Diablo III Retrospective

With Diablo III celebrating the tenth anniversary since its initial launch, we get this here GameSpot article that traces the game’s journey from a sorry punchline that barely worked to one of the pillars of modern Diablo-like action-RPGs.

Here are a few paragraphs about the infamous Error 37 to get you started:

Error 37 lights up the Internet

So, with an eager bunch of demon hunters itching to put the game through its paces and see how it handled, it was doubly problematic when it turned out that they couldn’t actually do that. Instead of being met with the game they had been waiting for for the better part of a decade, players received a vague message:

The servers are busy at this time. Please try again later. (Error 37)

Without any clear indication of exactly how busy the servers were, or how long it would take to fix, players were left in limbo. They had no idea if they should wait, check back in later, or give up entirely. Game director Josh Mosqueira later said that the launch was just much bigger than anyone on staff had anticipated–even after doubling and then tripling the projections–in the book Blood, Sweat, and Pixels by Jason Schreier.

This was especially galling because of the game’s always-online requirement. While Diablo 3 does have a multiplayer component, you can complete the entire game solo if you want to. There was no reason players shouldn’t be able to simply fight their way through the campaign alone, whether the servers were working or not. But playing offline, as you could in the first two games, wasn’t an option, so eager fans were stuck making no progress at all while Blizzard sorted out the server issues. This issue did not come entirely by surprise: Prior to release, and based on the playable beta, players were already expressing concern with the always-online requirement.