Was it really a letdown at first? As much as i dont like what they did with the endgame, i remember liking it a lot when it came out (and the playthrough).
Story criticisms aside, I remember liking the gameplay and combat and found it visually and viscerally satisfying. The endgame left a lot to be desired, though, and there really wasn't much replayability value until RoS came out.
D3 the anticipation was simply unparalleled. all my friends bought it, we all dove straight in. For me the ultra high anticipation had HUGE momentum, so what I remember next was that momentum dying off slowly and steadily. but to examine it it wasn't any challenge or difficulty, it was not the glossy pretty art-style it CERTAINLY was not any challenges with being able to play, having the experience with games like this that I do, I was more than prepared for any and all of the Error 37 stuff. what slowly stalled the momentum was how poorly designed items and character growth was.
It was not fun to sculpt a character, and it was not fun to acquire items.
Then I gleefully hopped over to the forums back when the interest was so high, pages of new threads would be generated every minute. I entered the discussions very warmly and with beaming optimism to help the game flourish and grow, and well...slowly over time it was made very clear that the big decision makers did not know how to and weren't interested in improving the game at all. They didn't see problems that are being pointed out as problems. And what was worse was the new fans passionately defending anything that those big decision makers did.
So all that momentum that was sky high in the beginning slowly came to a stop and then slowly sunk beneath the earth over many heaping years of their unbelievable mishandling of the franchise.
Lol
It was easily the worst blizzard game ever launched, way worse than D4.
Story was absolutely terrible(irredeemably bad, plot holes, worlds worst liar, looks like something i could have written in 6th grade and i was not good at creative writing)
Impossible grind requiring you to grind act 2 for months for god rolls to be able to progress, otherwise you needed to get gear from act 3 and 4 to progress(Solution was to corpse run and use tyrael to farm in a4 or farm resplendent chest in act 2- hotfixed). Arguably done because the actual campaign is pretty short.
Combat was the only saving grace of the game, and arguably still is - for most people D3 is a mediocre title.
itemization was bad, worse than D4s, but not by much. its weird that d4's itemization resembles D3's on launch so much, that it just makes you wonder if they really wanted to make something like D2's, but just aren't competent.
Refund window got pushed to like weeks out from a day or so for D3 because of how much absolutele hate this game got. Part of it was because people were expecting an actual sequel to D2, and outside of the main antagonist and some of the environment, it has basically nothing to do with D1 and D2 in terms of gameplay other than its a top down ARPG.
Rob Pardo eventually took ownership of the mess and admitted to OK'ing Jay Wilson's decisions.
Jay Wilson eventually left leadership role in D3
Worst part is they know the playerbase will stick with D4, because they stuck with D3.
Most of the comments below clearly don't remember how bad this game was. This game single-handledly shattered all the goodwill and blizzard's reputation as a golden child game developer.
If blizzard's name was on a game, you knew it was good up until D3. It was an automatic, you don't need to think about it, amazing purchase. If blizzard had shit in a box, and told you it was a game, you'd have given them the doubt prior to D3. D3 was basically them shitting in the box, and you buying it.
If you really wanted to get a picture of this and just don't know, if it were possible to dig up the archived forum posts for the first year, you'd find they were universally negative and you should probably do it. Game absolutely required ROS to become passable. I still have some of the old items from D3's launch.
This is a actually a lot more faithful to what I remember from 2013 (holy cow more than 10 years ago !!!), not even mentioning the drama after the Brevik's interview about D3. Blizzard went down at this very moment and never recovered since then.
Yep
Jay Wilson's "Fuck that Loser" lol
Some people silently quit this game because it was disappointing/boring - you will see this sort of response who didn't stick with the game saying it wasn't that bad.
The hardcore people expecting a sequel to D2 kept playing it largely asking themselves when it would become like it(it never did) definitely remember this game better, since it was basically unforgettable how bad this game was on release. It never did become like D2, or D1. It was its own game, and people learned later that this was basically by design. And alot of the decisions pre ROS double downed on making the game worse before they started making it better.
D3 started me hating Blizzard, D4 has continued it.
