EPTAlarm clock goes off at 1:45, giving me enough time to have a piece of my wife’s coffee cake and a bagel, and get most of the way ready for my day before 2 am. Some of you may be thinking – what hellish job does this man have? But you’ve got it all wrong. My job this morning is awesome. I am a Diablo 3 barbarian – at least that’s what I patiently explained to the servers for about the next 50 minutes. I’ve heard that is actually remarkably short compared to the wait some people faced. I saw a friend of mine come online with a character and get really pumped at three o’clock that he got in. Apparently some people were in queues for hours. Unfortunately for him, he disconnected about 5 minutes later, and I didn’t see him back online until his stream of cussing greeted me at just before 4 am. (My response: "Error 300008: You have no friends.")
The game was fun. I played in the beta and thought it was pretty dull, but as it turns out that’s because there was less than an hour of real content there. I won’t say it was *hard* - but then I haven’t gotten to the higher difficulty modes, but there were a few times I would’ve died if I didn’t use a potion. I had fun with it this morning though – maybe it’s just been too long since I played an action RPG.
I am continuously amused by how much they put into making the story of this game, when most of it is horribly contrived (just saying, I don’t consider being asked to fetch two statues in the middle of a quest to fetch 3 sword fragments to be “story depth”). But then, that’s the action RPG genre in a nutshell. If it had a great plot, it would just be an RPG.
Next thing I know, I’m level 14 and my son is awake and emphatically gesturing at me that I am supposed to be upstairs taking my shower right now. He’s off by about a half hour, but then Diablo is a bit gory for a 2 year old, and I don’t know what the cinematics are going to show either. I’ve forgotten how fun and mind-numbing dungeon crawls can be in games like this. And hey, I’m not the nerd I used to be – so it’s going to take a while longer, but I think It’s going to be a really fun ride.
Cheers Blizzard!
