14 DAY TRIAL // After 16 years since the release of Diablo, 12 years since Diablo II and 11 years since the Lord of Destruction expansion, Blizzard has finally released Diablo III, the next chapter in its hugely successful dungeon crawling role-playing game franchise.
Sadly, due to some of the studio’s newest ideas, like the always-on internet connection to its Battle.net servers, the launch, which happened earlier today, hasn’t been exactly smooth.
Hundreds of thousands of players were greeted with busy servers, lots of errors and even some game-breaking issues that Blizzard has already acknowledged.
While this was bound to be the case, given the popularity of the franchise and the millions of pre-orders, it’s a bit baffling that Blizzard was caught unaware.
A company that has already been through the release of several online games, including World of Warcraft and its variety of expansions, as well as StarCraft II, should have anticipated how many servers it needed for a smooth launch, especially since a stress test had already been carried out last month.
My own experience was mixed, as while I managed to easily install and play the game on my work PC, things were a bit different at home.
Here, I encountered not just an error during installation, claiming that my d3-09558-Win-final.MPQ file was corrupted, but also when I tried to log into the actual game, in the form of the dreaded Error 37, which signaled that the servers were busy.
Even so, after a bit of waiting, during which I wrote quite a few articles about the game, I finally managed to enter the game and was greeted with a very impressive experience, even if the opening segments were the same ones I had already tried out during the Diablo 3 beta stage.
Once I started playing, the errors and waiting time slowly faded away while I guided my female Demon Hunter throughout the different environments and dungeons around New Tristram.
How did your first Diablo III experience go? Did you get to play or are you still encountering issues?