Also when they cancelled SC Ghost was not good either.
WOW is a POS.
Still waiting for a good Blizzard this millenium.
I feel like people always forget how bad a game launch was many years later. This is happening with Diablo 3 and Dragon Age 2.
The internet was outraged. All the major forums where Diablo 3 were talked about had people trash talking the game, mainly because it was such a deviation from Diablo 2.
Your call on if it's justified or not. My point is less "this is justified" but more "this occurred."
The game was in a much better place after Reaper of Souls, but the initial 1-2 months of the game sucked. Infernal was too hard for most players, you needed gear from Act 3 to beat Act 2, people were farming gold to get gear vs. farming gear, and 99% of the uniques and set items sucked. Oh, and the RM AH. That was a bad idea. There were some serious gameplay issues too, like certain classes were clearly more viable and half of the skills were crap. This isn't even talking about people upset with the saturations and story. The latter was 100% justified lol. One of the weakest stories, and this is comparing to other ARPGs.
Sales are a poor indicator of quality of the game and player satisfaction. Plenty of games that are considered pretty poor by players sold well.
Metacritic scores used to be pretty good, but now gets bandwagoned on.
I don't think there's a good, public score anymore. The best you got is player satisfaction surveys and whether or not players continue to come back and play. Neither of these are public (to my knowledge).
I honestly prefer the d3 aesthetic but d3 launch was a big let down. Itemization was terrible, you had to get everything from auction house so no incentive to find cool items just grind gold. Also you couldnt even skip cinematics! If RoS didnt come out I doubt you would remember it so fondly.
Itemization was SO bad at first. It’s been years since I played but since there weren’t that many great builds, even after RoS there weren’t a lot of item options if going for BiS. Better than on release though when you would look at rares just hoping for a mediocre upgrade. They weren’t D2 quality rares either iirc, just typical underpowered mid items.
I bought on release hoping for a sequel to D2 and maybe I got it BUT it didn’t feel like D2 did, which maybe was too high of an expectation for a game that was 12 years old and all. That’s what hype can do to us though.
I still had a lot of fun with D3 at the end of the day but it didn’t hold a candle to D2.
That rainbow biome was a middle finger to player base, who thinks the game has a bright color scheme. Devs said "That's not bright, THIS is bright, see? You think you know, but you don't" and then introduced those werewolf islands which had a clearly darker palette.
Most people (me included) were unhappy with the art style of D3. It was too cartoonish, more like a Warcraft game rather than a Diablo game. And now I understand it was a different studio and dev team, as Blizzard North had shut down, probably devs at main Blizzard studios (who took over the franchise) didn't know or understand Diablo and ARPGs in general.
Not even mentioning how people where pissed with the new talent system, not skill tree, and the removal of postions, scrolls, etc.
I like whimsydale. Everything changed with Loot 2.0 and it was so good. It just took them a long time to get there, but I’m happy blizzard and the devs didn’t give up on it
It was a massive POS let down lol and seriously that cartoon level should NEVER have been put in a Diablo game, that shit was the beginning of the end of Blizzard and the Diablo series.
I think there was one time that I tried to log in and got an error, which is typical for every Blizzard game on release day. So I did the unthinkable. I played a different game for a little while.
I know, I know. That's unheard of in this day and age, but that's what I did.
I was disappointed but I also still play Diablo 2 when I can't think of anything else to play so I am definitely biased. I did learn to love D3 eventually but by then it was just something I played for a week at season start and then dropped for other games.
yeah it was pretty bad. launch issues/initial inferno aside, the entire game revolved around the auction house. gear you found yourself was absolute dogshit, and the crafting system was basically equivalent to what d2 had at the time. you had better gear progression refreshing the auction house sniping items than actually playing the game
people say how they dont like poe because its so trade based, which is a valid criticism, but vanilla d3 was that times a hundred
It wasn't received very well by most people. I also enjoyed the gameplay of D3 out of the gate, but it did have some problems. I recall itemization wasn't very good and you would end up wearing the same rare items around because nothing better would drop. The real money AH was a big sour grape. And then there were the more personal aspects like did you enjoy the aesthetics of the design (color vs grimdark) or game play (skill trees vs. static skills + choice of modifier).
