I was under the impression it started at normal and from there new difficulties would unlock.

Normal is the base difficulty. There won't be an 'easy' difficulty. Besides Normal, there will also be Nightmare, Hell, and Inferno.

Lol, with a barbarian I'm ripping through stuff now although granted I gave him a good chest and weapon at level 5 so with cleave he just flies through stuff.

2005/6-ish machine myself...

P4 3.06GHz that HyperThread's (badly) a second core.
2GB dual-channel PC3200 RAM
ATI Radeon Sapphire HD3450 512MB GPU.

TBH, there's absolutely no difference in performance that I can see between low/off and high/on at any and all setting combinations...

I did get a few more (VERY brief) periods - a few seconds a time - of my character running at a somewhat normal pace.

It does seem to slow down more when I'm destroying scenery/props, etc.

I'm guessing it would probably work much better on a true dual-core system, and maybe a slightly better GPU. It's playable, if damned slow, on mine...just don't expect to be much use in multi-play co-op games.

I'm playing on my old laptop, and I experience some major slowdowns during heat moments (especially in multiplayer) but apart from that, it's fine.

I am done with playing for now, and I must say - it's pretty good. In multiplayer it feels almost exactly like Diablo 2, and separate loot for everybody is great feature.

The game will be too expensive for me, though.

28 pounds at Amazon UK.... aaaahhh, fucking dammit, the price jumped to 33 over the night! :(

Is the difficulty system for Diablo similar to that for Sacred 2? Where, IIRC, your characters carry over into the harder difficulties, or do you start from scratch for each difficulty?

I must admit this is the *first* Blizzard game that I've actually enjoyed playing (first one I've ever installed on one of my own PCs too) and I considering buying it. But will have to get it directly from Blizzard's US site I guess... and $60 is a bit much... I guess Blizzard don't bother with sales at all?

You continue with your character as far as I remember; so if you finish normal at around level 30 then you can chose to start Nightmare with that same character, and so on.

As for sales, no, they rarely have sales. You could try and see how much importing it would cost, or you can get someone to buy the game and send you just the key to register on Battle.net.

They make sales, but rarely, and they are mostly related to special events (like X-years anniversaries or similar stuff).

If you get it from the US site, you'll have to play on US servers... You'll need to get it through the your regional site (if you want to remove some of the lag), don't know in what region Japan falls, but it is probably Asia + Oceania (similar to SC2, I'm guessing?).

... afaik, characters can be ported to higher difficulties, and you won't have to start over... someone should probably confirm this, as I've not played the game.

From what I know the game isn't region restricted (that's what they say when buying the game from Battle.net) so he can chose to play in any region he wants.

Really? Well, that is an improvement.

There does seem to be an option to switch regions in the menu. I switched to Europe before but that kinda didn't work since there aren't any servers xD

(Options - Account - Server Region Selection. The Americas/Europe/Asia)

During the stress test/open beta only the US servers were turned on, that's why it didn't work for the other ones.

I guess that makes sense. Thanks.