@umdesch4: I hear you (I go back to the days of 640K conventional memory), but even if we took the static hardware completely out of the equation, comparing games of the 90's to those of today is still like comparing the engineering of a wheelbarrow to that of a Chevy Volt. It's just completely impractical to believe that bugs are ever going to be stamped out to the extent they were when entire commercial-grade games could be largely written and created by one person.

I'll just wait.

Complexity isn't an excuse though. Blizzard does need to fix features they promised where why and how is academic but often not a concern to the user/player.

What about Error 666?

Another hour wait... I was playing flawlessly from 1-2:30, but got kicked off my single player experience for a 'server reboot'? Unacceptable

Always on DRM makes games useless for travelling as well.

@EXTomar: I was just offering that purely as a response to those who are effectively waxing nostalgic about how bug-free SNES games were, not as any sort of excuse for these specific issues.

The more obscure shield-swapping stuff is way more forgivable in my view than the always-online requirement, which is purely a commercial/anti-piracy measure that screws the paying customer more than it will prevent illicit behavior.

@blacklab said:

It's always weird to me that stuff like this gets through QA on a title that was in dev so long.

The problem isn't that bugs got through QA. It's that QA hasn't ended and day-1 purchase consumers make up the QA team.

Game is great though, only level 12 but playing really easily with all my friends is a godsend. I'll be patient. Plus optimized amazingly, plays great on my Macbook Pro 2009

If you're going to make your offline portion go online, then goddam make it work!!

Payed for around 4 hours during the afternoon, because i had today off. But no chance in the evening both nights (UK)

Y'know, for a game that they worked on for so long, it really shouldn't have bugs. Blizzard's quality is slipping....

I blame Activision :)

Nobody is asking the real question..... Is there a cow level?

GOTY!

I logged in around 10:30 am central today and got to play for a little over an hour before a message appeared in the chat log.

"Server shutdown in 60 seconds"

Well shit. Guess I didn't want to play single player anyway.

I bought this for my boyfriend for his birthday, and he was disappointed and disgusted to find himself lag-warping around in single-player, when no one else was using the net. This always-on DRM is complete bullshit, especially when not all countries have good internet. The fact that it actually causes lag in single-player is just pathetic.

Can not support a game that promotes online-only single player.

So when I tried to install the game using the game dvd, it keeps saying the dvd tray is ejected (even though its not) and if I keep seeing this message then I should download the digital copy from the website. Really pissed me off.

This game has been ridiculous from day one. When I buy a game I'd like to go home and, you know, play it. Why the fuck does one need to authenticate a store-bought disc to a busted server?

It's just a Torchlight clone so whats the big deal...

It's a big game, so bugs like this would be hard to catch, considering the number of people who probably got this bug versus the number of people now playing the game. And yes Alex, I'm in the work category.

Able to play it at the moment though it seems that there are issues with the achievements. I'm not recieving credit for anything towards achievements. From what I can find various people are not getting them, or having them all vanish from their account.

@Epsilon82 said:

@AiurFlux: I'm totally with you when it comes to the online requirement for single player. There is absolutely no justification for that whatsoever.

But comparing a multiplayer-enabled PC game in 2012 to games developed 15-20 years ago on static and immeasurably less complex hardware is just facile, pure and simple.

I get your point that it's become more complex, but my question is has the testing become more complex? Why are games coming out now with bugs that can completely cripple the game making you unable to play it? Why are patches coming out now that break basic fundamentals that can be found in a fucking menu? Budgets are more now than they've ever been, but how much of that money goes to actual quality assurance? Are these companies so hell bent on shoveling out their product that they flat out neglect the actual quality of it prior to release?

In my opinion yes they do want to shovel it out as quickly as possible. Now you might say that Diablo III has had a long enough development cycle with constant delays and I can accept that, but let's not forget that they removed unfinished content from the game to be released later so they could get it out earlier. We see it all the time with games that have a day 1 patch. My point is that it wouldn't fly back then but for some stupid goddamn reason we seem more complacent now. Were bugs a problem back then? Sure. Is it more complex now? Yeah. But it's inexcusable either way.

I overcame these problems pre-emptively by deciding to not buy the game, which I also think technically means I beat it before release.

This new age of online single player has me SUPER pumped guys :D

It's just a Torchlight clone so whats the big deal...

It's a big game, so bugs like this would be hard to catch, considering the number of people who probably got this bug versus the number of people now playing the game. And yes Alex, I'm in the work category.

My client is at 0% and has been that way for an hour...am I doing something wrong? I've exited out and restarted it 4 times. Even a full system reboot. Is this also a server issue?

