Guess what I just finished

I'll try to stay spoiler-free for those who don't have the game yet/aren't able to play due to lag/are waiting/are never going to get it.
Hint: Do not go to the wiki, especially to look up info on any of the characters if you don't want to be spoiled. I went to look something up when it was still full of speculation and got spoiled by the mention of a leaked image.

So... I was tossing up between going with the Demon Hunter or Monk class, started both, and ended up going with a female monk.
(Note: Apparently the male barbarian is the same barbarian from Diablo 2, so he could be quite an interesting character to play)

Pros:
-Combat is nice and smooth while quick (when not lagging)
-Story is pretty interesting, though I found some parts of Leahs personality a little irritating (the 'I insist that although I've seen all these things the old man is still making stuff up and it isn't real' thing)
-Most of the cutscenes are actually like animated sketches on old yellowed paper with a voiceover from your character which is really nice (and look! Each character class and gender has their own voice, fancy that Bioware).
-And the cutscene-cutscenes are of course up to their usual spectacular standards
-I played on normal and only really died via lag in the first Act, after that though as you'd expect things get tougher and you can expect to die a little more.
-I found that I really liked the way the monks skills worked, I had two skills on the mouse buttons bumping up my spirit and and number keys to use it. But you'll find that each class works differently from the others.
-Voicing is wonderful <3 I recognized a few of the voice actors though I couldn't pin down where they were from except the male Wizard being Gann (NWN2:MotB)
-The painted portraits are beautiful, I love that they have them for every single character.
-In fact I'm very impressed that although Blizzard obviously have the skill and resources to create great and realistic graphics, instead they go the artistic path and don't aim for pure realism. Look at the backgrounds, the rocks look painted, as mentioned the portraits, the sketched cutscenes, it all just adds so much life into the world.
-Entries and writing that you pick up is voiced, and can play while you continue gaming after you've closed the journal page screen. This is a handy way to be able to hear them without having to stop and listen every time you find one.
-Your followers banter with your character and each other while standing around at your base camp. And your own character is able to express a lot of their own personality through what they say.

Cons:
-I have to say, one of the things that I feel has left this game down the most is the online aspect. It's just... A pain to deal with.
-Lag. I've experienced lag that slows my character (but not the monsters who teleport up to me) down a lot for a few minutes. Sometimes this doesn't happen much, other times about every 30 minutes, and at its worst I've had it happening every few minutes. The lag makes a game that should run perfectly run terribly sometimes.
-Disconnections and server shut downs. These don't happen too often but can be pretty annoying if you're right in the middle of a quest and suddenly have 15 minutes before a shut down. Lately they've given about 45 minutes warning though which is better. You can also sometimes lose some progress or items from disconnections or shut downs/managing to log in while they're doing maintenance.
-Huge potion cooldowns. I had tons of potions and hardly ever used them, because the 30 second cooldown is far too long. Since I used a monk I used her healing ability and had the templar using his too. There are health pools around which are supposed to replace the use of too many potions, but I really think they should reduce the cooldown.
-Blacksmith and jeweler training pages (which you need for their last upgrades) cannot be found on Normal difficulty (or at least I didn't find any), however you probably wouldn't be able to use any items they would have made anyway, and you can find them on Nightmare difficulty.

Somewhere in the middle:
-Your stash space, blacksmith upgrades, jeweler upgrades and gold are all shared between your characters. This can be good and bad.

All up, I think it's a great game... Story, voicing, art and the way it works in general. It just really really needs an offline mode because making people who prefer to play it as a single player game play online really takes a lot of the fun out of the game (when you have to sit around waiting for the lag to stop so you can fight without ending up lag-dead again). I've seen this suggested and I certainly think they should allow you to choose whether to make your character for single or multiplayer to solve any problems with people editing their characters.

And now I've started up my monk on Nightmare, and a male barbarian and male wizard on normal. I think I'll take my time with these play throughs though


I was also thinking about it recently and it occurred to me that Diablo is kindof... Isometric. Like the Baldur's Gate games. It has speech with text and lovely portraits in common with those games too. I kind of wonder what a Baldur's Gate 2 + Diablo 3 combination game would look like. You could get rid of Biowares overused cut-and-paste dungeons and have more Blizzard-like random ones, custom PC characters with a lot more detail as the Diablo 3 ones do, have the relationship and friendship content of BG2, fast-pace and quick combat with the more tactical elements of BG and of course the ability to pause and have a party, great stories and plots from both etc. Ah, wishful thinking.