After 12 years was Diablo III worth it? That's far too loaded a question to answer in just a single piece, so we're putting together a review-in-progress series leading up to our final review. Today, we look at Diablo III's launch day and offer our take on our experience with the game so far.

Diablo III didn’t get off to a great start; in fact, it got off to a horrible start. As I write this article, the servers are down for maintenance, which is pretty much par for the course over the last 24 hours. I was hoping to finish Act I by the time I put this thing together, but alas, Battle.net isn’t feeling cooperative. A lot of readers like to point out that Diablo III isn’t an MMO whenever we post an article or news post about the game, but it looks like the game shares at least one thing in common with MMOs: crap launch days. They’ve gotten better over the years, sure, but Diablo III’s launch experience hearkens back to MMO launches of old due to the widespread instability and lack of service. That ‘always online’ bit? Not such a great idea after all, eh?

Read more of Michael Bitton's Diablo III: Review-in-Progress Part One.