By Jim Rossignol on August 5th, 2011 at 5:22 pm.
MTV have spoken to Blizzard’s VP of Online Technologies, Robert Bridenbecker, about the internet’s passionate response to the online-only requirement for Diablo III. He said: “I’m actually kind of surprised in terms of there even being a question in today’s age around online play and the requirement around that.” He went on to explain that anti-piracy concerns did not factor into the decision: “”Internally I don’t think [DRM] ever actually came up when we talked about how we want connections to operate. Things that came up were always around the feature-set, the sanctity of the actual game systems like your characters. You’re guaranteeing that there are no hacks, no dupes. All of these things were points of discussion, but the whole copy protection, piracy thing, that’s not really entering into why we want to do it.”
You read the full comments by Bridenbecker here.
05/08/2011 at 17:24 Zyrxil says:
I personally am not affected by it, but that guy is completely incompetent if he didn’t foresee some backlash to the no-LAN no-Singleplayer news.
05/08/2011 at 17:36 Bhazor says:
How does this effect LAN? Surely you can just invite a friend and his laptop over and join the same server?
But then I haven’t used a LAN since High School when I played Unreal Tournament so maybe I just don’t get it.
05/08/2011 at 17:40 Cooper says:
Being in the same room, both connected to the same external server on the same internet connection is NOT, in anyway, the same as a LAN setup.
05/08/2011 at 17:40 Anton says:
“No LAN” is the same reason why my friends didn’t even try out StarCraft 2. LAN play is something of a scarcity nowadays but I feel is still an essential part of the multiplayer experience. As a player, you still want that experience wherein all you guys are playing in 1 room, while heckling each other to bits.
05/08/2011 at 17:41 Bhazor says:
“Being in the same room, both connected to the same external server on the same internet connection is NOT, in anyway, the same as a LAN setup.”
…because?
05/08/2011 at 17:43 WPUN says:
When can we get a “stupid game industry comments” reference page?
Like Michael Pachter, investment analyst at Wedbush Securities: “unpaid crunch deserves no sympathy”.
etc etc etc
05/08/2011 at 17:45 Maktaka says:
It’s in the name dude. LAN – Local Area Network. There is no part of “both players connecting to a server across the country” that is in any way, shape, or form part of the “local area”. The term LAN has been diluted by companies like Blizzard to just mean “we’re in the same room” and you’ve taken a big gulp of the koolaid.
LAN is a way for people who don’t want to connect to a slow outside server to get fast ping times with each other and play the game without needing an outside connection. If you have to be online and play all games through a 3rd party server, it’s not LAN.
05/08/2011 at 17:47 Sheng-ji says:
Because with a LAN, if something goes wrong you can access all the wires and necessary devices and fix it there and then, that second instead of waiting for an engineer.
With a LAN you are not sharing bandwidth with your entire neighbourhood and when they all decide to watch eastenders on iplayer at the same time your connection doesn’t start faltering
With a LAN there are no data limitations. Transfer a couple million gigs over your lan and no one bills you or cuts you off
With a LAN you can hook up in places with no broadband
Come on, think about it for yourself! It’s not hard, I’m sure you can come up with more
05/08/2011 at 17:52 mechtroid says:
Imagine you’re at a convention center for a LAN party. You boot up the original starcraft game, play a game over LAN. Everything works. Then everyone decides to play some Starcraft II, and so you all boot up the game and sign in. Do you REALIZE what it’s like, trying to get 32 people to share a single pipe for bandwith? Everyone’s speeds would be around 56K. The lag between people in the same room, computers mere meters away from each other would be immense. THAT is why LAN is important.
05/08/2011 at 18:01 RandomGameR says:
I’m just pissed off that Diablo III doesn’t have a first person shooter mode. Also, it should paint my chicken coup but it clearly won’t.
