Blizzard Entertainment says it is aware of a game-breaking bug in the newly released Diablo III.
The launch last night of Blizzard's long-awaited action-RPG went far from smoothly and was beset with connectivity issues, prevented from logging in or being arbitrarily logged out. Now several threads on Blizzard's Battle.net forums reveal a new issue, which appears to be game-breaking.
Players who trade items with a Templar early in the game are met with Error 3006, which boots them out of Battle.net and leaves them unable to log back in. A post from Takralus, a member of Blizzard's community team, confirms that a fix is in the works.
"We are aware of this issue and are working on a fix," Takralus writes. "The current workaround is to not give the Templar any gear until after you accept him as your follower through the UI pop-up."
Blizzard said this morning it was increasing server capacity, and had taken its Battle.net websites offline, to address the login issues at launch, and it appears those problems have subsided as the launch rush has settled down; it can only be hoped that it fixes this new issue in an equally timely fashion.
Our Diablo III review will be published later this week. In the meantime, we recommend PC Gamer's work-in-progress Diablo IIIreview, which is being regularly updated with reviewer Tom Francis' progress and impressions.