Players of Diablo 3 may not realize this, but they’ve been playing Reaper of Souls for several weeks now. Tonight’s launch, which takes place at 9PM PST, will simply unlock the Reaper of Souls content for players who purchased the expansion pack.
"Here's the beautiful thing about this launch compared to [Diablo 3]: what people are playing right now is Reaper of Souls," said lead producer Alex Mayberry in an interview with GameSpot. "It's just Reaper with Act V, and the Crusader class, and adventure mode turned off. But it's all live. It's running. It's been running for a few weeks now."
Players who experienced the game when it was first launched in 2012 will have not-so-fond memories of Error 37, which popped up when you attempted to connect to the game’s servers. Blizzard is not expecting that to happen this time around, having thoroughly tested the expansion pack and prepared its servers for any eventuality.
"So this launch is much more under control. We made sure to plan it out in such a way that players would be getting all the data and the code–if you've logged into Diablo 3 anytime in the last several weeks, you've downloaded it–and we gave it a good full month of time just to have the servers running,” said Mayberry.
"We feel like everything's going to be pretty smooth.”