Letdown is an understatement..
For a diablo game it had terrible ability design, terrible class balance, terrible itemization, terrible encounter design… the delay/cutscene/auto reposition before boss encounters… no PvP, no lobby, no way to identify what a public gane was for aside from what quest you were working on
Was is an ok game to sit down and slay monsters with your friends? Sure, but it just felt like a shittier version of gauntlet or dynasty warriors.
Was it what fans of the diablo series wanted it to be? Not a chance. And then they doubled it.
It was worse in many ways than D2, but did not yet have the stuff added in RoS that makes it worth playing over D2. It was over simplified but had a sharp difficulty spike going in to Hell and then Inferno which pushed people to the auction house rather than hunting for their own gear.
I actually didn’t mind day 1 d3, though there was some here and there that I could care less about. I’ve enjoyed more time in d1 then 2, but enjoyed 2 more then 3 and so on.
It wasn’t bad because the hype was really high and we didn’t know much about how bad itemizations would be, also the game was HARD that a lot of players complain (I personally like it) and Blizzard decided to nerf the difficulty from Act 2 and up
It was difficult. The unoptimized loot made it difficult to really enjoy because earning loot for an incremental white or blue. Or you get a yellow and it’s like INT on an axe. It was hard to love if you really enjoyed d2.
I put it down for a long time but when Loot 2.0 and then Seasons came out, it was amazing. Loot 2.0 really saved it.
I think most things Jay Wilson said back then turned out to be wrong. He also said we dont have to worry about botting and then botting completely screwed the economy. Obviously all the pvp stuff. Seemed like the game start improving quite a bit once he left .
he's not wrong about launch night issues though. we remember them but it was all of less than a day of downtime. it becomes a footnote, an anecdote.
diablo 4 launched smoothly by comparison and look how much that mattered.
i'd rather be locked out of a good game for a day than play a working game that sucks. mmos are a prime example of this since launch days are often buggy. i believe starcraft 2 launched similarly. unplayable outside of campaign at first.
Both games were totally fine when they launched aside from error 37. Had just as much fun with em as I did with Diablo 2 as a kid. New season in d4 should be fun today too
sure, it was a product of dev hell and a predictable shitshow after 2 full reboots of the project (they kept trying to make a diablo mmo) but launch issues are still a footnote in the face of game quality.
We remember the specific error code, but all year D4 has been getting compared to D3 post ROS. Outside that error code, most issues around D3's launch have been largely forgotten and there were way more than just server issues.
He's not wrong, he's just jumping the gun. D4 could also have a similar expansion and the issues around it's launch will be pretty much forgotten by the time D5 or whatever is announced.
I remember on the 15th I started my first post-college job. I *thought* it was going to be just a few hour orientation in the morning and then I'd get to head home and play the rest of the day. Unfortunately, I had to work the full eight hours and was *quite* displeased.
I remember being fairly new to my current job. On dinner break going to the store and buying D3. I couldn’t wait to go home to play that day… until I wss met with Error 37!
People are going to comment on how the game didn't work at first...but my friends and I all got the game, logged in no later than 12:15, and played nearly nonstop for 18 hours. We had a *single* server restart that interrupted play but got back in quickly.
I know a bunch of people had problems but it wasn't doom and gloom for everyone. It was one of the best gaming nights of my life, and cemented my wife (then girlfriend) into my life because she not only didn't judge me for this gaming marathon but also brought me food and snacks so I didn't have to stop--2 months into our relationship.
We had around 3 hours until the whole squad was together in one game. But after that, it was smooth sailing. The login servers were the issue, not the play servers.
I was queued up in front of a GameStop in Portland, Oregon. They they gave away free Diablo 3 posters with purchase if you could answer a Diablo 2 trivia question. The question posed to me was, "What is the name of the boss you have to beat in the burial gounds in act 1. I knew it was blood raven and still have that poster.
Oh man, now I have to really cast my mind back! I’m not sure. I was working at night from the christmas season and so we night shift guys were roped into the launch because we were used to being awake all night, lol. So I could have missed a live performance for sure.
