I dont mean to offend anyone's idea's about the game, but my opinion is that it is the LAMEST EXCUSE FOR A SEQUEL TO THE GAME OF THE YEAR! The original Diablo is better than this !@#$!! USEast and USWest NEVER EVER CONNECTS unless ur VERY VERY LUCKY and even then, in about 5 minutes, it says "Connection was Interrupted."

Then, what pisses me off is that I have to resort to connecting to EUROPE and when I play there (or one time on the USWest Realm), the lag is HORRIBLE. My character would be running through the woods one second and the next, it would be DEAD BECAUSE THE LAG FROZE EVERYTHING AND A MONSTER HAD KILLED ME WITHOUT GIVING ME A CHANCE TO FIGHT BACK. And it's not my computer's fault (DSL, 750 Mhz, more than enough RAM, Sound cards and Video Cards tested and works at Maximum capabilities), so don't reply flaming back about that. The graphics are worse than the original one from 1996 ( those pixels make it unproportional and the coloring is really odd).

Last, when I get my connection interrupted or leave a game, the data is NO LONGER on battle.net!! I have to start as a level 1 person all over again!! And it still won't connect! I reload it, and it gives this little blinking "typing line" (like at the edge of something u've just typed up) and then that annoying sound when sumthing locks up....WUT KIND OF CRAPPY %^-* IS THIS?? Blizzard.com doesnt even connect to allow me to post this crap on their forums..let alone see the Front Page...

~Person who wasted $49.99 on sum bull!@#$

Diablo 2 = Ultima 9?

Too many parallels between these games as far as botched support issues(the 3dfx "tilt" is the #1 issue). With all of the reports of the bugged higher difficulty levels, I'm beginning to wonder if there really is a reason to play thru the higher difficulties. I don't like the penalties on higher difficulty with losing hard-won experience points, so unless that gets fixed(probably never in order to keep the "mood" from their perspective) I don't see much for replayability value.

There's also the fact that the game had a patch almost immediately after release, which could indicate two things. Either a rushed release(which seems the most likely), or they they knew a number of issues from the stress test or beta(but could not implement them before release). HOPEFULLY(but I'm not holding my breath here) gameplay and difficulty issues will be addressed in future patches, but I have to wonder how much design work on the inevitable add-on/expansion will affect the much-needed patches(and so far the 1.02 patch is bugged, so hopefully that was just a flub and not some inadequate QA).

This will be the true test of Blizzard's commitment to quality, and will show if the "evil suit" approach(release games in a buggy state in order to assure sales) has happened to a company that so far(until Diablo 2 anyway) had quality releases.

I really enjoyed Diablo single player, and I thought even with all the talk of PK, I can at least avoid that by having a good time playing single player. Unfortunately, the design decisions have basically ruined the single player experience.

Why do I say that? You can no longer save single player games, you can only save single players *characters*.

That's why there is only a "save and exit" option, and no "save" option. Because the game isn't saved, only the character is. So it doesn't matter how far along you are in the dungeon, you can't save the game, if you "save and exit" and reload later, your character will still retain his exp points, his possessions, but you have to reclear all the dungeons all over again. What's worse, you start up in town again, and have to go all the way to where it was you were when you saved, even the town portals I opened back to town just prior to saving isn't remembered.

So essentially there is no single player game, the single player game experience is really just playing the multiplayer game by yourself.

Even so, a single sp save file would probably take up no more than 12MB (in Diablo 1, a level 16 save file takes about 3MB, and supposedly each act in D2 is the size of the original game, and there are four acts, so I leave the rest of the math to you). While I don't deny that 12MB is large, it's hardly anything compared to the game's 650MB installation requirement. Given that, even if a save file took up 50 MB it wouldn't be totally unreasonable. Furthermore, much of the data need not be stored but rather can be recreated from the seed, but Blizzard didn't do this with Diablo 1 either, perhaps to keep the loading times down.

As could arguably be said about Diablo 2 as a whole, Blizzard got lazy and did a sloppy job in this respect. The most honest and likely reason for the lack of real save games is: it was easier to just recycle the exact same code for both modes.

I hate to admit it just as much as anyone, but Blizzard's Game of the Year streak has come to an end.