Diablo III Standard Edition

Pros: 3D graphics and atmosphere looks gorgeous at 1980x1280 led monitor. fun hacking and slashing delivering killer combos. cool to balance weapons, armor and skills

i'm up to level 25, started playing 1 year anniversary patch 1.08, so I haven't encountered any bugs :)

stable and consistent gameplay. high level eye candy cinematics

Cons: you have to be connected online to play. if your internet is messed up, you're out of luck

at times a pain to install. i won't use it but real auction house you have to spend real money beyond the cost of the game

Other Thoughts: good for casual gamer, maybe not so much for hardcore dudes

Pros: Great graphics-all in all. A little bit cartoony, but pretty nice overall.

Cons: Gameplay is a one-shot deal. After you've played through the game one time, it's rather redundant. It seems the programmers at Blizz spent a lot of time dev'ing a storyline, but the playability is severely lacking. If you had D1 and D2, and loved them, I'm afraid you will be disappointed.

Pros: From my experience good customer phone service.
Geez it finally came out.

Cons: No play offline = slave to server.
Server lags and crashes.
Authentication system fails and wont accept the codes.
Having to make phone calls to get things working again.
Forcing players to buy things with real money to be able to play.
Etc. Etc. Epic Failure!

Other Thoughts: Why in the world would Blizzard do this to their loyal customers? If Blizzard doesn't come out with a free patch to correct all of this games problems it will die. Wake up and listen to the players or you will loose them forever. Gone back to D2 until someone comes out with a good game or Blizzard wakes up and makes D3 everything D2 was. That's right I said it, make the game at least as good as D2 and I'd be happy with just that. As the game is it's poison and slowly killing the Blizzard fan base!

Pros: Can run it on anything.

Cons: Because you can run it on anything, those of us slightly above average to top-of-the-line systems suffer. We have a machine we put all this money into and then we find out that Diablo III is lacking in the graphics department. I realize D3 wasn't supposed to set records in the graphics department, but why go with a Torchlight style painterly effect? Diablo fans wanted a new Diablo game we all knew and loved. Dark, gloomy, scary. D3 looks similar to something a gifted child would make with paints. Everything (especially the environments) is textured in a blurred motion and doesn't give it that appeal like other anti-alias enabled games make. Also, the textures for your hero's are extremely low-res. At the hero selection screen its literally pathetic that I have everything maxed at 1920x1080 and I see jagged lines all over my armor. I could write a book on my experience with this game, but I don't have the time to do so. In a nutshell, I was hacked even though I had a VERY strong password. Come to find out it was because I "played online with a group." Turns out there was an exploit that people could find out your password if you play in an online game. What other game has an exploit like this? I mean c'mon Blizzard, you had how long to work on this game? 10 years? Anyhow, Blizzard locked my account and I had no money, no items, etc. After days of not being able to play they finally gave me my account back and said if this happens again I'd have to pay REAL MONEY for an authenticator if I ever wanted to play again. Are you kidding me? This was clearly an exploit on their end; I'm not at fault. Also, I cannot access the real money auction house because of this. It's locked for me to, not that I'd ever use it anyway. And no, I can't use the free authenticator app because I don't have a data plan for my phone. Also, Blizzard said we'd have team based PvP at launch. Guess what? Almost a year later and STILL no PvP. Just this stupid "brawling" which is just a duel mode which every other game has nowadays.

Other Thoughts: One the D3 forums, there are now numerous recent posts of players that have come back to play after the new patch. After doing some trades, they were shocked to find they've been banned. This is because of yet another exploit called gold duping that surfaced on the Auction House. But these players that came back were not the ones doing the duping. They saw the prices of some items were way high, so they sold those items if they had them. Blizzard's system caught that sudden gold influx to their account and were banned! These people did nothing wrong, how did they know the prices were because of gold dupers? They hadn't been playing for months and came back just thinking that the prices had increased due to lack of supply. Instead of investigating each issue, Blizz automatically banned these people. I agree they should warn or ban people for game breaking exploiting. But these people did not exploit. How would you feel?

Pros: It was fun at first

Cons: Blizzard has constant servers down
Many accounts get hacked, even with authenticators
Game is geared towards paying real life money, if you want to progress further in Inferno you need to PAY for it
They changed the stats for items you already own, this is unheard of for any MMORPG / RPG game.
Farming is needed to get what you want, this could take months to get some good gear, or just give in and pay
Repair costs quadrupled on a whim by them

Other Thoughts: Wasted my time, glad I switched to GW2

Pros: Great customization of skills for each classes. Beautiful maps.

Cons: No announcements have been made regarding this game's future expansion packs/DLCs.

Other Thoughts: This game was MEANT to be grindy.

Pros: Fun the first time through. Nice length.

Cons: This game is focused on the Auction House. They try to get people to buy things with real money!? Where's the game play in this?

Then they make you repeat the game, again, and again. It is too repetitive and BORING!

It's also ever so linear.

Other Thoughts: What a disaster. They came close to making something special, but created a nightmare of repetition.

Pros: None

Cons: Epic failure to Diablo fans. DO NOT BUY AS YOU WILL BE SEVERLY DEPRESSED.

Other Thoughts: Blizzard's sequel obviously was developed by numbskulls and the franchise has shifted to prioritize the almighty dollar over integrity of gameplay. Google the fans comments if you do not believe me.

Pros: The graphics are nice (compared to D2). Its roughly the same style of clickety-click-wear-your-LMB-out game-play as D2 was. Original story line that ties in well to the Diablo back story.

The skill tree is more complex in some ways than in D2 (runes), but isn't nearly as intuitive.

Cons: It does have a lot of repeated game-play, but then again so did D2 and Diablo, but I figured they'd draw it out a bit more this time...apparently not. I'm assuming they're going to do like LOD and issue an expansion some time in the future. I just REALLY hope it doesn't end up like WOW, where you have to keep buying endless expansion after expansion.

The whole cash money trading house is original (as far as its being integral to the game), but like a few other posters pointed out, after you get to a certain point in the game you're virtually forced into spending additional REAL money for an item/items just to be able to progress. Either that, or you've got to go back and repeat levels over and over in the vain hope that a powerful enough item will randomly spawn. I dislike this... a LOT.

The fact that you MUST be connected to the interweb to play is just wrong. Sure, with D2 playing on the realms was great fun and a good way to pick up hot items, but I got a LOT of enjoyment out of offline single player (as a matter of fact I STILL go back and play D2/LOD from time to time). I know this was - at least in part - an attempt to keep the hacking down to a minimum, as D2/LOD was probably one of the most h*cked/cr*cked/sp**fed games EVER... I just wish they could've come up with a better way.

Other Thoughts: I've been a huge fan of the franchise since the original, and I guess I just got my hopes up too high.

It's still worth the money, I just wish they could have matched the bang/buck factor that D2 had.

Pros: This game is great ive been playing since release and i love it. Theres no end game in diablo, and no matter how geared or how fast you kill mobs, bosses and what not your charcter is never finished

Cons: RMAH is dumb. Charcter skills lack alot. Needs more options for casuals if your a hardcore gamer as myself its not to bad but for a casual gamer it lacks alot of enjoyment

Other Thoughts: If you say you waited 10 years or game has no content you didnt play d2. If i remember correctly d2 before the expansion was like d3. The game is fine