Yes, that would be insane, but the price in my country (which is Poland, note that I am in Sweden only till the end of March) will hopefully be lower. For Diablo III they want 200 PLN which is insane, because usually new games cost around 100 to 130 PLN (and I mean games like CoD, NFS, and all the big titles). But if Guild Wars 2 cost the same, I would be really disappointed...

I'm looking forward to play the cracked version of the game. Then I'll probably buy the Collector's Edition in 5 years time like I did with Diablo II :-P

It'll certainly be interesting to see how fast and successfully D3 will be cracked, for academic reasons. As I recall, they always retain part of the game code on their servers, ie. it is partly a streaming game?

I will play the original (somewhere in the distant future) or not play it at all. Currently I have no big urge to play it, I have a feeling most other people are interested in its online (multiplayer) components mainly? I'm mostly a single-player kind of guy, lonely wolf in the gaming world. No guilds, no pacts, no nothing.

If you're lucky... WoW's CE goes for 300+ EUR, it is impossible to get a nice price.

The CE is available for 70 pounds:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Diablo-III-Collectors-Edition-Mac/dp/B0077HOA64/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1331893688&sr=8-2

Well, it's true, but they have to take into consideration that people aren't that wealthy in Poland. And they usually do it.
As it goes for me, I definitely won't pay that much for a game which doesn't offer any substantial breakthrough nor represent a new genre, etc. Diablo III will be basically a dumbed-down Diablo II with updated graphics - what's all the fuss about?
However other point to consider about prices is how dangerously close they come now to prices of console games. If Diablo III on PS3 had offline mode and cost only slightly more, then hell, I would pick it over PC version any day.

What do you mean by dumbed-down?

so, is a persistent internet connection still required, or have Blizzard come to their senses?

Well, I'm a single-player only guy, so Wow is just a giant pile of useless crap from my point of view....

I COULD take the Collector's Edition if the DRM-mess Blizzard put in its game won't be so harsh as it seems, and if I would find it in my mother tongue (just a fetish of mine...)...
Whatever crap is "streamed" on-line, it gets downloaded on the client (your PC), and than you (the mighty cracker-pirate) can do whatever you want with the code :-P

Well, the game is being made for the masses. It surely won't be a climatic jewel like the first one was. And it's enough to take a look at trailers and compare them with intros/movies for Diablo II for example. To me it looks more like an MMO than a single-player experience.
That's all I can say before the release. At least, that's my impression ATM.

I'm not saying it can't be done, but questioning how fast and how successfully it can be done. The very least, I guess someone has to play through the game in order to obtain all the game data, possibly even play it through several times if the game is branching, or there are optional quests and stuff.

But, I am not quite sure how D3 system is built, I just remember reading that the game data is sometimes streamed from servers.

So in other words, anything that is popular today, is being dumbed down?
They won't remove the DRM.

:O:O

Actually that's the opinion towards which my view is coming closer and closer with every big release nowadays. It is so because what is popular or not is decided upon wallets of casual gamers who do not like challenging and creative games. Lately gaming has been going the road which Hollywood took a while ago. Popular games are like popular movies: uncreative, with trite plots and full of amazing special effects, good voice acting and so on. They are dumbed-down because target audience has changed. 15 years ago gaming wasn't that popular as a hobby, games were kind-of hardcore entertainment only for people who really didn't bother that much about awkward controls and who could swallow not-so-amazing graphics. Now it has changed, so the games has changed.
So I expect Diablo III to be like a Transformers III in a movie industry. You can't say that it isn't dumbed-down for the sake of broader audience...

Don't care about Diablo 3 since seen first screenshots.