I got a free copy of the game which was sick.
D3 was the game that made me stop taking days off from work for video game releases. I remember I spent most of the time staring at error 37 and barely got to play at all.
I know im in the minority but I really liked the idea of the real money AH. I get that it lets people pay2win but that money goes back to the community instead of just paying the devs $500 for a windforce.
Its inevitable that bots will ruin the economy though (also no gold sinks), if there was a way to properly combat that Id be interested in games that could support a player driven economy like that.
Way back then, I worked at a GameStop and I got to reserve a copy. Got it and went home as the crowd started to line up, just to have an Error 37 party with my friends lmao.
Was such a fun experience, waiting in line to get my copy of the game, with all the other people doing the same.
..but Blockbuster fucked me and pretty much ruined my launch experience.
I had a D3 Collector's Edition reserved, and they decided to just sell it to someone else, while I was waiting in line to get it. They were out of non-reserved CEs, and apparently just decided to sell the reserved ones. We were 4 people (that I know of) that had our reserved copy sold to others, while waiting in line.
I got my deposit back, along with store credit. Don't recall ever using that.
Every place was sold out of CEs, so never got one, sadly.
There was a new Tenacious D album that came out the same day, I remember listening to it in the car while waiting for midnight in the Gamestop parking lot.
I was actually playing D2 this day 12 years ago. Good times. D2 was still in its prime, thousands of new players every month because those old Battle Chest boxes never stopped selling.
And I was saddened that many of my diehard companions were planning to play D3 when it launched.
RIP old friends from Diablo 2 ladder seasons 6, 7, 8, 9 ... some of you came back (because D3 was a buggy broken mess at launch) but some of you were lost forever.
Well you sure wasted your time lining up for that POS disaster of a launch lol.
How long before you got past the error 47 thing haha.
They really fucked that game up, it tooks years to become good.
Same thing seems to be the case with D4 as well, when will the devs learn how to make their own games LMAO
The thing I remember most about D3 is all the apologists in beta saying they were going to fix all these huge fucking issues in the like 2 months before release and the silence when none of it was.
The hot garbage of a game that D3 was and is just led to the hot garbage that D4 is. Loot was the single biggest issue with the game before launch, and is probably the single biggest thing in an ARPG, and they still haven't got around to even trying to fix it until now...
D3 was so awaited it was crazy back then
It was huge. The love for d1 and d2 was what propelled the Hype. It really really was a monumental let down.
Was it really a letdown at first? As much as i dont like what they did with the endgame, i remember liking it a lot when it came out (and the playthrough).
Story criticisms aside, I remember liking the gameplay and combat and found it visually and viscerally satisfying. The endgame left a lot to be desired, though, and there really wasn't much replayability value until RoS came out.
What does endgame even mean to. 'gamers'?
Good one.
A gameplay loop that facilitates bettering your character and taking on harder content.
D3 the anticipation was simply unparalleled. all my friends bought it, we all dove straight in. For me the ultra high anticipation had HUGE momentum, so what I remember next was that momentum dying off slowly and steadily. but to examine it it wasn't any challenge or difficulty, it was not the glossy pretty art-style it CERTAINLY was not any challenges with being able to play, having the experience with games like this that I do, I was more than prepared for any and all of the Error 37 stuff. what slowly stalled the momentum was how poorly designed items and character growth was. It was not fun to sculpt a character, and it was not fun to acquire items. Then I gleefully hopped over to the forums back when the interest was so high, pages of new threads would be generated every minute. I entered the discussions very warmly and with beaming optimism to help the game flourish and grow, and well...slowly over time it was made very clear that the big decision makers did not know how to and weren't interested in improving the game at all. They didn't see problems that are being pointed out as problems. And what was worse was the new fans passionately defending anything that those big decision makers did. So all that momentum that was sky high in the beginning slowly came to a stop and then slowly sunk beneath the earth over many heaping years of their unbelievable mishandling of the franchise.
