Review: Diablo 3

[D7Rock88]

It isn't about the money, its about the mods. If it was solely about the money then they wouldn't give a damn if modified items made it online and onto the auction house, because people would buy them, and its not likely they'd be cheap you know, regardless of what the price is someone would still buy it and Blizzard would still recieve 10% from that sale. But hey, believe whatever you want. The truth is the truth, but if you want to believe that every game company is just out for whats in your wallets, then hey thats your choice. Not my choice though.

[Wheelhouse]

'open battle.net'

 

Yeah, just remove it.

 

But like others have said, I don't think this is the reason. The real reason is money.

 

If you play single-player only, you will never go to the Auction House. By forcing you online, you are at least always 1 or 2 clicks away from the Auction House.

 

That being said, now that I'm able to play the game (the servers are actually up), the game is fun.

 

It's what you would expect from a Diablo, from what I've seen so far, but that's not a bad thing.

 

But..playing single player and getting "disconnected from the server" is, quite simply, annoyingly stupid. Happened to me once when it turns out I was like 10 seconds from a checkpoint. Had to replay about 5-10 minutes, but that's 5-10 minutes that I wouldn't have had to replay if I wasn't required to be logged in for single player.

 

I have no idea if I'll ever play multiplayer, but the issues associated with having to log in to play single player make it less attractive the more I play. And the more unattractive it becomes, the less likely I ever spend any gold (let alone real money) on the Auction House.

[justwannaddl]

Don't forget the potential to monetize the in game items. Want the special Christmas skins this December? Just shell out $2.99 or buy it off someone for 500k gold. Want access to an entire year's worth of special monthly crap? Subscribe for a low low price of three dollars a month or $29.99 for the year.

[gregathit]

Micro-transactions are the wave of the future (at least in the game companies eyes) and they plan on exploiting it to its fullest potential until gamers rebel. Personally, even though I am an old school gamer who spent a rediculous amount of hours playing D1 and D2 (and loved every minute of it), I am going to pass on D3 in protest on the online nonsense.

 

I have no intention of paying full price for a game only to "rent it". While you don't have to pay monthly fees you still have a product that is not "standalone" so in essence you don't truly own it. If you are fine with that concept then by all means go and buy the game. At some point however folks will have to draw a line in the sand. For me it starts with this game and its "online only" nonsense.

 

Cheers

[Jerbsinator]

It isn't about the money' date=' its about the mods. If it was solely about the money then they wouldn't give a damn if modified items made it online and onto the auction house, because people would buy them, and its not likely they'd be cheap you know, regardless of what the price is someone would still buy it and Blizzard would still recieve 10% from that sale. But hey, believe whatever you want. The truth is the truth, but if you want to believe that every game company is just out for whats in your wallets, then hey thats your choice. Not my choice though.

[/quote']

 

Sorry but that makes no sense. Every company in existence is out for what's in your wallet, there is rarely an exception to this and Blizzard is definitely not one of those exceptions.

[D7Rock88]

It isn't about the money' date=' its about the mods. If it was solely about the money then they wouldn't give a damn if modified items made it online and onto the auction house, because people would buy them, and its not likely they'd be cheap you know, regardless of what the price is someone would still buy it and Blizzard would still recieve 10% from that sale. But hey, believe whatever you want. The truth is the truth, but if you want to believe that every game company is just out for whats in your wallets, then hey thats your choice. Not my choice though.

[/quote']

 

Sorry but that makes no sense. Every company in existence is out for what's in your wallet, there is rarely an exception to this and Blizzard is definitely not one of those exceptions.

 

Yeah it wouldn't make sense if you got a dim view of things, but me I still like to think that good exists in the business world and thats its not just all about greed. *shrugs* I've never been given a real actual reason to think otherwise.

[HanPL]

O well..

 

[Kain82]

So I bought it on wednesday and been hooked ever since. I almost didn't because of metacritic, and now see they're full of shit. I've already logged in 7+ hours and I'm not done with Act 1 yet. Reviewers in metacritic claimed the game could be completed in 3-8 hours. I find the bosses like the Skeleton King to be quite challenging. My male wizard died atleast 6 times before I was able to beat him. I also like how they mention things from Diablo 1, like Decard Cain, King Leoric/ Skeleton King and Lazarus. The hired mercernaries now have their own backstories, and there quite talkative. They also interact with other followers like Leah. The graphics are quite nice for this type of game. The VA so far is good, as well as the music. The cinematics are excellent. So in closing. If you're into hack and slash rpg's, don't let other people's opinions sway you from buying the great game.

[Jexsam]

It isn't about the money' date=' its about the mods. If it was solely about the money then they wouldn't give a damn if modified items made it online and onto the auction house, because people would buy them, and its not likely they'd be cheap you know, regardless of what the price is someone would still buy it and Blizzard would still recieve 10% from that sale. But hey, believe whatever you want. The truth is the truth, but if you want to believe that every game company is just out for whats in your wallets, then hey thats your choice. Not my choice though.

