Heh, just got home from work and tried to play it again. Servers are down. Either again or still, I couldn't say.

They only went down about 15 minutes ago. The official twitter feed says it's just a temporary restart.

[quote name='JTippetts' timestamp='1337219048' post='4940809']
Heh, just got home from work and tried to play it again. Servers are down. Either again or still, I couldn't say.

They only went down about 15 minutes ago. The official twitter feed says it's just a temporary restart.
[/quote]

This is turning into a comedy of errors, or just hilariously bad timing on my part. Got up an hour early this morning to try again.

Servers are down.

Maybe I'm being a dickweed, maybe I'm just annoyed that I as yet have not been able to play the game I paid for, but this morning they are saying that the servers are down for maintenance. To maintain implies effort expended to keep something in an operational state, but from what I've seen, there has been no operational state to maintain. (I know, it's mostly just bad luck/bad timing, but still.) Are they sure this game was really ready to leave beta and/or stress testing?

I've had mostly good server luck, but the move from a roguelike to a tiny isometric action-MMO is disappointing. Granted, it's still pretty fun (especially now that level 10+ is providing more options/challenge).

I've played roughly 15 hours since release (just enough to beat the game on normal difficulty). Here are my thoughts:

- If you liked Diablo 1/2, you will like 3. Its a lot of fun and takes everything that was good in the previous two and improves on it.
- Launch day and day+1 were a little rough. I didn't have too much trouble, though, and it worked very well for me for the most part. Maybe I am too sympathetic with Blizzard, but I don't really think the launch went nearly as bad as so many people are clamoring it did. There are just so many people that I feel its nearly impossible to not have some problems, even with the most diligent planning and preparation.
- The difficulty of the game is pretty easy until you get to level 10 or 15, but then it does get more difficult. I was worried the game was going to be much too easy, but I am very happy with the difficulty so far. And from what I've been reading, nightmare/hell/inferno won't disappoint at all.
- The game just feels great and has been very fun!

Just my two cents!

I've played roughly 15 hours since release (just enough to beat the game on normal difficulty). Here are my thoughts:

- If you liked Diablo 1/2, you will like 3. Its a lot of fun and takes everything that was good in the previous two and improves on it.
- Launch day and day+1 were a little rough. I didn't have too much trouble, though, and it worked very well for me for the most part. Maybe I am too sympathetic with Blizzard, but I don't really think the launch went nearly as bad as so many people are clamoring it did. There are just so many people that I feel its nearly impossible to not have some problems, even with the most diligent planning and preparation.
- The difficulty of the game is pretty easy until you get to level 10 or 15, but then it does get more difficult. I was worried the game was going to be much too easy, but I am very happy with the difficulty so far. And from what I've been reading, nightmare/hell/inferno won't disappoint at all.
- The game just feels great and has been very fun!

Just my two cents!

I'll add that:
- If you're not feeling at home untill the end of act 1, don't quit, it gets a whole lot more D2 like in act 2+ and by early act 3 you're back in there are 2, 3 nm 5326235 mobs on me.
- Difficulty also takes a while to join the party, normal mode act 1 is trivial, act 2 boss is where it kinda starts, nightmare feels more like D2 hell, and there are 2 difficulty levels above that! (i died like ~ 10 times during the whole normal game, died that many time killing a pack of blue mobs in nightmare . . . they gave some of those some pretty sick modifiers lol)

the move from a roguelike to a tiny isometric action-MMO is disappointing.

I'm confused as to which diablo games you've been playing? Hasn't Diablo always been an isometric beat-em-up with RPG-like character progression, woven together with a weak storyline?

Managed to get some serious time in today. Home early from work, the baby cooperated, the servers cooperated. Got a wizard through Act 1 and 2. Most of the way through Act 1, I was sort of "meh". I've played the beta enough that nothing there really felt new. For a good part of Act 2, I was the same. But things really started to click around level 20, and I got to a place called the Desolate Sands that sort of took my breath away, and really got me to studying the landscapes. The Desolate Sands is this bleak boneyard, sandy and full of cliffs and rocks and bones. It's bleak and ugly, and yet I found it strangely beautiful enough that I stopped for awhile and just sort of studied it for a long, long time.

After I got to Act 3, I spent some time going backwards to study the levels and places I had blown through. And I found a surprising amount of beauty. I'd heard all the complaints (bright colors, stylized "WoW-ish" graphics, etc...) which is probably why I hadn't bothered to take my eyes off the enemies long enough to smell the roses (or, rather, bloated corpses; there are a whole bunch of those). And I found that I loved the landscapes. The art team really put the effort into making the areas feel real, to me. Full of panoramic vistas of crumbling bridges and waterfalls, cliffs and statues in the fog-hazed distance, ledges and corridors that you can't get to and that aren't part of the game play area and yet serve to make each area feel like it's part of a larger whole. I even found myself loving the soft, painterly, sort of smeary look a lot of the textures have, in stark contrast to the grittier, grungier look of D2.