I and avoiding this game like the plague .... what im really exited about is touchlight 2

When you're unable to play a singleplayer game because of lag, you got ripped the fuck off. How could they have fucked up so bad? 
 
Seriously? Monsters and the whole singleplayer game world freezes when you lose one too many packets? Get the fuck out of here Blacktivision. If I was still on my old ISP, this game would literally be unplayable.

@ScreamingFist said:

Oh PC, you're such a turd.

*coughcough*redringofdeatherror8002E501*coughgough*

Lets keep the sweeping generalization to a minimum shall we? Oh wait. This is the internet!

The always-on internet connection DRM, in a misguided attempt to combat piracy (for some reason) means I'll never buy or play this. Don't treat me like a criminal, ActiBlizzard. And let me play my single player game off-line. I've actually heard people are experiencing lag. Lag in their single player gaming session!

What the ever-lasting fuck. And yet the sheep will buy, and play, and accept the abuse. Sad story.

@thebigJ_A: I was pretty pissed by the battle.net only access too.

I honestly cannot wait for private servers to show up.

That way I can see, once again, how always-online DRM is a fucking retarded idea and only serves to make the pirates look like the good guys.

And let's face it, D3 is a big enough game that it would make a good profit regardless of having to always be online.

There hasn't even been so much as a mention of a Templar in my game and i'm getting this "Error 3006" message now. I was just playing my monk and Barbarian a little while ago, decided to try out a Wizard and now nothing but "Error 3006."

And now Battle.net is down again.

Would have been nice if they could have just allowed offline play but nah, that'd make way too much goddamned sense.

@Bwast said:

@lockwoodx said:

@Bwast: Can't tell if you're a blizzard fanboi or missing vital pieces of your brain. It's a fact Blizzard rushed D3 to beat Torchlight 2 to market. Get your shit together man, that post of yours was just embarrassing.

What's wrong, baby? So many people talking about D3 and your shitty Torchlight 2 with it's preschool girly graphics is getting left in the dust. You're going to log into that game day 1 and there will no one to play with because the best game in the history of the genre was just released. Let me get you a tissue, Borechlight fanboy. You only like that game because the art is so bad you think you could do it yourself. Catering to the mentally challenged - Torchlight 2. Catering to true gamers who have an actual sense of value and self-worth - Diablo 3. Fact.

WAT?

@grayfox1210: I think that it may be sarcasm. Hard to tell on the tubes.

@JantShira said:

This game has been ridiculous from day one. When I buy a game I'd like to go home and, you know, play it. Why the fuck does one need to authenticate a store-bought disc to a busted server?

Because people can't stop buying into this shit which tells the game companies that abusing your customer is fine.

@MariachiMacabre said:

Really? You needed to resort to blatant homophobia in some strange attempt to win an argument that no one will give a shit about 2 hours later?

I think you missed it. Your use of the word "blatant" shows you almost caught it though. Yes, it's a troll. That particularly subtle type of trolling that's not "real" trolling exactly. More of a parody of a viewpoint that's not far off from what some people actually think. Personally, I thought it was pretty astute and spot-on. Problem with a post like that is that when you're making a parody of people who's views really are that crazy, it can be hard to tell sometimes that it's not the real deal.

PS. Also (and this is a pro-tip for @Bwast as well, for future reference) notice that the spelling, punctuation, and grammar in his post are all flawless. When, in internet history, have you ever seen a post like this that was so obviously written by a well-educated person? Bwast, you gave yourself away.

@AiurFlux said:

@umdesch4 said:

@depecheload said:

Whatever, call me behind the times,

That was me, and I was trying to be tongue-in-cheek with that comment. I agree with you 100%, but increasingly these days, I find that it's because the person I'm agreeing with is roughly my age, and we're both old enough to remember when things that are commonplace now were unacceptable when we were younger.

If things like this happened in the cartridge and cassette days the Nintendo offices around the world would have been smouldering piles of rubble. Imagine if Ocarina of Time had a bug where you might crash, say 33% of the time, if you equipped a certain shield. The company would have to issue a recall and send out a new product or face the ire of millions. Now though? Release it and patch on day 1. Testing has gotten lazy because of this single fact.

So yeah. Hugs?

Slight difference. A console is a known quantity, it has a single hardware setup and in the case of Nintendo, they handle both software and hardware in-house. Same company making everything => full control of the process => minimal chance of undetected errors. Think of iPhone and Android. The iPhone has a very limited number of iterations and you constantly know what you have to work with. The Android platform exists in literally hundreds of versions that could fuck up what you develop for it based on how they interpret what you develop, not to mention varying screen sizes and proportions that you need to adapt your graphics and possibly interface for. Which of these two is known for stability and consistent performance? Which is ragged on for being buggy and crash prone?