05/08/2011 at 18:42 El Klinku says:
What I find disgraceful in this, its the fact that everyone is pissing on UBI DRM (wich is a good thing) and almost every gamer seems to accept Blizzard descision of always online, wich is the same bullshit. This game is not an MMORPG and its treated as such. If the SP would be remove, it would be something else, but In the end, Blizzard requirement is the same as UBI DRM and they succesfully make a part of the community believe its not. Sadly the consumer buy something they doesnt really possess. a wall of Babylon, which creates a separation between gamers. An endoctrination that you play by developers rules, that internet is as vital as water and that it should be normal to disdain someone without internet as an alien, an abnormality of the society. That my friend is close to facism.
I might never have a reliable connexion so that mean I will never pick this game, wich is a shame! Because everybody as the right to enjoy gaming no matter where they live (I live in canada, in rural area)and shouldnt be punish for this very reason. And i know many people that is in the same situation as I. That’s a shame because the only people that will get hurt by the Facist DRM UBLIZZARD SOFT is pulling right now it’s gamer and it’s community!
05/08/2011 at 18:48 Warskull says:
This is more phase 1 of back-peddling than a incompetence or a stupid comment by the VP. They knew people don’t like that style of DRM. They just thought they could get away with it because they were Blizzard. They can’t admit that though. “We thought you were big enough fanboys that you wouldn’t care, no matter what we do to you” isn’t exactly good PR, even if it is the truth.
Anyways, this combined with the real names on the forums idea is telling you to watch Blizzard. They aren’t the same Blizzard you used to love. They are constantly trying to see what they can get away with now.
05/08/2011 at 18:52 Starayo says:
Why LAN? Because when I’m playing Starcraft II with my friend, in the same room as me, and my connection drops because the wiring is shit and it’s been raining so the pits where the joints in the copper phone wires are located are filled to the brim with water, I can’t play the game anymore.
Most of the time it doesn’t affect me, but when it does, it’s really, really shitty.
LAN is still a must.
And don’t get me started on professional tournaments getting ruined by disconnections/lag.
05/08/2011 at 19:30 tyrsius says:
@Bhazor
Are you kidding? Do you understand what a LAN is? A LAN is a LOCAL area network. If you are both connected to an external server, then you are not LOCAL, and it is not a LAN.
Because of their DEFINITIONS!
05/08/2011 at 19:32 Froibo says:
Alright.. this isn’t a RTS, I can understand it from that standpoint. But how often do you think an internet connection is really going to effect a game like Diablo 3?
05/08/2011 at 19:49 Harlander says:
Under all circumstances, since you’re forced to play it over the Internet?
05/08/2011 at 20:00 Eamo says:
I played Diablo 2 to death, max level characters, item farmed for hours on end, I still sometimes hear those cow’s mooing in my dreams. The multiplayer experience though was a disaster when you went outside your friends. There were so many client side hacks that any good items that dropped were auto-looted before you even saw them on your screen, PvP was pretty much impossible without resorting to trading for duplicated items. The reality is that by relying so much on the client the multiplayer game suffered immensely and there were severe issues with single player anyway when it came to items. Drop rates were balanced around a multiplayer environment so if you just played single player it was pretty much impossible to ever complete a set or get a unique you needed.
I’m not so sure about the real money auction house but the online only play is a no brainer. The reality is that Diablo 2′s online play was horrible in many many ways and they pretty much came down to comprimises that had to be made to accomodate the single player offline play.
As for lan play Diablo 2 was always a terrible game for lan play. If you had a group of people who would start at level one and only ever play when they all got together it was fine, but if any of them got a bit ahead or behind the levelling curve then the game got bad pretty fast. MMOs work for multiplayer because you spend 90% of your time at max level so you can easily find others to group with at a similar level. In Diablo most people never even reached max level or even close to it and the abilities scaled enough that a level 50 and a level 60 player weren’t really able to play on an equal footing.
Just google “diablo lan party” and see how few people are actually even doing that anyway. On the first page of results I see one party in 2009 and one guy who says he organises an annual one for his mates. Now I dunno, but if I was the kind of person who would go to the hassle of organising a lan party just to be able to play a game with my mates, I suspect I would rather be able to play with them online whenever I wanted instead.
And even at 8 player any home broadband can easily accomodate Diablo 2 in 8 player mode. I played it online for years on a 56k modem and it was fine. I really don’t see the issues and to be honest I suspect most of the issues is people who want to pirate the game making an issue about lan parties.
