Facepalm: The highly anticipated Diablo II: Resurrected launched yesterday, but a broad swath of players found themselves unable to play or even load existing characters for online play. It seems Blizzard had underestimated the demand and its servers became overwhelmed.

Diablo Executive Producer Rod Fergusson responded to the problem, commenting on Twitter that player response surpassed the expected load estimates they made during testing.

"We've had tons of players online, which is great but has been a challenge for servers surpassing our testing," Fergusson said. "We know many players are still affected, so we're actively adding capacity and will keep on this until it's in a better place. This may involve more restarts as well."

Blizzard's online crew quickly responded to the outage, taking the servers offline for "maintenance." The downtime was only for 30 minutes, but players still had issues for a few hours before things seemed to even out. Blizzard Customer Service reported via Twitter that it had fixed the problem by 5pm eastern and would continue to "monitor performance."

Fortunately, playing offline was still a viable alternative, which probably helped relieve the stress on the servers as players opted to play offline until Blizzard resolved the issues.

We got in on the beta for Diablo II: Resurrected and found it to be a faithful reproduction of the original. Obviously, graphics and cut scenes got the most attention, and there are a few settings and interface tweaks, but Blizzard didn't change much.

You still have seven classes to choose from---Amazon, Assassin, Barbarian, Druid, Necromancer, Paladin, and Sorceress---and the maps and dungeons are still randomly generated. Overall, the 21-year-old game holds up well. Would I recommend buying it if you still have a playable copy of the original? No. But it is a no-brainer for anyone who has never played it before.