It will continue to download stuff that’s necessary to progress through the game, but the download itself actually pauses when you hit play. The next time you open the launcher, it should be at the same percentage.
Well said! And just watch all these people calling for heads to roll, and wanting their money back, will totally forget the first 30 hours of Diablo 3 7+ years down the road while they’re still playing and enjoying D3.
I got my CE at lunch yesterday, ran home and installed it. I had to wait until after work to play, but I squeezed in 3.5 hours of play time and it was awesome! I took Friday off, so hopefully I can rock it out for about 7 hours.
The only minor network glitch was my first login attempt timed-out, tried a second time and it was smooth sailing. Like I said I played about 3.5 hours, then shut it down after just killing the Skeleton King.
I’m pretty happy so far with the game, so far everything I’ve found (armour and weapons) are much better than what I can buy, or have the blacksmith build. Mind you I have “trained” the blacksmith guy a whole bunch (his “shop” just got bigger, I think I spent about 12,000 gold to do so) and there are some pretty cool armour and weapons he can build that I can’t use yet (I’m level 9, the cool stuff is level 10 minimum).
I can’t wait to spend many more years of playtime with this game!
MtM
I finally got everything upgraded, installed and running about 7pm on Wednesday ( I had to have minor surgery on tueasday so I wasn’t home darn it) I ended having to play one area several times as the servers would kick me out about every 10 minutes and then finally I couldn’t get back in for over an hour and finnaly quit just before the Skeleton King as my hands were hurting and I died after being overwhelmed by skeletons. I used the portal I had gotten earleir so we will see if it is still there when I go back.
My son (his wizard) and my demon hunter went up against The Butcher and we died the first time because standing in fire still seems to be a bad thing. The second time around, we did a better job staying out of the fire, but the wizard got killed early on with about 75% health left on The Butcher, and I soloed that bastard for the next 3 or 4 minutes using a lot of smokescreens, bolas from a distance, and rapid fire. My son was quite impressed…
Does anyone know exactly what lives on Blizzard servers and what doesn’t?
I’m having a debate with someone, and it occurs to me that I’m not entirely sure how the server-client infrastructure works.
I’m under the impression that Diablo 3 is something akin to WOW. The art assets live on your hard drive, but the level design, the monster AI, and everything that makes up what you actually play lives on their servers and is streamed to you. Just like an MMO.
I believe it’s NOT like say SCII where the single player, and everything that made up that experience lived on your drive/came in the disc, and the program simply checked to make sure you were logged in to battle.net.
This would mean that the only way to play a pirated copy of Diablo3 would be to play on some dude’s home brewed server. Which essentially makes pirating pointless.
Am I right? Is it something in between?
I had some comp time coming to me, so I took part of the day off work to play Diablo 3. I finally experienced my first death - not the Skeleton King, surprisingly, but a damned tree in the Fields of Misery. I’m really glad you don’t have to traipse back to your body to retrieve your items. This is so much freakin’ fun, and once all my friends have it installed it’s going to be mind-blowing.
There are so many elements to this game that I imagine you could put in hundreds of hours (lord knows my husband did with Diablo II… he kept playing it right up until Diablo 3 was launched.) Good video games really are the cheapest form of entertainment.
Lol! The trees were the first thing to kill me too. Those darn plants are deadly because they can easily surround you.
I warned my party about them last night and they laughed. Pretty sure someone died.
I have no actual knowledge as to D3’s design and client/server mechanics, but your impression seems about right to me.
The biggest reason why D2 was full of interminable exploits/hacks/dupes/etc. was because so much of the game took place on your computer, where it’s relatively easy for a hacker to manipulate. Blizz tried their best to patch what they could, but the basic architecture made a permanent fix to the problems impossible.
They probably wouldn’t make the same mistakes when building D3 from the ground up, particularly now that there is a real-money auction house involved.
