Twelve fucking years man, twelve fucking years! That is a long-ass time to wait for a game sequel to come out – you’d expect the final product to run like clockwork, right?
WRONG MUTHUFUKKAH! On the weekend I got my dirty paws on the “Starter Edition†of D3 just to see if my Macbook can handle it before I fork out R630 rand on this game.
Cause that’s a lotta flippin’ DOUGH y’know? Almost half a tank of petrol right there!
After some issues with the guest pass, I download the game (it’s nearly 8 gigs so prepare yourself for some hardcore bandwidth face-raping) and fired it up, all excited and ready to slay EVEEERRRRRYYYYYYTTTHHHIIIINNNNGGGGGG!
I got a solid 5 – 10mins of playing time, enough to choose a character, storm the gates of New Tristram, decimate about twelve undead rotters and level up to LEVEL 2!
Satisfied that it was up and running I then made the rookie mistake of logging out and carrying on with life, thinking I could just log on again in the evening and get a good couple of hours in before I hit the hay.
Boy was I wrong. Ever heard of Error 3003? How about Error 37? Google either one of those and you’ll find about a bazillion complaints about how difficult it is to actually play Diablo III.
From what I can tell, the game plays a lot better if your machine is a PC, meets the minimum requirements comfortably and is connected to a decent WiFi / fixed line.
If, like me, you are running the game on a Macbook with the bare minimum specs and a 3G line, you might as well just give up now.
I didn’t even get far enough to see how the game actually plays out when you’re getting swarmed by the minions of hell, but from what the forums say it’s buggy and generally doesn’t play well on a Mac so I don’t really have high hopes.
Of course, it didn’t help that the European server was down yesterday evening, that could have been what was causing all the errors but still, what the fuck Blizzard?!
Making us log onto the Battle.net server just to play the game is total bullshit. I fully understand that it’s the best way to guard against piracy and hacking, but it’s also the best way to alienate, frustrate and generally fuck with everyone who ever loved and played a Diablo game.
You should never have to log onto anything to play a game solo. Blizzard, you need to sort that shit out for two very simple reasons:
1. So that we can all actually PLAY THE GAME.
b. OVERNIGHT the volume of traffic on the battle.net servers will drop substantially, thus freeing them up for the guys who DO want to play multiplayer.
Needless to say, I’ll attempt to log on again tonight, and the night after that and the night after that because the 5 – 10 mins I got to play were pretty rad, even if I had to scale the graphics down so far it ended up looking like Diablo 1.
In other news, if anyone wants to hook the Tiger up with a gaming laptop, you will be HANDSOMELY rewarded… (with meatballs).
-ST
