Monte Carlo

Do we know if we can play on hard difficulty straight out of the box?

SLAM DUNK ! ! !

There are (more than usually incredible) rumblings in the Company of Heroes community that Relic / THQ will announce CoH2 in the next month or two.

I was surprised at the class roster TBH, where was stuff like the paladin, druid and assassin? As others have said, it'll be in an XP / DLC I suppose. The monk / witch doctor and wizard leave me cold.

Finished the Beta at level 10 with Barbarian, will try Demon Hunter next. With more classes and higher difficulty this will be lots of fun. Will prolly be on later.

By the way, I'm not sure the game auto-levels - playing a level 10 character with a level 6 felt very, very easy. And, to be fair to Blizzard, I'm getting onto the game very easily - server issue seems better.

Tigs good to play, if I was being lame I blame it on my son - we were fighting for control of the mouse! I left when I got a godawful crash that shut down my 'puter!!!

Guys is there a scout class that can recce without being spotted? Tigs I am airfixpanzer#2822

A few more thoughts: I like the crafting system, a lot. Harvesting unwanted magic items into essences is fun. Usually I find crafting a bit of a chore, but upgrading craftsmen and making it more of a trading minigame is cool. You need to get up to level 10 or so before there is enough tactical flexibility to really enjoy combat - the barbarian now has the ability to leap into combat, make some interesting multi-opponent strikes then use a sort of spirit hammer to finish the mobs off. Leaping into mobs made up of elite enemies and bosses is great. The dynamic environment will be more fun at higher difficulties, luring mobs into areas where you can collapse a wall or drop a chandelier on them for example, or possibly for non-melee characters it's already useful. There's more to this game than meets the eye, lots of polished little details you find as you go along.

Finally got into the barbarian properly... pretty good brutal fun and I love the massive dungeon levels. Basically it's FIghTIng In TUNNelZ heaven.

I don't. This art looks like something people were making back in 2001. Even though this means looking like actual original art. Like that Da Vinci guy - wow that Renaissance art sucked.

Does the owl join your party? He's cool.

OK I've played up 'til level 5 in the Cathedral near the start of the the game as a Demon Hunter. I played a little MP with Gfted1 last night as a Barbarian but it crashed. I like it. The graphics are nothing special but they are solid, workmanlike and the performance on highest settings is great. The dungeons / level design is good, I like the interactive environments (dropping chandeliers on monsters etc) and the creature roster is interesting. The Diablo feel of the game is there, in fact if anything I think they've been *too* slavish to canon / feel of the original. The normal difficulty however, is a joke. The Demon Hunter was quite good fun, he's basically a pistol-wielding rogue with traps and there are some interesting tactical possibilities with him. I had a lot of fun zipping around the cathedral setting traps for lumbering undead hordes and shooting them from afar. All I really wanted was an up-to-date D2. I'm pretty conservative in my expectations so I'm not disappointed: it's a jump-straight-in H&S romp as you would expect, at this stage I'm giving it a solid 8/10 and will be picking up the full version.

I've been trying on and off for three hours - error 37 all the way. I suspect folks who get logged on will stay logged on. But yeah, release day will be horrible. And the whole online SP deal they've lumbered themselves with won't help either. But not anticipating the interest in this? Come on, it's Diablo 3 FFS.

Majek was that Euro or Ami servers?

What a waste of time. sigh.

I think the stress test has proved that if you open up a free play Beta of one of the most hotly-anticipated games ever then you get "latency and connection issues" although I could have told them that from my armchair TBH

I've had a party-pack of error messages from the Blizzard 'Diablomatic Random Error Message Generator'

Error 75 too! Methinks this is going to be too busy to actually play this weekend.

Just tried that, it defaulted straight to the start menu. It's 21.30 CEST so I don't know what the problem is.

Hmmm the Blizzard forums are melting too now.

^ From where? The log-on screen says the game is up to date. Thanks.

No. Error 3003 FFS

21.00 CEST....

Rolling Stones at the moment, I'm loving Tattoo You. Ceremonials by Florence and the Machine is getting lots of play in the car.