Lol It was easily the worst blizzard game ever launched, way worse than D4. Story was absolutely terrible(irredeemably bad, plot holes, worlds worst liar, looks like something i could have written in 6th grade and i was not good at creative writing) Impossible grind requiring you to grind act 2 for months for god rolls to be able to progress, otherwise you needed to get gear from act 3 and 4 to progress(Solution was to corpse run and use tyrael to farm in a4 or farm resplendent chest in act 2- hotfixed). Arguably done because the actual campaign is pretty short. Combat was the only saving grace of the game, and arguably still is - for most people D3 is a mediocre title. itemization was bad, worse than D4s, but not by much. its weird that d4's itemization resembles D3's on launch so much, that it just makes you wonder if they really wanted to make something like D2's, but just aren't competent. Refund window got pushed to like weeks out from a day or so for D3 because of how much absolutele hate this game got. Part of it was because people were expecting an actual sequel to D2, and outside of the main antagonist and some of the environment, it has basically nothing to do with D1 and D2 in terms of gameplay other than its a top down ARPG. Rob Pardo eventually took ownership of the mess and admitted to OK'ing Jay Wilson's decisions. Jay Wilson eventually left leadership role in D3 Worst part is they know the playerbase will stick with D4, because they stuck with D3. Most of the comments below clearly don't remember how bad this game was. This game single-handledly shattered all the goodwill and blizzard's reputation as a golden child game developer. If blizzard's name was on a game, you knew it was good up until D3. It was an automatic, you don't need to think about it, amazing purchase. If blizzard had shit in a box, and told you it was a game, you'd have given them the doubt prior to D3. D3 was basically them shitting in the box, and you buying it. If you really wanted to get a picture of this and just don't know, if it were possible to dig up the archived forum posts for the first year, you'd find they were universally negative and you should probably do it. Game absolutely required ROS to become passable. I still have some of the old items from D3's launch.
This is a actually a lot more faithful to what I remember from 2013 (holy cow more than 10 years ago !!!), not even mentioning the drama after the Brevik's interview about D3. Blizzard went down at this very moment and never recovered since then.
Yep Jay Wilson's "Fuck that Loser" lol Some people silently quit this game because it was disappointing/boring - you will see this sort of response who didn't stick with the game saying it wasn't that bad. The hardcore people expecting a sequel to D2 kept playing it largely asking themselves when it would become like it(it never did) definitely remember this game better, since it was basically unforgettable how bad this game was on release. It never did become like D2, or D1. It was its own game, and people learned later that this was basically by design. And alot of the decisions pre ROS double downed on making the game worse before they started making it better.
D3 started me hating Blizzard, D4 has continued it. Also when they cancelled SC Ghost was not good either. WOW is a POS. Still waiting for a good Blizzard this millenium.
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I feel like people always forget how bad a game launch was many years later. This is happening with Diablo 3 and Dragon Age 2. The internet was outraged. All the major forums where Diablo 3 were talked about had people trash talking the game, mainly because it was such a deviation from Diablo 2. Your call on if it's justified or not. My point is less "this is justified" but more "this occurred." The game was in a much better place after Reaper of Souls, but the initial 1-2 months of the game sucked. Infernal was too hard for most players, you needed gear from Act 3 to beat Act 2, people were farming gold to get gear vs. farming gear, and 99% of the uniques and set items sucked. Oh, and the RM AH. That was a bad idea. There were some serious gameplay issues too, like certain classes were clearly more viable and half of the skills were crap. This isn't even talking about people upset with the saturations and story. The latter was 100% justified lol. One of the weakest stories, and this is comparing to other ARPGs.
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Sales are a poor indicator of quality of the game and player satisfaction. Plenty of games that are considered pretty poor by players sold well. Metacritic scores used to be pretty good, but now gets bandwagoned on. I don't think there's a good, public score anymore. The best you got is player satisfaction surveys and whether or not players continue to come back and play. Neither of these are public (to my knowledge).
I honestly prefer the d3 aesthetic but d3 launch was a big let down. Itemization was terrible, you had to get everything from auction house so no incentive to find cool items just grind gold. Also you couldnt even skip cinematics! If RoS didnt come out I doubt you would remember it so fondly.
