isn't just a stand still and click affair.

I might give it another crack in the near future, but by the end of last night's session I was properly bored with it, it's was just so fucking dull.

WTB is right, I should have managed my expectations better, this is Blizzard, and they've simply done the same thing again, but shinier.

But whereas Starcraft 2 (just about) worked on that basis, Diablo 3 doesn't IMO - games have come on an awful lot in the last twelve years, and the basic mechanics of Diablo simply don't hold up these days.

Plus it made my wrist and clicking finger hurt, I'm an old man now, this game is RSI waiting to fucking happen.

Servers appear fine now.

Act 2 is kicking my arse in places, it's no longer a "click as fast as you can" game for my barbarian, I actually have to use some tactics, have died a few times and run away a few more.

There are suddenly a load of one particular legendary weapon on the AH, pages and pages worth. I suspect their anti-cheating system isn't as good as they think it is...

Can somebody please explain to me the attraction of games like Diablo? I don't get it.

"Oh no! Monsters!"

*click*click*click*click*click*click*click*click*click*click*click*click*click*click*click*click*

"Hurrah, a shinier weapon!"

*click*click*click*click*click*click*

"Phew, they were easier. New level! Oh no! Harder monsters!"

*click*click*click*click*click*click*click*click*click*click*click*click*click*click*click*click*

"Same amount of clicks needed to dispatch these guys now. Hope I find a better weapon soon. Oh wow, there's one!"

*click*click*click*click*click*click*click*click*

"That's one click more than last time. These monsters are tough! Wow! L33t weapon!"

*click*click*

"Hurrah!"

[Update 1.43 - 104667kb/603785kb]

*click*click*click*click*click*click*click*click*click*click*click*click*click*click*click*click*click*click*click*click*

"Curses!"

"No wait, shinier weapon!"

*click*click*click*click*click*click*click*click*click*click*click*click*

(Repeat, ad infinitum.)

I mean, not matter how many times you click-click-click, the monsters are getting harder too. So, basically, as you move and the enemy moves, the scene remains static. Nothing really progresses. The only difference is being able to brag about having a certain weapon to other gumptionless dead-eyed twonk-fingered oafs that won't make things easier because now you're fighting the new super-hards that are now averages and waiting for the next patch that brings along the new relatively super-hards. In a trite storyless fantasy setting. That has been done a billion times before. With you altering the landscape of precisely nothing. NOTHING CHANGES. Bastion at least has a plot and idiosyncracy and lovely music that makes it fun whilst being SHORT and CHEAP.

I JUST DON'T FUCKING GET IT.

That's it. That's it right there. It's a Skinner box with better graphics; no different to a fruit machine.

You win! Bolder the crucial bit... getting the shinier shit to impress/sell to your fellow oafs is what it's all about. Playing feels so disconnected - yes, I was the mightiest monk in all of Tristam's perpetually doomed city limits, but I didn't feel any real sense of power or excitement holding down left mouse and letting him punchpunchpunchTHWACK punchpunchpunchTHWACK mindless enemies over and over, nor did I feel any fear or dread entering another crypt because I'm fifty feet in the air watching it all like a police helicopter.

Yes, an FPS or racing game or anything else also involves pushing buttons to simulate doing far more exciting things... but desperately blocking an attack before chop! Chop!!! SLICE!!! in Skyrim is far more exciting because firstly I'm "there" facing my opponent and secondly I'm not just holding the button down and watching, I am controlling and have to time each strike or block.

Leveling at the same rate as the monsters? Great, your improving gear becomes meaningless, but you gain different moves or something instead, that is the progression. Contrast to New Vegas where they sufficiently tweaked the leveling so I got absolutely massacres by cazadores and Deathclaws the first time I stumbled across them, and only much later with my high level character with good equipment could I handle them. That's down to Diablo being linear.

I was talking to a Steam friend who was taking a break from it last night. He says that most of the beta was in fact a part of the game that could be considered a "tutorial". A very long and dreary one, I opined, but that apparently is why I found it "easy".

I totally gay love you Pete.

Pretty much

Act 2 is where it starts to be a proper game, where you need some kind of tactics and can't just rush headlong into the fray.

Why do people love it? As Doccy G said, it is essentially a fruit machine, attached to a quite lovingly created action RPG with a story and everything! Add to that each time you play the landscape is totally different, so if you like to explore then you can get your kicks doing that. Sure, you are exploring for better gear and new monsters to kill, but that reward is as arbitrary as any other reward on any other game, if you break it down to its base level.

For me, it harks back to the earlier days of gaming. Chucky Egg, Asteroids, Pacman. All games that essentially had no point, other than trying to get just that bit further, get your score that bit higher. Diablo 3 is that, but done with modern technology.

Personally, I'll play it through once all the way, to see the story, and although i'm currently thinking i'll go back and go through on the harder levels, I know what i'm like. Most likely i'll switch to another game after that, but I do understand why people will play this for years.

...and anyway, are you really asking a forum full of OCD gaming nerds, why a randomly generated collect-em-up is addictive? If someone made a game which had a randomly generated virtual shelf of video games that reset when you got to the last box, we would all be forever clicking away re-ordering them.

They all required skill though.

Fair point.

Lets look at Asteroids. The skill is in how and where you move your ship, which rocks you choose to shoot in which order and what the effect of doing that will be.

Substitute "ship" for "character" and "rocks" for "monsters"

OK

How on earth is it like a fruit machine?

Also, I appear to be in the minority with my chums when it comes to this game, they're all lapping it up and grouping together and thoroughly enjoying the wholesale tedious slaughter of billions of identikit enemies.

Played more of the Guest Pass demo up to the Skeleton King.

Don't think I'll be buying this.

Keep hitting the reel spinattack button in the hope that the random number generator drops money loot.

Got halfway through Act 4 on Sunday, before the servers crapped out and kicked me out of my game

It's going to turn out to be around 20 hours for a run through on normal difficulty. Plot isn't actually too bad at all for an action RPG, environments are engaging and very nice to look at. If that was all it was I would be quite happy with it, let alone the extra runs and gear hunting to come (if I can be arsed)

Act 1 is pretty rubbish though, to be honest. The game only really gets going in the followings acts, so it is a bit crappy that you have to go through Act 1 to get there. It's still more of the same though, but with more skills, more tactics and more challenging mobs. So if you just don't like it in Act 1, then fair enough, but if you can see the potential in the game, but think it is too easy and with a crap story, then stick with it till the end of Act 2 at least.

I never even got past Act 1, and if the fundamentals of the game don't change then I see no reason whatsoever to go back to it.

Huge disappointment for me this game.

It's pretty but there's just no game for me.

I'm becoming increasingly less arsed about buying it. I might as well turn it into a protest over the whole online only thing whilst I'm at it.

Well put it this way, it's been a toss-up between Dungeon Keeper 2 and Diablo 3 for me the last couple of days, and every time I've sat in front of my PC it's just been a case of, 'Hmmm, Dungeon Keeper 2 it is then.'

Dungeon Keeper 2 is a thirteen year old game, and it's more fucking advanced than Diablo 3.

It's almost like ultra-high resolutions and 120 frames-per-second update rates aren't the be-all and end-all of gaming!