I've been sorta pessimistic and generally not very enthusiastic about Diablo 3 for many years now, all the way from the first rumours that were something like "hey all, this is supposed to be Blizzards calendar, they have a suspicious space here, I bet it's D3!" to the first video clips and even when the date was finally confirmed. Maybe I have been preparing myself for a possibility of dissapointment or something since Diablo 2 was such a huge thing for me. I don't know. Few of my friends have acted like they're sitting on burning coals lately but I just couldn't find any exitement in me. Until now. Just out of sheer luck I managed to notice that this is open beta weekend. I swear, my mind went on autopilot :D

My old battle.net username didn't seem to exist anymore, I must have been purged because of years of inactivity. There never really was anything substantial in there anyway, just a couple of sad attempts at Diablo 2 but for some reason I never got the multiplayer to work without awful lag, either in battle.net or just LAN. Good thing that even brand new users get to play the open beta so I just registered again and downloaded the client.

As I expected I couldn't get in when it opened. I didn't actually expect to get in at all that night, but I did, somewhere after 1AM I think (it opened at 10PM local time) and I actually got to play it for a couple of hours before having to give up and go to bed at 4AM :3 It was slow, partly because I'm playing on my laptop but it was so fun~ So much memories. I really do think the beginning was calculated to hit just those nostalgia chords though, since you once again need to visit the ruins of old Tristram and whoo, you get to go after Deckard Cain again! Poor helpless old man. The boss fight is also someone familiar :P

I played some more today. Much less lag but still some performance issues because of laptop. Doesn't even help to bring all the graphic settings to minimum. And the installation did say my graphics card might result some problems. But all in all, still much smoother than last night so the servers aren't so busy anymore, which is nice. And I intend to play the actual game on my tabletop, I just don't have access to it right now and I didn't want to steal BF's computer for the whole weekend. I'm actually somewhat impressed that my laptop actually can run the game at all!

Well anyways, seems I actually get to do more playing than I expected from a server stress test open beta. So far I've only gotten disconnected once. Right now there is a little maintenance pause so I came to write this. Now I'm heading back to see if I can log in again soon :)