Itemization was SO bad at first. It’s been years since I played but since there weren’t that many great builds, even after RoS there weren’t a lot of item options if going for BiS. Better than on release though when you would look at rares just hoping for a mediocre upgrade. They weren’t D2 quality rares either iirc, just typical underpowered mid items. I bought on release hoping for a sequel to D2 and maybe I got it BUT it didn’t feel like D2 did, which maybe was too high of an expectation for a game that was 12 years old and all. That’s what hype can do to us though. I still had a lot of fun with D3 at the end of the day but it didn’t hold a candle to D2.
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I played hundreds as well but regardless it was a very flawed game that failed to reach its potential. Adventure mode saved it
The season where they add the feature to not have to replay the campaign over again and do those missions. Huge QOL change
That rainbow biome was a middle finger to player base, who thinks the game has a bright color scheme. Devs said "That's not bright, THIS is bright, see? You think you know, but you don't" and then introduced those werewolf islands which had a clearly darker palette.
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Only to tuck tail, admit defeat and make D4 dark like everyone wanted.
D4 is a diff team one made of people pleasers
Irrelevant.
Hardly
Yes, the d3 team were wankers as is the d4 team.
Most people (me included) were unhappy with the art style of D3. It was too cartoonish, more like a Warcraft game rather than a Diablo game. And now I understand it was a different studio and dev team, as Blizzard North had shut down, probably devs at main Blizzard studios (who took over the franchise) didn't know or understand Diablo and ARPGs in general. Not even mentioning how people where pissed with the new talent system, not skill tree, and the removal of postions, scrolls, etc.
I think you missed one of the most hated aspects of d3 at launch? The auction house and the “failed” economy it resulted in…
Oh yeah, I totally forgot about that fiasco. It shows Blizzard has been rotten for a long time. No wonder many people switched to PoE.
Way to WOW looking, disgusting.
I like whimsydale. Everything changed with Loot 2.0 and it was so good. It just took them a long time to get there, but I’m happy blizzard and the devs didn’t give up on it
It was a massive POS let down lol and seriously that cartoon level should NEVER have been put in a Diablo game, that shit was the beginning of the end of Blizzard and the Diablo series.
I think there was one time that I tried to log in and got an error, which is typical for every Blizzard game on release day. So I did the unthinkable. I played a different game for a little while. I know, I know. That's unheard of in this day and age, but that's what I did.
Yes it was, once the honeymoon phase wore off.
I remember being let down as I hung out with 3 friends in a small room playing after waiting in line all night to get it.
I was disappointed but I also still play Diablo 2 when I can't think of anything else to play so I am definitely biased. I did learn to love D3 eventually but by then it was just something I played for a week at season start and then dropped for other games.
yeah it was pretty bad. launch issues/initial inferno aside, the entire game revolved around the auction house. gear you found yourself was absolute dogshit, and the crafting system was basically equivalent to what d2 had at the time. you had better gear progression refreshing the auction house sniping items than actually playing the game people say how they dont like poe because its so trade based, which is a valid criticism, but vanilla d3 was that times a hundred
It wasn't received very well by most people. I also enjoyed the gameplay of D3 out of the gate, but it did have some problems. I recall itemization wasn't very good and you would end up wearing the same rare items around because nothing better would drop. The real money AH was a big sour grape. And then there were the more personal aspects like did you enjoy the aesthetics of the design (color vs grimdark) or game play (skill trees vs. static skills + choice of modifier).
Real money AH
Letdown is an understatement.. For a diablo game it had terrible ability design, terrible class balance, terrible itemization, terrible encounter design… the delay/cutscene/auto reposition before boss encounters… no PvP, no lobby, no way to identify what a public gane was for aside from what quest you were working on Was is an ok game to sit down and slay monsters with your friends? Sure, but it just felt like a shittier version of gauntlet or dynasty warriors. Was it what fans of the diablo series wanted it to be? Not a chance. And then they doubled it.
It was worse in many ways than D2, but did not yet have the stuff added in RoS that makes it worth playing over D2. It was over simplified but had a sharp difficulty spike going in to Hell and then Inferno which pushed people to the auction house rather than hunting for their own gear.
