Launches of games this massive and highly anticipated are often rocky, and Diablo 3 was no exception the first few hours after release. I'm sure there will be more stories throughout the day, but for now, here's what's been the good, the bad and the ugly of the Diablo 3 launch.
The Good
- We'll start things off on a positive note. When news broke that pre-orders of Diablo 3 from GAME Australia would not be filled, there was an outcry among fans, many of whom had already put money down for the title. GAME has been struggling hard in recent months, but this was perhaps their worst sin to date.
But fortunately Blizzard heard about the woes of its fans, and is letting players transfer their pre-purchase from GAME to Blizzard themselves, allowing those slighted to download the game on launch day using a valid receipt from the store.
- The second bit of good news is that I can actually log into the game in North America as we speak, but of course, that was not always the case.
The Bad
- Forums and threads the internet over are filled with four or five hour old messages about how no one on earth seemed to be able to log in to Diablo 3 in the first few hours after launch. They were met with the dastardly error 37, though some were greeted by errors 300008 and 3006 instead. It was very reminiscent of the beta, which had many more flavors of error codes past those, but things appear to be somewhat under control now.
- The first game breaking bug has already been found in the game. During one mission if you're the Demon Hunter class and give your equipped shield to a Templar follower, the game will boot you off the server, give you a 3006 error and won't let you log back in. It's being worked on, but stay away from that templar, Demon Hunters.
The Ugly
- I guess you could put the above errors into this category, but the ugliness around my place right now is the current state of my roommate. He too has been anticipating the game for a decade, but just now realized his graphics card is too sub-par to install the game. He hadn't thought to check it as he can play games like Starcraft and League of Legends just fine. He had a day of demon slaying mapped out with me, but now he's scrambling to try and build a desktop from scratch just so he can play the game. Now that's dedication. I wonder how often this scene is replaying itself across the country? There has to be a significant sect of non-regular PC gamer Diablo fans who are just now discovering that not every computer can play every game.
That's all the news for now, and 10AM seems like as good a time as any to call it day. I'm off to cleave some baddies with my Barbarian. See you in hell.
