Frustrations of a casual gamer with Diablo III
- Weekly server maintenance on the US servers happens in the Australian evening. This isn’t so bad though: at least I have the occasional productive weekday evening.
- You have to start playing on the rarely challenging Normal difficulty to begin with. For most games I won’t get past 3 playthroughs, tops, and I have to waste one like this.
- You only unlock the next difficulty level on a per-character basis. So if after finishing the game with one class, I want to then try another class, well, it’s back to Normal for me. In order to try out all the characters on a sensible difficulty level, I’m going to have to play through 10 times. As previously mentioned, this is unlikely to occur.
- It doesn’t remember which bits of maps you’ve covered and which bad guys you’ve killed. This is totally awesome if you’re into dynamically generated, ever-populated worlds and annoying if you just want to finish something.
- It disconnects you from the server and loses what you’re doing if you leave it alone. This was the super-irritating thing that made me write this freaking list.
- Most of the pain-in-the-arse elements mentioned above are a side-effect of wanting to avoid cheating… in a co-op game. Who gives a fuck?[^1]