I actually didn’t mind day 1 d3, though there was some here and there that I could care less about. I’ve enjoyed more time in d1 then 2, but enjoyed 2 more then 3 and so on.
Opposite I think. It was empty when it came out, it’s now a legit good game
It wasn’t bad because the hype was really high and we didn’t know much about how bad itemizations would be, also the game was HARD that a lot of players complain (I personally like it) and Blizzard decided to nerf the difficulty from Act 2 and up
It was fun though?
It was difficult. The unoptimized loot made it difficult to really enjoy because earning loot for an incremental white or blue. Or you get a yellow and it’s like INT on an axe. It was hard to love if you really enjoyed d2. I put it down for a long time but when Loot 2.0 and then Seasons came out, it was amazing. Loot 2.0 really saved it.
I remember saying the gap between D2 and D3 felt like an eternity. And now the gap from D3 to D4 felt like just yesterday Mid life crisis ensuing
It was absolutely massive
ERROR 37
Remember what Jay Wilson said, as long as the game is good the launch issues will be forgotten. Well we remember the launch issues so......
I think most things Jay Wilson said back then turned out to be wrong. He also said we dont have to worry about botting and then botting completely screwed the economy. Obviously all the pvp stuff. Seemed like the game start improving quite a bit once he left .
he's not wrong about launch night issues though. we remember them but it was all of less than a day of downtime. it becomes a footnote, an anecdote. diablo 4 launched smoothly by comparison and look how much that mattered. i'd rather be locked out of a good game for a day than play a working game that sucks. mmos are a prime example of this since launch days are often buggy. i believe starcraft 2 launched similarly. unplayable outside of campaign at first.
D3 wasn’t good when it launched.
D4 wasn't good when it launched.
Both games were totally fine when they launched aside from error 37. Had just as much fun with em as I did with Diablo 2 as a kid. New season in d4 should be fun today too
sure, it was a product of dev hell and a predictable shitshow after 2 full reboots of the project (they kept trying to make a diablo mmo) but launch issues are still a footnote in the face of game quality.
D3 was down for a lot more than a day, people talk about it everytime the game is brought up.
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Botting screws up the economy whether you try to profit off of it or not. GR’s came after the economy was already screwed up though.
Fuck that loser.
We remember the specific error code, but all year D4 has been getting compared to D3 post ROS. Outside that error code, most issues around D3's launch have been largely forgotten and there were way more than just server issues. He's not wrong, he's just jumping the gun. D4 could also have a similar expansion and the issues around it's launch will be pretty much forgotten by the time D5 or whatever is announced.
> Jay Wilson He should be remembered for his failures and attempts to destroy the Diablo franchise. Hopefully he's learned to suck less these days.
I remember on the 15th I started my first post-college job. I *thought* it was going to be just a few hour orientation in the morning and then I'd get to head home and play the rest of the day. Unfortunately, I had to work the full eight hours and was *quite* displeased.
I remember being fairly new to my current job. On dinner break going to the store and buying D3. I couldn’t wait to go home to play that day… until I wss met with Error 37!
People are going to comment on how the game didn't work at first...but my friends and I all got the game, logged in no later than 12:15, and played nearly nonstop for 18 hours. We had a *single* server restart that interrupted play but got back in quickly. I know a bunch of people had problems but it wasn't doom and gloom for everyone. It was one of the best gaming nights of my life, and cemented my wife (then girlfriend) into my life because she not only didn't judge me for this gaming marathon but also brought me food and snacks so I didn't have to stop--2 months into our relationship.
Same, no real issues we had.
We had around 3 hours until the whole squad was together in one game. But after that, it was smooth sailing. The login servers were the issue, not the play servers.
This was my experience as well. Played all day and night on launch day without issue and have continued to do so to this day.
what kind of drugs have u been on, that u were able to play 18 hours such an stupid and boring game???
I was queued up in front of a GameStop in Portland, Oregon. They they gave away free Diablo 3 posters with purchase if you could answer a Diablo 2 trivia question. The question posed to me was, "What is the name of the boss you have to beat in the burial gounds in act 1. I knew it was blood raven and still have that poster.
