It sucks. Why?

It seems the game basically consists of one popup and one button. Here’s a screenshot:

Of course I realize that there’s much more to Diablo 3. And I’ll probably like it. But what good is good gameplay, nice graphics, and polished character classes for your action RPG if you can’t actually play it?

I am absolutely sure that Blizzard employs competent people. Anything else would simply make no sense; and since none of their launches are ever smooth, I guess we can conclude they decide not to invest enough money into the infrastructure to cushion the launch peaks. Saves them money in the long run, of course.

But if the company doesn’t want to handle the peaks, then they should not hype the game in such a way as to generate peaks. Open up the servers before you start selling the game. Then you’ll have a more organic log-in behavior.

The worst is that nobody managed to edit the little “breaking news” box on the startscreen to let the players know what’s happening.

I am really, really tired of games companies not doing their job. I’ve actually created a “blacklist” after the Mass Effect 3 debacle, committing myself to never buying a Bioware title again. Well, Blizzard, congratulations. You just made my list. I am sorry to tell you that you will never sell Titan to me, whatever that will turn out to be. I’ll still play Diablo 3, but it’s the last of my money you will see.

Update, the next day: Well, I guess my sarcastic comments came around to haunt me, from a karma point of view. 19 hours and 16 minutes after launch, I still can not play the game I bought because the servers are overloaded. Again or still, whatever. This is a textbook example of how not to launch a game. And be that as it may, I am one annoyed geek.

Until I have time to write a formal review, here’s some screenshots to whet your appetite…

• Zone design is great, the zones look really nice.
• Quests are much less annoying – there are of course still FedEx- and kill-ten-grue-type-quests, but over all it is MUCH more imaginative, and has many nice extras (for example there’s a quest to free Murloc babies, which has got to be ones of the cutest things in a video game ever).
• Death Knights are actually a fun melee class, which I had not thought would ever happen; their starter “campaign” is also really well designed.
• Less reputation grind… it seems.

The bad:

• It’s more of the same. Really. If you have played WoW at all, you have played the expansion. Unless you are a WoW ultra-nerd, you should get tired of it really quickly.
• Inflation got knocked up another notch. My mage made 500g profit, just by questing, in three days of game-play.
• It absolutely sucks to be a new player at the moment, or to play a low level character. Unless you are level 70 or higher, and thus able to consume the WOTLK content, you will play this game alone for a long time.

Bottom line:

Wotlk gets 3/5. This is what the first expansion should have been like – Northrend totally puts Outland to shame. There’s enough to keep the old timers happy for a while, and some of the new additions are quite nice, but it is not compelling enough to warrant anything more than a “for fans” recommendation.