Diablo III Launches, Already Completed in Korea Despite Rocky Start

[News Portal]

Although we here in Australia won't be able to play Diablo III until 5PM AEST, the servers have already gone live in Asia and Europe. DSO Gaming is reporting that Korean players have already smashed through the single player mode, while Just Push Start mentions that the same players have had trouble with Asia-specific error codes preventing them from playing the game. European players have overwhelmed Battle.net's login capacity and been slapped with an "Error 37", while some have experienced outages and received an "Error 75". Blizzard are moving quickly to respond to the problems, which appear to have eased for the time being.

Source: DSO, Just Push Start

Read full article by GON News

[Kinky Kel]

Derp. Obviously some difficult, uimmersive gameplay and story to smash through it so quick. Yes truly difficult.

[Marius]

Derp. Obviously some difficult, uimmersive gameplay and story to smash through it so quick. Yes truly difficult.

Of course. It was the normal difficulty completed. Which in Diablo terms is the tutorial.

The players involved are also more in it for item farming higher difficulties, so skipped everything not absolutely essential.

Personally, it took me 3-5 hours just to do the first beta content, because I was searching out every hidden area.

[garf]

Playing the beta (which was locked on Normal difficulty), I found the game very easy, but I think beating it on the higher difficulties will be a real challenge.

[Sathias]

Even if it is normal difficulty, how many hours did it take? Seems ridiculous unless they hacked/exploited it somehow.

[Marius]

About 5 hours Sathias.

It seems that D3 has a lot of skippable content. D2 by contrast had more gates.

I think if you want to look for all the hidden events/side quests it will take longer.

[Avant]

About 5 hours Sathias.

It seems that D3 has a lot of skippable content. D2 by contrast had more gates.

I think if you want to look for all the hidden events/side quests it will take longer.

That's a bit of a shame. Hopefully there is a lot of champions/rares on the optional paths. I expected it to be short though as Skel king could be done in well under an hour.

[Otto-matic]

Hope they get their stuff sorted soon so that those looking forward to it can actually play the game

[vcatkiller]

Big whoop. Skyrim can also apparently be beaten in around 2 hours as well, if you rush through like a maniac and don't stop to smell the proverbial flowers.

[Marius]

That's a bit of a shame. Hopefully there is a lot of champions/rares on the optional paths. I expected it to be short though as Skel king could be done in well under an hour.

Well, you need to understand how D3 was designed compared to D2. There were two major design changes which led to this.

1. New loot scripts.
2. Flat difficulty curve.

In D2, you farmed the bosses for items. In D3, it's the champions that give the most loot. So if you just go straight from boss to boss, you can complete the story, but that's not optimal for item hunting.

In D2, nightmare and hell modes were a little tacked on. In D3, nightmare and hell are meant to be a steady progression from normal.

[DjVu]

Why was it released so much earlier in EU/Asia? Are we just unlucky to be gated to NA timezone?

[DarkMess1ah]

Also might be worth news'ing about the free starter edition of the game:

http://us.battle.net/support/en/article ... guest-pass

on the topic of which.... any have a guest pass key they probably don't need? I mean, getting 5 in the retail box is clearly too many....

[Ashigaru]

Jesus.... 5 hours? Ridiculous....

[Tim Colwill]

Also might be worth news'ing about the free starter edition of the game:

http://us.battle.net/support/en/article ... guest-pass

Already done yesterday!

http://games.on.net/article/15599/Convi ... er_Edition

[TRB]

Big whoop. Skyrim can also apparently be beaten in around 2 hours as well, if you rush through like a maniac and don't stop to smell the proverbial flowers.

Except skyrims' speed run was done by in-house testers with years of experience with the game already.