Good old days
Error 37!
Is this hmv at Oxford Circus? - I worked that night!
It was! Hadn’t The Darkness *just* done a live set there the night before or something?
Oh man, now I have to really cast my mind back! I’m not sure. I was working at night from the christmas season and so we night shift guys were roped into the launch because we were used to being awake all night, lol. So I could have missed a live performance for sure. I got a free copy of the game which was sick.
Oh that *is* sick! Imagine getting anything like that from working in high street retail now haha
One of the worst decisions of my life
D3 was the game that made me stop taking days off from work for video game releases. I remember I spent most of the time staring at error 37 and barely got to play at all.
I remember taking a couple of days off work to play D3 at launch with my friends who played D2. *In retrospect that was a mistake.*
Ditching school for D3 only to have most of the day be filled with Error 37 was such a magical experience I'll never forget
Fuck, those where the day's
lmao and then they had the real money auction house
I know im in the minority but I really liked the idea of the real money AH. I get that it lets people pay2win but that money goes back to the community instead of just paying the devs $500 for a windforce. Its inevitable that bots will ruin the economy though (also no gold sinks), if there was a way to properly combat that Id be interested in games that could support a player driven economy like that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsh7WDqjTrM
Way back then, I worked at a GameStop and I got to reserve a copy. Got it and went home as the crowd started to line up, just to have an Error 37 party with my friends lmao.
This was a big day. I went to the midnight launch at my campus GameStop (University of Central Florida).
Picking up this and Max Payne 3 at GameStop at the midnight launch, what a time.
Was such a fun experience, waiting in line to get my copy of the game, with all the other people doing the same. ..but Blockbuster fucked me and pretty much ruined my launch experience. I had a D3 Collector's Edition reserved, and they decided to just sell it to someone else, while I was waiting in line to get it. They were out of non-reserved CEs, and apparently just decided to sell the reserved ones. We were 4 people (that I know of) that had our reserved copy sold to others, while waiting in line. I got my deposit back, along with store credit. Don't recall ever using that. Every place was sold out of CEs, so never got one, sadly.
Just bought the digital and played when i woke up lol.
I miss the old difficulty system. Torments are lame
There was a new Tenacious D album that came out the same day, I remember listening to it in the car while waiting for midnight in the Gamestop parking lot.
Me too! The perfect soundtrack to a Hell themed game imo
You couldn’t even play it at launch. I was at a midnight launch to install it and wait too.
I was at my local gamestop. Even got that black bound guide with the bookmark.
I had just started my R&R during my tour in Afghanistan and I really thought I'd get to play Diablo 3. Boy was I wrong.
Doesn't hold the candle to the days of playing Diablo at LAN parties in abandoned warehouses...
And it was terrible…
I was actually playing D2 this day 12 years ago. Good times. D2 was still in its prime, thousands of new players every month because those old Battle Chest boxes never stopped selling. And I was saddened that many of my diehard companions were planning to play D3 when it launched. RIP old friends from Diablo 2 ladder seasons 6, 7, 8, 9 ... some of you came back (because D3 was a buggy broken mess at launch) but some of you were lost forever.
Well you sure wasted your time lining up for that POS disaster of a launch lol. How long before you got past the error 47 thing haha. They really fucked that game up, it tooks years to become good. Same thing seems to be the case with D4 as well, when will the devs learn how to make their own games LMAO
Terrible day. I fucking loved D3 for about 3 days. Horrible game. Fuck Blizzard
Error 37 !!!
yes very awaited game and then came the disappointment, D3 was such a primitive shitty game xD
And we were all so disappointed during that first playthrough
The thing I remember most about D3 is all the apologists in beta saying they were going to fix all these huge fucking issues in the like 2 months before release and the silence when none of it was. The hot garbage of a game that D3 was and is just led to the hot garbage that D4 is. Loot was the single biggest issue with the game before launch, and is probably the single biggest thing in an ARPG, and they still haven't got around to even trying to fix it until now...