I also found myself pleasantly surprised by the skill system. The beta really didn't do it justice. Only after you get a good, hefty set of runes to choose from do you really begin to understand that despite the lack of stat customization, there is still plenty of room for character building. The wizard, at least, feels like a deep and complex character whose gameplay changes radically depending on your skill loadout.

The item/loot system is pure Diablo. Simplified in some respects, complexified in others, but still whole-heartedly Diablo. I managed to deck myself out in a few rares and earn enough money to train my blacksmith up to where he can make some pretty decent gear. While the crafting system is very simple, I do like it. They took the gambling that D2 had, and removed all the annoying running back and forth to the Sewers entrance in Lut Gholein to re-roll the merchant's loot table.

The difficulty was pretty tame, if I'd have rolled a hardcore character I would still be in the game, but I can see hints of what is to come and have had a few close scrapes, and one or two honest-to-goodness "oh, shit!" moments.

The story is kind of meh, though (which is fine by me; too much story just gets in the way of the hacky-slashy), and the always-connected requirement is and always will be a colossal pain in the ass, almost a deal-breaker sometimes. And the Belial fight at the end of Act 2 felt a little too much like an easy stay-out-of-the-bad-and-you'll-win WoW raid dance for me to truly enjoy it. But by damn if this doesn't feel like a Diablo game after all, despite all my cynical pessimism.

Playing on nightmare as ranged, I notice a fairly major difference from original - just about all mobs are either invisible (popups), have some form of stealth (not like D2 where you could nuke them while hidden) or have ranged or range-closing abilities.

Give the insanely powerful AOE that makes some design sense, but it gets a bit frustrating, forcing a huge investment into vitality and dps, just so you can nuke them down at point-blank range in 1.2 seconds, since you'll be dead in 1.4s. Not really hard, just somewhat tedious. It gets somewhat pointless to even try to run away or position yourself, when you get either nuked at range or they jump at you the moment you get away.

Damage also scales like crazy, one hit kills are the norm unless you have sufficient gear.

On the upside, auction house comes handy at solving this problem. But at same time - if running bosses/mobs for gear isn't needed anymore, what's the point? To get to 60? Then it's just a matter of waiting for best deal at AH.

Just cleared Act 3. It was short and hideous-looking, but it offered up some pretty good fights. Azmodan felt even more like a WoW raid than Belial, though, and didn't really bring any particular challenge. My wizard is rocking mostly yellows; I still haven't seen a single legendary, but that is fine. I like my legendaries like I like my beef: rare as hell. I had one pretty tense moment where a pack of vortex champions kept pulling me back into this GIGANTIC seething mob of skeletons, despite my best frantic efforts to escape. Racked up an 87-mob kill streak and picked up a couple rares when they finally dropped, and after the fight was done all I could do was sit there and go "holy shit."

I don't use the auction house, and I won't, for the same reason that I never traded for anything in D2. If I don't earn it myself, I don't want it. I get the uneasy feeling, though, that Blizzard has tuned legendary drops with the AH in mind, making them perhaps more rare than uniques were in D2, and that is not something that I like. I would probably consider offering up stuff on the AH, but at the moment all of the stuff I don't use or that I outgrow goes into the shredder. Got my blacksmith as high as he can go until Nightmare. Apparently, unlike in earlier versions of the beta, you can only get training manual pages in NM difficulty.

The buzz is starting to wane a bit; but then, in D2, my enthusiasm always started to wane in Act 4. At this point in the game, I'm just eager to move on to NM and start playing with new toys, and to visit again the better-looking scenery of the earlier Acts. (Why does Blizz insist that the game get uglier as you progress more deeply?)

Honestly, the legendary's aren't that unique, at least compared to uniques in Diablo 3. I'm only in the middle of Act 3, and have found 3 already (albeit I can't use two of them, due to being the wrong class).

Honestly, I'm not sure about how I feel about Diablo 3 at the moment. I'm not too overwhelmed by it (in either a good or bad way). I'll continue to finish the game, but I'm not sure I'll play it much longer than that. Definitely not enough to get even half of the achievements. (And quite honestly, I think I'm getting to the point in games where I'm burned out with achievements, especially since some of them seem to be endurance achievements of how many thousands of hours are you willing to devote to the game...)