always on
It’s a little weird that Diablo III is online-only now… The first two games had a single-player component that could be played completely offline. No internet required. But D3 requires you to sign in to Battle.net every time you fire up the game, and everything winds up being hosted by Blizzard.
I’m actually pretty OK with this… I played most of my Diablo II games on-line anyway. It was nice to have my characters stored on-line, so I didn’t have to worry about backing them up or anything like that. And it got you access to some nice extras, like some of the special rune combinations.
But it’s still a little weird not to have any off-line option available…
And I’ve now run into some on-line issues.
I killed the Skeleton King a couple days ago… Got an achievement for that. And I went to the trouble of getting the “Instant Karma” achievement during that fight. And, when I logged off that night, I saw both those achievements lit up correctly.
But, last night, those achievements were no longer lit up. The servers apparently forgot about those achievements. Which isn’t a big deal, since they’re relatively easy to earn… But it’s a bit annoying.
And then, while I was playing last night, the servers started lagging. My character started bouncing around the screen a bit. Tried to pick up the same piece of loot about 5 times before it actually showed up in my inventory. Then I got disconnected entirely.
Obviously some growing pains are expected with a new game like this… But it’s still annoying. And doubly-so since I’m basically playing single-player, but I’m being forced to deal with server issues anyway.
