Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Diablo III: Blizzard lays an egg

In case you're a normal person leading a normal life--in other words, you work for a living, you go to bed at a decent hour, you get up early, feed your kids, get them off to school and then head off to work for a long day--here's a newsflash you may have missed: Blizzard's Diablo III launch has been a colossal failure.

Word spread quickly when players on Asian servers found they could not log in and play. The top error addressed was an issue with licenses for digital versions of the game. The Asia launch was declared a disaster. You can read all about it in the Battle.net forums.

Predictably, the US launch was just as successful. The phrase of the day is "Error 37," although a good argument could also be made for a number of other errors. To get a feel for how many unhappy gamers there are, all you have to do is drop in on the Diablo subreddit and join the error message upvoting fun. The bottom line for me is, I ain't playing.

I find myself wondering how many of those other folk occupying GameStop at midnight last night rushed home, ravaged the packaging, waited half an hour for the game to install only to find they couldn't even log in. Now I think I may understand why the game takes so long to install: All along it wasn't that there was so much data to copy; it was because Blizzard was stalling for time. "Um, here, listen to this. It's the music from the original Diablo. I'm sure you'll enjoy it! Oh, and while you're listening to that, here's the entire Diablo story told in finely drawn sketches."

Yeah, yeah, that'll work.

We're left to scratch our heads and wonder exactly what Blizzard was doing during those beta test periods and during that open beta. After all, isn't that what the open beta was all about--getting ready for the big launch? I cannot begin to express what a huge and preposterous failure this is. At this point, no game company, least of all Blizzard, can say, "Oh, we just did not anticipate ..." Not after all those other launch-day failures that should have served as great big lessons for ambitious launches.

A big point of failure in all of this is the rise in popularity of the internet-only multiplayer model. Once upon a time, LAN play was king. Companies, including Blizzard, strongly supported LAN gaming. Does anybody remember the spawn copies specifically for network gaming? The very idea would seem like utter insanity to today's gaming companies. Spawn copies? What am I, stupid?

Would we even be reading anything about this launch failure if Diablo III supported local single-player and LAN play without logging on to Battle.net servers? This would barely be a blip on the radar. Oh, Battle.net servers are down. So what? I can play locally.

I'm sure many gamers--particularly the Blizzard fanboys (you know who you are)--will shrug dismissively. Blizzard will get it ironed out. They always do. And I'm sure they will. In the meantime, I've just spent 60 bucks on what out of the box looks like a fresh, steaming nugget of excrement. In two weeks time, many will forget these hiccoughs. But I can't and won't, largely because I come from a different era of gaming, an era in which terms such as "launch failure" or "launch disaster" didn't exist in the gaming lexicon. Oh, sure, there were bugs to deal with; there have always been and always will be bugs. Some bugs are harmless, some are showstoppers.

When the original Diablo hit the shelves, I found myself in the closest thing to gaming nirvana I can remember. Before the game was released, I played the demo over and over and over again. Remember demos? Some companies still release those. I simply could not kill the Butcher too many times. I even bought the expansion pack developed by a different company. The expansion was considered so bad that few people even want to admit it existed at all. But I played it and liked it. I and my colleagues even stayed late after work one day to play Diablo on the company network. It was a huge LAN party. There's another term that will soon be gone from the gaming lexicon: LAN party. Remember those?

Eventually, I'll be playing Diablo III once the kinks are ironed out. But I can't help feeling that the good old days of gaming are gone forever. Here's to the future.


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