Well, Blizzard has finally come out and given an exact date for the release of Diablo III. It's been pushed back a lot and I believe they've been stripping features out but now that there's an actual release date it starts to feel more real.
The date is May 15th, 2012 which is exactly two months from now.
Now the question is do I want to take time off work in order to play a whole bunch right at launch? May 15th is a Tuesday and the game is available for online purchase so I imagine it would be possible to start right at midnight. So if I was going to take time off I'd want to take the whole week off and skew my sleep schedule such that I'd be waking up right at midnight and then going gung-ho all week.
But do I actually want to go gung-ho? The game looks interesting and I really liked D2 so I'd imagine I'll end up playing a lot of D3... But do I need to play it all right away? I've taken time off for WoW expansions because I wanted to charge for realm first achievements and didn't want to be the one lagging behind preventing my guild from being able to run dungeons or raid. None of those things are true for me in D3. There are probably achievements (Blizzard put them in SC2 so I imagine they'll be in everything going forward) but I have no reason to believe there are any time sensitive ones and even if there are I have no reason to believe I'd be able to get any. As far as grouping goes I've always treated D2 as a solo game and I imagine the same would be true of D3. I'll group up if it makes sense, of course, but I don't feel any obligation to make sure I'd always be in a good condition for grouping.
It's also possible that playing a lot early is actually going to be worth money. You can sell rare items to other players for cash but I don't believe items get consumed in any way. So the first few awesome items rate to go for substantially more than the millionth awesome item. I have no intention of 'making a living' by farming virtual monsters but the opportunity does exist for an early windfall and I think that window is likely to be rather narrow. Spending 5 hours sleeping, 2 hours in transit, and 8 hours at work each day is probably enough to close that window pretty firmly...
Finally there's always the possibility that nothing will work for the first few days and I'll end up wasting my vacation days staring at a log-in queue or constantly crashing. Taking time off for Star Wars: the Old Republic would have been bad. Taking time off for Final Fantasy XIV would have been a disaster. Blizzard has a decent track record and have been pushing the release date back so one would hope the odds of disaster are pretty low but they do exist. But then I can probably just play something else with those days off, right? What else do I spend vacation days on other than games?
1 comment:
I just booked vacation, but only starting on May 16 (and I can probably cancel it last minute if it looks like nothing will work). I also will probably mostly just play it as a solo game, and there is no reason I will have to dump a ton of time into it right away, but I imagine those days at work would be agonizing.
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