Now, combine a fragmented platform (PC) with the complexity of games having increased vastly since (in your example) the late 90's and bugs on launch day is something I feel is a very pointless thing to complain about. Especially in relation to a company like Blizzard who is basically known in the business for being one of the most QA-focused companies. If not the most.

As for claiming you are "old enough to remember"... I am also old enough to remember and I remember that games were buggy as shit back in the day. We just didn't get patches for them and had to cope anyway. Either by finding a solution by our selves, or just trying to work around the bugs. Now we are getting used to the higher quality and support and have gotten used to a "certain way of life". You don't remember, you are nostalgic.

BWAST literally is just being a scumbag... I can't believe we've got more people like him who are on GB...

You don't have to insult people to prove a point. That's just being crass and immature.

@Vodun said:

As for claiming you are "old enough to remember"... I am also old enough to remember and I remember that games were buggy as shit back in the day. We just didn't get patches for them and had to cope anyway. Either by finding a solution by our selves, or just trying to work around the bugs. Now we are getting used to the higher quality and support and have gotten used to a "certain way of life". You don't remember, you are nostalgic.

Really? What game, in the late 90s, say 1998, did you get home on day one, install, and were completely unable to play? Half Life? Unreal? Star Craft? Fallout 2? Baldur's Gate? Those were the games in particular that I remember buying that year (oh, and Quake 2, which was technically a 1997 release, but I didn't get it until a couple weeks into 1998, so admittedly that wasn't day one for me). I remember VERY well. In fact, I still have the drives that those games were originally installed onto, and about 4-5 years ago I got them all working again for the hell of it. They all worked totally fine right out of the box. There were some strange bugs occasionally (I remember Fallout 2 had some game breaking bug several hours in that afflicted a couple of my friends, but somehow I managed to dodge), but that was about it.

I remember getting the network to work properly for everyone at LAN parties could be a bit of a slog, and a waste of at least a couple hours the first night of a 3 day weekend, but there were beers flowing, and plenty of learning about networking that carried over to my day job, so it was all good.

So hell yeah, I'm nostalgic, but I also remember with surprising clarity how much time I didn't spend owning a game I couldn't play.

PS. I just looked it up to verify that it was indeed 1998, and Starship Titanic was one example of a game that was broken, and I didn't end up getting to work until I had a Windows 98 SE install. But that was hardly what we would call a triple A release.

@MariachiMacabre said:

Really? You needed to resort to blatant homophobia in some strange attempt to win an argument that no one will give a shit about 2 hours later?

I think you missed it. Your use of the word "blatant" shows you almost caught it though. Yes, it's a troll. That particularly subtle type of trolling that's not "real" trolling exactly. More of a parody of a viewpoint that's not far off from what some people actually think. Personally, I thought it was pretty astute and spot-on. Problem with a post like that is that when you're making a parody of people who's views really are that crazy, it can be hard to tell sometimes that it's not the real deal.

PS. Also (and this is a pro-tip for @Bwast as well, for future reference) notice that the spelling, punctuation, and grammar in his post are all flawless. When, in internet history, have you ever seen a post like this that was so obviously written by a well-educated person? Bwast, you gave yourself away.

Is the achievement tracking fucked, or is it just me?

Here is a hilarious quote from Senior producer Alex Mayberry when asked about Diablo 3's "always connected" requirement

"We can provide a much a much more stable, connected, safer experience than we could if we let people play off-line."

Source

@Scythus said:

Here is a hilarious quote from Senior producer Alex Mayberry when asked about Diablo 3's "always connected" requirement

"We can provide a much a much more stable, connected, safer experience than we could if we let people play off-line."

Source

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

This is so weird that US are having these problems, ive been playing non stop on EU servers and haven't had one problem.. been switching shields and all sorts. Nightmare for Blizzard that there server problems hit the most influential country...

@umdesch4 said:

@Vodun said:

As for claiming you are "old enough to remember"... I am also old enough to remember and I remember that games were buggy as shit back in the day. We just didn't get patches for them and had to cope anyway. Either by finding a solution by our selves, or just trying to work around the bugs. Now we are getting used to the higher quality and support and have gotten used to a "certain way of life". You don't remember, you are nostalgic.

Really? What game, in the late 90s, say 1998, did you get home on day one, install, and were completely unable to play? Half Life? Unreal? Star Craft? Fallout 2? Baldur's Gate? Those were the games in particular that I remember buying that year (oh, and Quake 2, which was technically a 1997 release, but I didn't get it until a couple weeks into 1998, so admittedly that wasn't day one for me). I remember VERY well. In fact, I still have the drives that those games were originally installed onto, and about 4-5 years ago I got them all working again for the hell of it. They all worked totally fine right out of the box. There were some strange bugs occasionally (I remember Fallout 2 had some game breaking bug several hours in that afflicted a couple of my friends, but somehow I managed to dodge), but that was about it.