More than you think needs to be happening on the client, since when you DC, you lose some of your stuff and progress. If everything was on the server, that wouldn’t be happening. It definitely isn’t WoW level. Diablo 2 did the same thing, so it’s probably really close to that.
I got it working last night and stayed up till 330am playing. Having fun with my monk (trying to place his accent, some…russian dude?) Punching zombies apart and going all Chuck Norris on enemies. Havent had any difficulty so far; Skeleton king was a long fight but my heals got me through it. Looking forward to finishing putting together all 3 pieces of that sword now.
I had a very nice session tonight, playing along with my brother and some other random pubby.
I still really think the people raising hell about the launch are over-entitled gamers. Every Blizz launch has been like this. Just relax and wait a few days. Things were seamless tonight.
And as for why they need “online always” DRM - well, yeah, a big part is just to protect their game (and income) from piracy. But D1 was more or less unplayable online publicly because since most of the stuff was handled on the client side hacking made it completely broken. DII did a bit better, but there were still terrible hacks and dupes. I kinda get why they went “online-only, even for single player”. Minor inconvenience in that the servers at launch are not up to it. But major boon if they can keep the game and its economy legit without dupes and hacks.
tome the biggest drawback to only playing online is that when and if Blizzard stops supporting the game it will be unplayable. I can still play Diablo 1 on my computer if I choose to but online it is not supported anymore. How soon until blizzard decides that Diablo 2 doesn’t have enough players to support having an online prescence? The same one the next big game comes up for Diablo 3.
Those trees can be hard, until you figure out the trick to them: The tree itself isn’t too deadly; it’s the flower buds it throws that bloom into poison clouds. And when the parent tree dies, all remaining flower buds bloom immediately. So you’ve just got to make sure to get away from the buds before then.
Does anyone know if there’s a command to display your lag, like /fps in D2? I had a couple of deaths last night that I think might have been due to lag.
IIRC there is a connection/lag bar towards the bottom. It’s just a line with 3 or 5 demarcations that goes from green to red and you can mouse over it to get your ping times.
-XT
When did Diablo 2 come out? It’s still supported, you say? 2000. Twelve years ago. Last content patch was 2009.
You say you can still play Diablo I. Ok, fine. Do you? Do you really need to be absolutely sure you can still play any of these games twelve or more years after they appear on the market?
Does anyone have a guest pass they don’t need from a boxed version? i have some friends that want to try it but i bought the digital version.
I actually played both last summer, single player, not online. The point isn’t do I play but can I play. If Blizzard goes out of business (please don’t say they are too big to fail) D3 is worthless. The other versions of Diablo are still playable.
You may not think this is a valid point but you are welcome to have a differing opinion than mine.
They could always release a patch before they went under to allow people to continue playing it. It’s no guarantee, but what are the odds the game is going to become unplayable in a time frame you’d really care to play it?
I guess if there’s one company that can keep the server running, it’s Blizzard though with things being so unpredictable, you never know.
Now, if this is an EA game, I won’t touch it even with a ten foot pole. There are games which need server support going offline in just after a year.
Just guessing, but since I do web architecture for a living, fairly well-founded guesses…
Given the size of the install, most of what you see is local. Every item in the game, even the cracked sashes, has a unique ID generated by the server, and its condition and location is tracked by the server. Your character’s state - position, health, items and skills equipped, etc - is tracked by the server. The local game client gets information about entities in the world - items, monsters, map tiles, door locations, chests, etc - and displays that to you using the local assets. You interact with the world, killing monsters and picking stuff up, and those are registered with the server. Since leaving stuff like hit calculations for the local client to do would create a window for cheating, those are handled by the server. Basically, the local client is all of the UI, but the real decisions are handled server-side. The client may have the ability to get out of sync, but the server always wins.
This is also why the game requires an always-on internet connection - without the server, it’s not a game. And coding it so that it could do all that work locally in addition to handling it server-side would have been more work and more testing.