[/quote']

 

lol no

 

See, here's the thing. Hacked and modded items in a multiplayer environment like this can kill your game. Nobody will have fun if everyone runs around with hacked god items. New players will be alienated. Frustrated players leave. Your game garners a terrible reputation for being filled with hackers and godmodders. Not to mention the havoc it would wreak on the in-game economy, both real-money and virtual.

 

And all this? Hurts their revenue.

 

Game companies have every reason to crack down on hackers and godmodders, not just in the interest of fun and balance (remember, a fun game makes people more willing to part with cash), but in the interest of not giving their game a shitty reputation.

 

 

EDIT: I don't mean to sound dismal, though. Yes, companies are all about profit, this is in inescapable fact. But you have to remember, the devs that work on these games? They're people. And odds are some or most of them do, in fact, give a damn about making a fun, entertaining game that people will like. They're not company drones, they're people who care about the product. It's people like this, who still care, that give us truly awesome games. If they didn't care, they'd be cranking out a new game every other year like Call of Duty or Battlefield just to milk the cash cow.

[justwannaddl]

I can agree that devs have a right to manage their own servers to prevent of abuse. I don't agree with always online DRM for games advertised as single player even if it has significant multiplayer features.

 

Would you accept it if other companies said you need an always online connection for the latest Mario, GTA or Halo as long as they justify it with the addition of an auction house? Apparently Diablo 3 proves that you can.

[Wheelhouse]

I can agree that devs have a right to manage their own servers to prevent of abuse. I don't agree with always online DRM for games advertised as single player even if it has significant multiplayer features.

 

Would you accept it if other companies said you need an always online connection for the latest Mario' date=' GTA or Halo as long as they justify it with the addition of an auction house? Apparently Diablo 3 proves that you can.

[/quote']

 

Yeah, that's the thing about this single player/multiplayer combo.

 

I don't have any plans at all to play co-op until I've finished the story a first time (I'm still in Act 1, level 11 wizard, along with lower levels of all other classes to see what they're like).

 

I would have had NO problem with a character creation choice of single-player only and online capable player, and with them (their gold, items and the like) not at all ever crossing.

 

Like I would create my first character - single player only. It would have no ability whatsoever to touch Bnet. The stash it has would/could share with other single player only characters, but not with later online characters.

 

Once finished with the campaign the first time, at that point I'm going to decide to keep playing or not. If I choose to make co-op characters at that point, I have to start over at 0 gold, no stash, etc, for those co-op players.

 

I don't see how this would affect their AH in the slightest (with regards to duped and/or hacked items and characters) other than many fewer people would ever click the Auction House button (and therefore wouldn't be exposed to the Real Money Auction House).

 

I suspect (and I suspect Blizzard suspects) that if they offered single player only mode (that didn't at all interact with co-op in any way), that a huge chunk of the people who bought the game would never go online. I never did in Diablo 1 (were you even able to? I forget), and rarely did in Diablo 2, and didn't really plan to all that much in 3.

 

What I do know is that this online constant DRM issue (with servers being down so much in the first 2 days, and being taken down a few times today) is that not everyone sees Diablo as a multiplayer-first game, while some do.

[Jerbsinator]

I just got the game yesterday and I gotta say, it is fantastic. I was skeptical but it's actually very polished and quite fun.

[sen4mi]

Incase any of you forgot' date=' Blizzard is not very fond of any of their games being hacked or modified to the point where bots and player created items...especially items that turn you into a god, are involved.[/quote']

 

This, I think, is close to the core of my reasons to never be going near a Blizzard game.

 

I have played enough "Blizzard Clone" games (hellgate, torchlight, borderlands, ...) (and games that Blizzard has derived from [nethack, rogue]) to have something of an idea of the gameplay. I would probably enjoy the gameplay. But... for me to be forever denied the ability to be doing my own derivations?

 

Personally... this is not something I would ever want to pay money for. I would have a hard time playing that kind of game for free.

 

(Which, I suppose, has something to do with my presence here on a forum which mostly involve's a different company's games...)

 

Mind you, there are people that go much further than I in the "game must be moddable" direction. I do like some of the comforts and polish that can be difficult to support in a completely modded game.

 

Anyways, everyone has different tastes, and I hope no one has been offended by my lack of enthusiasm for diablo 3.

[Kyocera]

As for the game itself, very good and enjoyable. The epitome of the "lootiful" top down hack and slash type game, however...

 

Blizzard is an absolute abominable disgrace. From day 1 the servers were overloaded and now today the EU server collapsed completely. While this game has online components it's essentially single player so the necessity to rely on their servers being up when you play is the most barbaric and draconian DRM I have ever seen in my life. I have paid £45 for a game that I simply cannot play. If it was an MMO then it might be understandable but for what is for the most part a single player game? It is downright inexcusable.

 

I'll be instructing my bank to claim back the £45 for this game on account of the fact I've paid for something I cannot use in any way shape or form. I will no doubt lose access to the game for which I don't give a shit about, it's not that good and to be honest it's not worth the asking price anyway.

[thesapien]

Ouch! That sucks. No single player when the servers are down and the servers are down a lot??? I already get annoyed when single player in games is paused on the menu while it connects to a server, but at least it finally continues and lets you play, normally. Not here? Damn. That sucks.

