Diablo 3: Meet the Hardcore Crüe

I’m very “anti” boring stuff in games these days. So after I finished my first run through of Diablo 3 and joined a public group to bring down Diablo him herself in one of the most telegraphed, least surprising twists EVER — anyway — I started in on Nightmare mode and found myself doing the exact same things over again. Same everything.
So I moved on. Lots of games, after all. Not being paid to play the same game entirely through over and over again. I know people like the challenge, but even on Hell mode, it would be just the same thing, only much harder.

One of the first things Gleek, Spode and Ulan told me when I joined the instance group back in Neverwinter Nights 2, that when Diablo 3 came out, we were going to drop what we were doing and just do that.
NWN2 turned out to be a disappointment as a multiplayer game, so we moved to Dungeons & Dragons Online and have been having a great time (yay, ding 18 me!). _Such_ a great time that even with Diablo 3 out and all of us playing characters in it, we still played DDO.
Last Sunday we decided to start the group in Diablo 3. In Hardcore mode. Because Hardcore mode — you die for any reason, your character is deleted — would be just the sort of thing we needed to give the game enough challenge. Diablo 3 is (how does Syncaine always put it?) faceroll on keyboard easy. It’s _supposed_ to be, to give people a good intro to the game. But it gives everything away. The story is exactly the same next time around. And the next. And the next.
Half an hour into the night, Ulan crashed, his character died, he had to start over. He moved to a new computer, restarted, joined us in a dungeon and by the end of the fight of the skeleton king, he had nearly caught up in level.
Gleek has secretly returned to DDO. When it takes so long to hit level cap (it’s been years and I still have not) I can’t really blame him; it was he and Spode that worked enough out of group to hit the level cap, they deserve the kudos.
So this is the thing. We’re gonna do Hardcore through Diablo 3 at least through Normal (super easy) difficulty. We’ll probably do Nightmare mode until someone dies, and I somehow doubt we’ll want to repeat Normal mode from start to end again to continue in Nightmare. I dunno how the others kept interest up in Diablo 2 for as long as they did…
… but I feel our time in Diablo 3 is limited. We’re gonna do it, we’re gonna have fun, but Guild Wars 2 is coming in August and I have the feeling we’ll be there when it does.