I actually liked the story and the progression that it has on D3, though I was a bit underwhelmed with the High Heavens presentation on Act IV and how "weak" Diablo actually is. One would think that being an amalgam of all the evils would make him again the ultimate evil described in all the lore they created. That part was a bit contradictory.

On D2 levelling to 99 took a long time because of a programming bug that was never adressed. After level 90, even if you levelled in the Throne of Destruction area, which has enemies with levels 90 and above that should trigger the bonus exp for high enemy level, the game actually discounted that exp from the base exp you'd get for being equal levelled to the enemies. With Baal that was even worse, because him being at level 99, the discount was even larger, which made levelling to 99 almost an impossible task (with a 8 person party or with a players 8 modifier it still would have taken 200 baal runs to go from 98 to 99).
Without that programming bug, a lot of people would have reached it, especially since boosting level 1s to level 90s was pretty common and easy to do (Hell Ancients and Hell Baal runs).

@Stefan.De.Machtige 

I haven't had any connection issues since Day 1 (EU server) outside the ocassional latency spike.

Nonetheless, it kept you doing things, didn't it?

Nice analysis. I haven't got the game, sadly, but I played it when my friend got it at launch in a sorta party. We managed to play...15 minutes I think, and we were trying for 4 hours. I liked what I saw.

We tried again yesterday for a few hours and had fewer problems, fortunately, but I'm still not sold on it. I was really hyped, like many, after the awesome first two, but this seems to be little of what I wanted. I'll now likely wait until it comes down in price, which is a shame.

The only thing it kept you doing was repeating the same run over and over again . Then again, levelling up to 99 was never the goal in D2, Magic Find was where all the action and fun was. Same thing will happen on D3 once people start hitting 60 and see that their gear is nowhere near as good as it can be (I think that the level cap being 60 is a trully moronic decision).

And the Error 33 strikes again! I spoke too soon >_

There is one thing that is starting to annoy me a great deal, I'm at the end of Act III on Nightmare, most mobs are a wash, even the Elites. But, out of all the times I've been killed on Nightmare difficulty, 90% of them are upon mob death, they have silly post-mortem attacks like explosions, freezing and (gasp) Arcane Sentinel Orbs that fry you with lasers. Is this how they plan on making the game difficult? I didn't run into a single hard enemy on Act I, because none of them had instakill abilitites on death.

Feels like a cheap shot.

vlad; the health globe system is kinda broken, I'd agree, I know I praised it in the OP but I'm getting a bit tired of globes dropping behind boss gangs when you're forced to retreat. You keep moving backwards, slowing, shooting and dodging and using a health potion, you finally kill the boss group and have a long trail of utterly useless health globes ahead of you.
Feels kinda like regenerating health in FPS games at this point.

Why remove the old potion system? The whole annoyance with potions was that they took up a lot of space in your inventory, that issue is solved both by potions taking up a single slot with stacks of fifty and every single item taking far less inventory space. Potion drops are also very common, there is no point in such a high drop rate when there's a long cooldown.
Also, the inventory system, allbeit less annoying that the one in Diablo II, simply doesn't make any sense to me. Two small gems essentially take up the same space as a large two-handed hammer or a suit of armor.

Still not too pleased with the difficulty, I remember seeing the Blizzard video where they talked about tweaking the difficulty to the point where testers said "Stop!" and then doubled it. Well, either they're talking nonsense or the baseline difficulty is just really, really low (the latter is by far the most likely since this game is designed to appeal to groups outside of diehard Diablo fans as well).

Hoping for a real challenge in Hell mode!

Edit; glad I didn't write what I thought about, that the server issues are largely resolved for EMEAA. I can't log in due to server issues now...

Go Blizzard!

Servers been down for nearly five hours now, on a sunday, preventing you from playing a single player game in a game you own and have paid for... This is getting ridiculous. I've been working fourty hours from wednesday to saturday and today was finally a whole day off where I had time to sit down and enjoy some gaming.
Dammit....

It's so sad it's funny

Haha, finally got in again, they were down for five hours...

Meh, i'm playing Torchlight now and enjoying it, so I won't be going back to D3 today.