Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Daniel Klein says:

So here’s my take on why Blizzard did this.

1) Cheating of any kind cheapens play experience. There’s two options here then:
1a) have your code run locally and try to go for a Diablo 2 style either/or solution: either play offline completely, where duplicated items and crazy cheats allow you to redefine the game into something you think you want that will end up not being much fun at all or play online, where we try to make sure the code you’re running locally is genuine so you can’t cheat. People will end up defeating those measures eventually and there will be cheating online.
1b) run your code server-side with only basic display/input done client-side. This all but guarantees no cheating. Modding and offline play are collateral damage here, but Blizzard may have welcomed that collateral damage.

You could try to develop an offline mode based on 1b), or could develop both approaches, of course, but this is additional work for what Blizzard seem to think of as something not entirely desirable. I’m sure a lot of people at Blizzard would have loved to have mods in the game; I know for a fact that many, many people in the games industry are fans of modders and their mods. But this is a decision that is taken early in a product’s life cycle and after this kind of decision is taken, mods really aren’t an option anymore.

2) There’s a strong tendency in online games toward something approaching a free to play model–games as service with additional content sold later on representing a good chunk (if not all) of the income. Now I’d be surprised if D3 went free to play, but the shop suggests to me that they’re already open to some new ideas. The shop is also of course a brilliant way of undercutting the whole eBay thing and guaranteeing a better play experience here (no more people promising to sell you x item for money and then not delivering). Given those things, an online-only server-side model is the only thing that works.

Once again, they could have added a single player mode to this, but it would necessarily need to be very different and thus require an immense additional amount of development effort (you couldn’t just run your server locally on the player’s machine–that would put the server code in players’ hands and open the door to grey shards. At this point we’ve established Blizzard would be hoping to make most of their money through stuff sold in game lateron, thus grey shards would hurt them even more).

The TL;DR here is that Blizzard decided early on to develop the game in a certain way, surely motivated by their target business model (they’ll sell boxes at first, but they won’t stop there). Some things become impossible because of this. Modding, I assume, is something Blizzard is unhappy to kill, whereas they’re probably not crying many tears after grey shards.

I know many people feel VERY differently about this, but this news doesn’t affect me at all. If I played Diablo 2 “single player” at all, it was just to build up my character for multiplayer runs. I was always all about the multiplayer. As for mods: I’m a HUGE fan of the modding scene and some mods ate up 100+ hours of my time (the original Team Fortress for Quake, Fall from Heaven 1 and 2 for Civ 4), but I’ve never found a Diablo 2 mod I liked. To me, they all exacerbated the design problems in Diablo 2 in that they made for even more imbalanced play experiences with even fewer viable build choices (aka, one build was always hopelessly overpowered to the point that playing anything else felt like I was gimping myself). The same goes for Torchlight, Titan Quest–basically any action rpg. This seems to suggest that balancing an action rpg is very, very, VERY hard. It’s a shame there won’t be a modding scene for Diablo 3; maybe they could have proven me wrong. But as it is, I wouldn’t have expected it.

So real TL;DR: Blizzard isn’t being evil. Don’t overreact.

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