I love Yatzee. Him and MovieBob are pretty much the reason I read stuff on the Escapist.

Escapist is always good for a laugh.

Yeah, not being able to play lately is getting pretty ridiculous, especially since the game is already been purchased. In other news, I found thisawesome review of D3 yesterday.

I’m really pretty happy it wasn’t me who paid for the game. 2 out of 3 times when I think “hmmm, I fancy playing some Diablo”, the servers are down. Although the having to log in to single player thing was probably the main reason I wasn’t going to buy it I did at least trust that Blizzard, of all companies, would be able to run a stable set of servers for it. I really hope that people who have a problem with this sort of thing are actually taking notice of this, and will actually not purchase the next game that tries it (rather than making lots of noise about boycotting it and then making the game the fastest selling PC title ever). Otherwise I fear this is the future.

You can, but you have to invite someone to them to start. I guess I could get someone to join me then have them leave, might keep it as a private session.



I didn't actually think of looking at the Battlenet settings. That might work.

Lol, true! I've gotten so used to not being able to pause that in games that let you pause I forget I can do it. I played through a bunch of Age of Empires Online before I found out you could pause a game; I was shocked!

As for what Xythe said, I'm totally with you, man. In WoW I always solo'd everything except for dungeons and raids for the same reason. I wanted to experience the quests at my own pace in my own order and in my own way. At least in WoW when a guildie asked to tag along I could just say "sorry" but if in D3 they can just pop into your party, that sucks.

Can you set yourself to "away" or "hidden"?

Can't you create a private game like in D2?

*Puffs on pipe* Money, dear boy.

that sounds truly obnoxious. How do game developers eff up things like that?

So, having said I wasn’t going to get it, my fiancée bought me the game for my birthday (early present). Aside from the server issues on the actual launch day (they seemed to be sorted yesterday), I have one really major complaint which didn’t pop up during the mass test weekend. The game has quite a strong atmosphere, and a fairly interesting story (so far), and I want to experience that properly. One sure fire way to ruin this for me is to put someone else there with me. I have quite a long list of friends on Battlenet, both real life friends, and people I know through my 5 year stint playing WoW. And they kept joining my game. Here’s where my complaint is, you cannot stop people just hopping in and out of your session, if they’re on your friends list, they can jump in any time they please.

I’m totally up for that once I’ve finished the story and want to mess around with some of the other content, or for playing through a second time with a different class, but for my first playthrough it’s infuriating. When you’re trying to get into a story/world, and there’s a Demon Hunter constantly spinning in circles spamming their attack while you’re getting some conversation snippets, or another player reaches an objective first and skips all the dialogue because “I did it already”, or “I just want to kill stuff”, or you die because the monsters immediately double in strength when someone else joins, even though they spawn back in town while you’re in the middle of a melee, it really ruins the experience. I seemed to spend more of my evening going, “I don’t want to sound like a dick, but could you just piss off out of my game, because you’re kind of spoiling it for me”, than I did actually playing. All it needs is a confirmation dialogue so you can say go away when someone tries to party with you (like every other game in the history of ever).

If anyone has managed to find a magic button somewhere that keeps you playing solo, I would dearly love to know about it, because I couldn’t find one.