The game should be judged on how good it is for the genre it's in and to be straight about it, it's easily the best ARPG out right now and so it should be a 10. However, due to the online-only style of it I'd give it a 9.5 - it's not the game itself that's losing the 0.5 it's the way that it's given to us.
If you can think of a single game that's better than Diablo III to come out recently in this genre, reply to this and let me know - I won't be hostile, I just honestly think this is the most fun you can get out of an ARPG ever. Please don't say Torchlight, it's a completely different approach and I respect both games equally - Torchlight 2 isn't out yet and the first Torchlight was an 8.5 game since it had no multiplayer.
@DuaneDog I think you're too far up your own ass to realise there are people out there that are better than you at certain games.
Diablo III is not easy. Diablo III on normal mode is easy. Diablo III is not normal mode, the core part of the gameplay and fun comes from a four-way co-op match on nightmare mode or higher. If Blizzard incorporated the Nightmare, Hell and Inferno modes right off the start you'd get the idiots thinking they can play the game like that, getting about an hour in and saying "*** this I'll go play something where I don't die every five seconds".
You people are so used to Oblivion style games where every creature just levels up with you so there's no real variation - this game requires you to put effort into it to get the most back.
Normal mode is for enjoying the story. Nightmare or higher is for really testing your skill.
Also, wait for PVP before you pass any judgement on what is already one of the most perfect Action-RPG releases since the start of time.
Sorry to sound full of myself with that notice, but there's something I need to clear up here.
Metacritic User-Score for this game is 4.0 at time of writing. This alone is causing a huge amount of people to not purchase the game, but let me make this clear; Diablo III is an excellent game all over with the one and only problem being the always-online single-player.
So that means if you, like almost every single user of this forum, have a broadband always-on connection, you will not have a single problem with this game. You may occasionally see a few lag spikes. You may occasionally have to wait whilst the game is updating. You may have had connectivity issues on the release day. These problems were annoying and frustrating for most, but there's something you need to understand. We live in the age of unlimited internet bandwidth and hard drive space and because of this the majority of PC games are downloaded illegally from sites such as ThePirateBay.
What does this mean? It means that if Blizzard were to make the Single Player mode offline, they would lose out on a huge amount of sales for the actual game from those that find ways to crack the single player to allow multiplayer. Yes, the game is available to torrent already but not without issues. If the torrented version is not perfected and the only imperfection of the original is online-only single-player, then I say good on Blizzard for creating a game that is actually stopping torrenters from succeeding.
TL;DRThe game's amazing. It's literally the benchmark for Action-RPG and I encourage you to spend a couple of minutes thinking of any other game in the same genre that can deliver as well as this.
Sure, you get those complaining that the game is too easy and that it's just not fun - but consider this; those that are giving metacritic scores of 0, those that are criticising what is in my opinion the game of the year, those that have actually bought the game and gave it a negative review five minutes within getting it home purely because they couldn't get online straight away... what do you think they are doing right at this minute?They're playing the game.
So, if you have any doubts about whether or not this is worth your $59.95, just take it from me that if you're a fan of the genre there is no alternative. The Torchlight series is very good and I have no doubts that the sequel will be great, amazing even - but it's not the same game and there are a huge amount of differences.
The last thing I have to say is regarding the difficulty. Yes; the game is fairly easy on normal difficulty but once you have completed it on this, which is extremely fun by the way, you get the chance to play on Nightmare mode. After this comes Hell and Inferno. I guarantee if you like your games hard you will love Inferno.
That's all I have time for. I know this will all be in vain as you'll all just dislike it because I'm all for the game, but this is what I think of the current situation. If you're hating on the game without even trying it, like many of you below me commenting on the DRM used, you have no place here.
@vfibsux That's very true about you paying for the game and so you can choose when and how to play. The only thing I can say towards your problems would be that it's actually not a problem at all. The servers have gone down a couple of times since launch, for me at least, and they are usually back up within 10 minutes anyway.
During the 10 minute break I just grab a drink or check my emails - it's back on whenever I'm done.
@Gilgamesh89 Yes, it will run on a GTS 450 and it's possible to use the DirectX 11 features, but you won't really get very good frame rates with those enabled. I'd say you could put it on low - medium graphics with no anti-aliasing.
You need to fix the part where you say: " --anything from Nvidia's GTX 400 series or ATI's 5000 series, through to the latest Kepler-powered GTX 680 or ATI's HD7970. " Not 'anything' from the GTX 400 series or HD 5000 series will work. By saying this you're just enforcing the views of those idiots that think they can just buy a system with a Phenom X6 and a HD 5450 to play games on. You should change it to GTS 450+ or HD 57xx+ cards. The GT430 will not run this at all smoothly and the HD 5450 won't even start the game. It's stupid to give false hope, some people will actually buy a new PC with a 5450 in it because you've said this. I have an idiot friend who wouldn't listen to me, saw a review saying the same thing for some of the newer Valve games and picked up a PC with 4GB RAM, Phenom 1055T and a HD 5450 because it said "1GB Graphics Card".
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