So Diablo III came out yesterday, and I want to talk about that instead of the other big tech story eating every headline this week, because honestly Im sick of that one already and Im guessing youve read six posts about it by now.
I preordered Diablo III back in March. Paid the full sixty bucks digital, downloaded the client days ago so it'd be ready to go the second midnight hit. Ive been playing Diablo since the original came out on my dads Packard Bell in like 1997 (I was way too young for it, my mom would not have approved of the pentagrams). So this was a big deal for me. I cleared my whole evening. Told my girlfriend not to expect much conversation.
And then I logged in and got Error 37.
If you havent seen it, Error 37 is Blizzards friendly little "server is busy, try again later" message, and last night it might as well have been the only screen in the game. Diablo III requires a constant connection to Battle.net even to play single-player, offline mode was cut entirely at some point in development, and it turns out when you build a game that phones home for absolutely everything and then several million people try to log in at the exact same midnight, the servers just sort of buckle. I got in for maybe eleven minutes around 1am my time, got to the Cathedral, and then got booted with an error 3006 disconnect that dumped me back to the character select screen with none of my progress saved. Did that two more times before I gave up around 2.
Ive seen a lot of people online this morning arguing that this is what you get for always-online DRM in a single-player game, and yeah, I basically agree. I get why Blizzard wants it, it makes the auction house (the real-money one, which is its own whole conversation Im not getting into today) possible, and it cuts down piracy on day one. But when the entire pitch of "always connected" collapses the second your actual playerbase shows up, the tradeoff stops making sense. Nobody who buys a copy of Diablo III to play by themselves in their living room should need Blizzards servers to be healthy in Irvine, California for their sword to swing.
A few numbers, because I like numbers: Blizzard said something like 3.5 million copies sold or bundled with World of Warcraft subscriptions before the game was even out, and that pre-launch total made it the fastest-selling PC game ever before a single person had actually finished the intro cutscene. So the server crush wasnt exactly a surprise nobody saw coming. Im not saying I could have engineered Battle.net better than Blizzards own team, obviously I couldnt, Im a guy who writes a blog in his spare bedroom. But "we sold more copies pre-order than any PC game in history" and "we werent ready for the login surge" are two facts that dont sit well together.
Anyway. I did eventually get in properly around 10am today before work, played through the first act up to the Skeleton King, and its good! Really good, actually, the art direction on the early zones is fantastic and the itemization already feels better than Diablo II ever did at launch. Deckard Cain shows up in about the first five minutes doing his usual doom-and-gloom routine and I got genuinely nostalgic. Its just that I paid for a single-player game and my ability to play it by myself was, for a good chunk of yesterday, entirely dependent on server capacity in another state.
Im still going to play tonight. Ive got a barbarian build Ive been theorycrafting for weeks and Im not letting one bad launch night sour twelve years of waiting for this. But if you were planning on picking it up this weekend, maybe just wait until Sunday evening when the crowds thin out a little. Save yourself the staring-at-a-login-screen part and skip straight to the fun.