05/08/2011 at 21:04 Amun says:
@Eamo: Your post is full of piss-poor arguments.
05/08/2011 at 21:05 studenteternal says:
@Bhazor: Not sure if you are trolling, but I have personally run into nasty issues trying to play with people in the same room without LAN capabilities because of NAT translation across my firewall, and battle net like services not allowing multiple sessions from the same public IP, even though there are 2 of us, on 2 computers, with 2 legit copies of the game in my living room.
Full Disclaimer: I have not tried doing this with starcraft 2 so I have no idea if Battle.net has this problem.
Also I would much rather play a multiplayer Diablo over dedicated fast ethernet or gigabit in my house, then share the meh, 20 mbs or so connection I technically get from the cable company. And that 20 is higher then what a lot of people have, trying to play 2-3 sessions, or more, over 1.2mBPS DSL connection would be just sad.
05/08/2011 at 21:25 firefek says:
@Eamo
Hence, that is why we want modding support. Not so much to affect online play, but so that we can modify the LAN and singleplayer component. Lets say the singleplayer was bad, though I found it rather fun, there are mods that enhance the singleplayer experience and made it better, good or even excellent. Lets say I have a LAN party and a new friend joins in, then we can just “cheat” him to our level. Blizzard took away all the options for this kind of play, which a lot of people loved. It is no small wonder that people are mad. Pirates are not affected, they can still pirate the game with the “offline crack” anyway.
05/08/2011 at 21:57 Sheng-ji says:
Eamo, I agree with you that there were a lot of client side hacks, but lets be honest, trying to play an RPG game with strangers is always going to run the risk of ending up playing with some idiot. Even if they eliminate hacks and cheats, you’ll get trolls who will pull every enemy on the map and dump them on you, disconnecters etc etc. As for competitive PvP play, lets just say, there are better games.
I agree online play in D2 was horrible, but I don’t think it was due to compromises made for single player, can you back up your assertion with any facts? And now why should people who prefer single player have their game gimped for the people who want to play online?
I’m sorry to hear your friends wern’t disciplined enough to have a character to play when you were all together at LANS and leave them alone when not at LANS, that sucks for you, but my friends were great and consequently some of my greatest gaming memories were created in D1 and D2 at LANS.
Also I don’t think google is a particularly reliable analysis tool. In my day job (I work in criminal prosecutions), if a defence council came up with that in court, he would be stripped of his licences and laughed out of the industry.
The fact you bought up the people complaining about this must just want to pirate the game argument proves you are an idiot. If people want to pirate it… guess what, the pirated version WONT connect to battlenet!!! It’s people who want to buy the game but not see the pirates get better functionallity who are bitching about it.
And you telling me you had 8 people playing D2 over a 56k connection is a lie. It wasn’t possible. And why would you have done that anyway, when it had LAN capability. I think it’s been adequately explained why everyone connecting to a remote server halfway around the world from the same
home is an inferior solution, but to give Amun a cheeky +1: Your post is full of piss poor arguments.
05/08/2011 at 22:26 Shortwave says:
My LAN already has to play an extra hundred bucks each time now so we can have a “Internet connection properly installed by a trained professional” just for Starcraft 2. : |
Not too sure where I am going with that..
I’m disappointed and sad.
Bleh.
Diablo III, whatever.
: (
06/08/2011 at 03:23 VezRoth says:
I am extremely effected by this BS story about how the had no anticipation about Always On DRM being an issue. I am forced to call Shenanigans.
06/08/2011 at 10:14 dadioflex says:
@studenteternal the 20Mbs cable connection is download, your shared upload is “only” 512kbs – so 10 times faster than we had for dial-up Internet back in the day but still pretty piddly for modern games.
06/08/2011 at 18:02 CareerKnight says:
A lot of people seem to read always online as have to play with random people, it does not mean that, their will still be singleplayer (just like in sc2 which also requires you to log in) and you will be able to host private games for only your friends. Most of the bitching about no lan i suspect goes to the fact that multiple people won’t be able to play off of one copy of the game aside from some people cursed with abnormally horrible connections (I’ve even heard of people complaining that they don’t have an internet connect, on an online forum, which makes me think their full of crap or need to rework their priorities) . As a side not I hate how mmo has started to be applied to almost any game with an online component even when it makes no sense. Games like wow are mmos but a game like Diablo when you will rarely play with more than 3 people is clearly not in that category.