[Kyocera]

Yep no internet connection or server problems and you simply cannot play whatsoever in any way shape or form.

 

Blizzard can dress it up any way they want to but essentially it's DRM, carefully crafted from the game's very inception.

[Ark of Truth]

Right now folks Diablo 3 is under a massive hack attack with stuff being stolen without knowledge. Blizzard claims that there is nothing they can do.

 

STAY AWAY FROM DIABLO 3!!!

[Mashi]

Haven't seen that. The only thing I've seen is this:

 

We've been taking the situation extremely seriously from the start, and have done everything possible to verify how and in what circumstances these compromises are occurring. Despite the claims and theories being made, we have yet to find any situations in which a person's account was not compromised through traditional means of someone else logging into their account through the use of their password. While the authenticator isn't a 100% guarantee of account security, we have yet to investigate a compromise report in which an authenticator was attached beforehand.

 

If your account has been hacked, please view the previous post for information on contacting our support department.

 

 

Which sounds more probable, seeing as how people are and continue to be dumb about basic security.

[Ark of Truth]

Nah there was a flaw in the system and Blizzard doesn't want to admit it. My brother got hacked and he's password which is stuidly long. Blizzard is just to busy which it's shitty WoW expansion to eve bother to look correctly.

 

The funny thing is when they checked my brothers account they saw it was a different country he logged in from and that everything was sold. Surely that in itself should of been a warning flag.

[Mashi]

A long password doesn't mean safe if your machine isn't clean, and second you're not taking your computer security seriously. It just means it's a long password, and could have been sniffed, or picked up through some other means including using it on another site. Or that it could have been snagged ages ago, and simply used then.

 

That they said he was logged in from another country, and everything was sold from there simply says he could have been keylogged like people have been getting since the early days of WoW. There's no warning flag unless you have more to it than that.

[Wheelhouse]

A long password doesn't mean safe if your machine isn't clean' date=' and second you're not taking your computer security seriously. It just means it's a long password, and could have been sniffed, or picked up through some other means including using it on another site. [b']Or that it could have been snagged ages ago, and simply used then.[/b]

 

 

As someone who was hacked in WoW (and had great service from Blizzard getting everything back in under 4 days - but this was right before a big wave of hacks) right after they changed B.net login to your email address (it used to be a username), I think this is what happened to me way back then - that my email/password combo had been stored somewhere, and the day after WoW went with your email address as your login, it was tried and it worked.

 

I have an authenticator (physical FOB one - btw, what does FOB mean?), so have less worries about hacking (and am much more paranoid about security now), but reading the forums reminds me of Rift shortly after it launched last year, where people were being hacked in pretty big numbers, and everyone blamed them for being unsecure with their surfing habits/viruses/etc.

 

Someone who knew what they were doing (I always assumed it was someone on the hacking side of internet security, rather than the security side) got his account hacked, and did the usual post about how he knew it wasn't his fault, etc, because he "knew what he was doing". Of course he got flamed non-stop in that thread.

 

But he figured out how he was hacked, and it was without the hacker knowing his user name OR his password (what I think is referred to as session hacking), and demonstrated to Trion how it was done.

 

Only then did they come out and admit there was an issue, because to that point they were taking the stance that all hacks were, basically, the players' fault.

 

Trion even named him (via username on their forums) as the one who "was very helpful" in tracking it down, and they added IP tracking, where if you logged in from a different IP, you got locked and had to check your email to unlock your account (which of course doesn't do much good if your email password is the same as your game password).

 

The Diablo 3 forums remind me of that time in Rift - not saying there's legit bypassing of Blizzard's security (that people can be hacked where the hacker doesn't even use a user/password), but it's been done before with other games (as well as the PS3 network), so it IS possible to be an issue with Blizzard, though obviously not proven.

[Ark of Truth]

Well Blizzard launched an mobile authenticator on the same day after saying there was nothing wrong with to be said there may have been.

[Mashi]

Well Blizzard launched an mobile authenticator on the same day after saying there was nothing wrong with to be said there may have been.

 

The mobile authenticator has been out for a couple of years on android and iphones. And the sms version has been out for around a year.

[Jerbsinator]

The game is still great. I have had it since release and still play quite a bit. The only problem I have is Inferno difficulty is just ridiculous. It's so difficult that it destroys the fun.

 

Also I am not pleased that you need to have a cellphone to use the RMAH, that is bullshit. Sorry Blizzard but I don't have a phone and I don't want to buy your stupid authenticator either. Guess you don't get my money. They need more options for people without a phone. It's ridiculous that they just assume that everyone has one. (I realize that a lot do...but a lot of people do not either)

[Atreyu]

From what I've heard/seen of the game, It doesn't really seem that great. I've played diablo 2 and later quit because of how boring and confusing it became. I didn't like D2 because of how much the terrain changed each time you login. You couldn't strategize. Now correct me if I'm wrong, but even though it apparently doesn't in D3, it seems you have to go to the same dungeon every time to do different quests. That sounds really boring. Enlighten me, if I'm wrong.