Hi there. I am posting this because I am getting an Error 37 where I cannot play Diablo 3. Perhaps you are familiar with the error and are reading this page because the amazing reader also got Error 37.
Blizzard’s server issues are understandable at a game’s launch with especially how many more customers flooded in than was expected. Even the Auction House melting due to the craziness seems like a logical consequence from the early log-in issues. If 6 million players are shutting down the servers since it was more than Blizzard anticipated, clearly all the auction house activity would crash the Auction House.
I can tell you for sure that Blizzard is more upset at the server issues than the players are.
“Bullshit.”
“Impossible.”
“No one is more upset than I.”
“I took the day off to play…”
“I am screaming in my pillow now.”
“How can you say that?”
Yes, it’s true. Blizzard is far more upset about the servers than the players. Here is why:
1) Blizzard’s entire reputation of a gaming company is at stake here. The definition of Blizzard games is online multiplayer. If Blizzard stumbles on this, the reputation takes a hit which means future sales take a hit along with future sales of Diablo 3.
2) Blizzard is counting on the revenue from the Real Money Auction House to pay the bills. Currently, the RMAH has been delayed indefinitely. And should it appear, dealing with other people’s money is dealing with dynamite. You think people are pissed off now? These server issues are giving people incentive to never use the RMAH because they won’t trust Blizzard’s servers.
Blizzard has more to lose with these server issues than the players do. I suspect Mike Morhaime is raging at the Diablo 3 server people.
I also suspect that the game is going viral after the early adopters (all five million of them) leading to many more players trying to log in. I know people in their 40s playing the game which is unusual. Last time I saw that was with World of Warcraft and the Wii (but those 40 year olds might be an isolated incident).
Currently, I am playing all five classes simultaneously. They’re not all at Inferno yet but getting there. A few days ago, something in the game suddenly ‘clicked’ as if I finally figured it out. I’ve been playing non-stop since then.
I would like to do a more full detailed review of the game sometime in the future. There is some bad stuff like the awful story, the server issues, and imbalances at the Inferno level. But I am more interested as to why people are passionate about the game.
Diablo 3 is an Old School Game. This is not a Cinema Game. In fact, people despise the main story which has all the cinema cliches (but people love the ‘story’ told in the non-cinematic way with the follower conversations and the lore books, e.g. the ‘flavor’). There is absolutely no one taking the camera and moving it around like a movie director (e.g. 3d Mario, modern Zelda, nearly every game out there today). The camera stays fixed and everything is top down. (Shigeru Miyamoto would be quite unhappy with the game because he mistakenly thinks a 3d camera is a ‘good thing’ and allows the player more ‘freedom’. Clearly, he is referring to HIS freedom.)
Old School Gaming is a brick wall of difficulty that requires much repetition to progress. Old School Gaming also has players in a giant E-peen contest about who is more progressed than the other. Remember in the NES days about people comparing which games they could beat? Or the arcade days with the high scores?
If you took Diablo 3’s design to a Modern Game Company and pitched it, you would say:
“This is an isometric game where players do repetitious things and grind for loot that is random. The mobs and some dungeon layouts are also randomly generated. Due to the randomness, there is imbalance everywhere and no consistency of player experience. Will you give me money to make this game?”
And every Modern Game Company would say no.
Diablo 3 is more of a role playing game than most role playing games out today. I loved playing games like Final Fantasy I or IV and getting my ass kicked. Sometimes I had to go and grind for money to buy better gear (hello Dragon Quest I) or raise my levels. I found the games then totally consuming. There was no ‘story’ in the modern sense. You could say the classic RPG games had no story but only ‘flavor’. There was no cinema except in some of the Final Fantasy games where a little script went off after you killed a boss. Nowadays, RPGs are crappy cinematic stories with ‘character introspection’ with no grinding, no difficulty, because “grinding is not fun. Difficulty is not fun.” Yet, the market defies these people.
And the game is an action game loosely because you must dodge fireballs and stuff in the game. It lacks the intensity of a Classic Zelda game of course. And that shows where there is a game that the market wants that no one is making: Classic Zelda.
Aonuma hated Legend of Zelda and Zelda II because it was about grinding and killing stuff repeatedly with some good difficulty. Since Aonuma cannot even play Super Mario Brothers, he just died. Instead, he wanted a ‘story’ and was happy in Link to the Past where he could cut down grass all day and the appearance of story scripts. Then he made the game Marvelous which bombed big time in Japan. For some reason, Nintendo abandoned everything that Zelda stood for to replace it with Aonuma’s wrong ways.
The passionate Diablo 3 players are not any different than the passionate Classic Zelda players (or passionate Gauntlet players or Wizardry players). The solution is not to make a retro Zelda but to get Zelda back to what created so many passionate customers in the first place. And none of that includes puzzles or ‘story’ (both of which were non-existent in the original Zeldas). The reasons why Aonuma hates Zelda are the reasons why we love it.
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