Tuesday (15 May) - Diablo 3

Tuesday (15 May) - Diablo 3

At midnight on the 15th of May, Diablo 3 was officially released. I know of one friend who was awake at midnight. His report: "As soon as 1201 hit I was anxiously trying to log into the game to get a whiff of the sweet aroma of demons and death as glimpse of world’s first to log on achievements flashed in my eyes! ;) Sadly it took me about 10 tries and a few minutes to get past the log-in screen, and then when I finally got to the character select screen it was so laggy that I couldn’t even create my character. . . Overall I spent about 15-20 doing nothing!"

I made my first attempt to download the game on Tuesday morning. I probably tried twenty times without getting past "Updating Setup Files," which would hang at about 40% and then do nothing. I couldn't even get to the actual download of the game. I read through the technical Support forums and tried every plausible tip. And then I started trying implausible tips, and even some stupid tips - like making changes to Microsoft Explorer settings even though that program had nothing to do with anything if you didn't actually use it, which I don't.

Along about 7pm I finally found the culprit that was hanging up the process - it's called "agent.exe" and it's used to assist in installing programs. Well, it's "assistance" was causing the problem. The solution was to delete it from the computer. And then things started working. From that point forward, it took about an hour to get the game fully downloaded and installed.

Blizzard complained that my video card was a piece of crap, even though it met the minimum requirements. I told Blizzard to shut up and logged in anyway. There are some opening video clips, but I'd already seen them online before the game launched. I went to the character screen. Even with my crappy card the resolution and detail is pretty good. Better than WoW, which should be expected given it's a new game. Yet, it is much like WoW in the way the character screen is set up. I would learn that it is a lot like WoW in a lot of ways.

The first thing to do was to create a character. I've known for months that I would be playing this game, but didn't put much thought - ok, no thought - to what I would name that first character. I wanted my first toon to be a Barbarian, which is the class of character I used in both Diablo 1 and 2. I was tempted to start with a female character, but the female barbarian was eye tearing ugly. I thought about making another Wildshard, but decided I wanted to start fresh with this game. Again, without a whole lot of thought, my first Diablo 3 toon came to be known as Barbedwire.

I'll get into all of the details in a second post. It's 2:30am and I've been playing a good while now. Barbwire is level 7. I'm loving this game so far. Good night!