I remember getting the network to work properly for everyone at LAN parties could be a bit of a slog, and a waste of at least a couple hours the first night of a 3 day weekend, but there were beers flowing, and plenty of learning about networking that carried over to my day job, so it was all good.

So hell yeah, I'm nostalgic, but I also remember with surprising clarity how much time I didn't spend owning a game I couldn't play.

PS. I just looked it up to verify that it was indeed 1998, and Starship Titanic was one example of a game that was broken, and I didn't end up getting to work until I had a Windows 98 SE install. But that was hardly what we would call a triple A release.

Half-Life I don't personally remember any major issues with, nor Star Craft (except multiplayer) or Baldur's Gate.

Quake 2 I had to build custom config files to get it to work properly. That was also the only way to set up your controls in any real fashion.

Fallout 2 was a buggy piece of shit and I didn't get to play that until early 00's, even then it had a lot of game breaking bugs (like invisible children stealing your items) which had to be bypassed by loading someone else's save. Still one of the best games I have ever played.

LAN parties is a clear indicator of how things have gotten more stable. Back in the day, like you say, you always spent a lot of time getting games to link up, and even then you often suffered synch errors. Multiplayer was a major bitch. And claiming that only beer mitigated the pain doesn't really help your argument.

Half-Life is actually an interesting game to bring up in this discussion because Steam was basically a distribution platform for patches for that game and its mods to begin with. So no matter how stable you feel that game was, Valve felt the need to have a dedicated distribution platform for fixes and updates for it.

Well it's a brand new day. What's the consensus so far? Has Blizzard managed to mostly stabilize it yet, or is it still constantly refusing access & kicking players out?

If not, I'll probably wait another week before buying. Don't need the agita.

@Vodun said:

LAN parties is a clear indicator of how things have gotten more stable. Back in the day, like you say, you always spent a lot of time getting games to link up, and even then you often suffered synch errors. Multiplayer was a major bitch. And claiming that only beer mitigated the pain doesn't really help your argument.

Yeah, I'll agree with you there. But I always blamed Microsoft for that. I mean, if the machines in the room couldn't even see each other in Network Neighborhood at the OS level, how were the games supposed to connect?

I dunno though, overall, I'll still take what we had then over what we had now from game companies. Even though I was young and foolish and idealistic, and remember railing against the injustices in the world just like I see the kids on these forums doing now, I don't remember ever having to say "I'm going to boycott this company", or even "I'll think twice before buying another product from this company again" about a game dev company. Computer hardware companies and Microsoft took the bulk of that ire, usually for monopolistic practices, and component failure due to sourcing from the lowest bidder.

Anyway, it's all a moot point. Whether or not I'm seeing the past through a filter of nostalgia, this is one more game I'm not going to end up buying. The list of game companies for whom I don't have the patience to put up with their bullshit keeps getting longer.

@lockwoodx: lawl, someone writes like a highschool girl that loves her anime boyfriend.

And also, no, I am not. I am incredulous at your stupidity, and I take pleasure in informing you of said stupidity.

@mason said:

Well it's a brand new day. What's the consensus so far? Has Blizzard managed to mostly stabilize it yet, or is it still constantly refusing access & kicking players out?

If not, I'll probably wait another week before buying. Don't need the agita.

I've been playing most of the day and only had one little hiccup once when trying to switch between 5 characters quickly (to swap equipment around) and the operation timed out (after 30 seconds) on the last switch and I had to click "switch character" one more time. I haven't been checking forums or twitter today since I haven't had any problems, so maybe a million other people are being stabbed repeatedly by their computers when trying to play D3, but I'm having fun without any hitches.

@Ghostiet said:

Is the achievement tracking fucked, or is it just me?

It seems to happen temporarily sometimes, but I don't think it's a serious problem. Yesterday I lost my achievements for about three hours (other people I played with seemed to have the same issue), but then they all came back like nothing had happened, and I even kept the new achievements I earned while the old ones were gone. Banner unlocks even stayed unlocked the whole time, so it seems more like a player-side display issue than a server-side issue.

this is so stupid and pointless.

i wanted to play diablo 3 single player. no interest in multiplayer. i played diablo 1 and 2 SP never wanted to play MP.

so hey blizzard, why would i even consider buying this? why the fuck would i want to deal with server issues for a single player game?