07/08/2011 at 03:44 Eamo says:
@Sheng-ji
Ok, I’ll address a few of the points brought up in your post.
Yeah, there is always a danger of bad players but the game did have the facility to kick players from a game etc to mitigate that somewhat, to some extent the best any online game can do is give each player some control over who they play with but the more they can do to limit that the better. Diablo 2 certainly wasn’t perfect in that regard and I suspect any cooperative game will always be vulnerable to that sort of griefing but while excluding the social aspect of LAN play it provides no real benefit that you can’t have with online play, any group of people who can play on a LAN can presumably play together online.
I listed in my post several things that (in my opinion of course) caused for a lower quality of single player play, primary amongst them was that the loot rules were balanced around multiplayer and in game trading with other players, it was almost impossible to complete sets or find a particular unique item in single player, you had no way to transfer items between your characters since that was based on game persistance after you logged out, you could generate a random dungeon which contained pretty much unkillable bosses for your character with no way to reset the map, things like transmuting, socketing items etc were very hard to manage when you couldn’t just make a new char to socket them when you found an upgrade. These were all things that I would contend were designed around multiplayer, yes they could all have been better handled without requiring online play but then that carries some extra costs.
With regards to LAN play, I would argue that unless you are going to very large LANs the online component isn’t going to cause significant issues, I would suspect that any half decent home broadband will comfortably allow as many people as are likely to have PCs there to play online together. As I said I played the game fine online on a 56k modem. I didn’t claim to have run LAN games on a 58k modem, you took me up wrong on that, that would have been just me playing at home with others in multiplayer who were in their own homes (or wherever). At that I would have had usually about a 300ms ping, spiking up to 1k ms at bad times which actually works fine for a pretty forgiving cooperative hack n’slash like Diablo. Assuming a similar bandwidth usage per client in D3 that would allow for about 20 people on a 1 meg line. Any location big enough to accomodate more people than that should almost certainly be able to provide enough bandwidth for more though obviously the problem is going to be people streaming video in the same location etc. But for small, friendly lan games which I suspect comprimised the majority of LAN play I would love to hear why it would be an issue.
As for google, it’s not a definitive source of data at all but if you are going to discount it at least suggest something better. I would say that google strongly suggests that Diablo 2 LAN play is not very common. If you have better information then I would like to hear it. Granted I didn’t dig very deeply but I couldn’t see any real active Diablo 2 LAN community anymore. Certainly nothing near the size that would be required for all the people who are up in arms about it to be involved. Now maybe Diablo 2 has a large underground off-internet LAN scene that I am unaware of, it is certainly possible, but it seems to me more likely that a lot of people complaining about it are not in fact complaining about LAN play itself but about the other things that have changed. Arguing about LAN play makes it a kind of a “gamers rights” issue whereas arguing that you want to be able to run your hacks and dupe items etc etc comes accross more as a “right to cheat” argument which is a lot more shaky with regards to gaining widespread support.
As for a pirated version, the complexity of pirating a game where most of the gameplay logic exists online is vastly more difficult than just running a server for a game that includes both client and server code in the executable, the code that spawns monsters, moves them, generates items, generates levels, calculates how skills work, saves characters etc. etc. etc. won’t be in the executable you buy in the box, that code only exists on Blizzards servers. Yes it will be possible but unless they somehow manage to get their hands on a copy of Blizzards server program then it will be a very large technical undertaking. I’m sure people will try but it will be a long term and complex undertaking. What you will be buying will, presumably, be a dumb client to a large extent. It doesn’t have to be but it seems likely because that is what snuffs out piracy. The less the client can do the harder it is to pirate the game. That is why the LAN play argument is used by pirates, to be able to play on a LAN you have to get an executable that can do all that stuff in your Diablo 3 box or wait a long time for it to be painstakingly cloned by hand (or hope for a huge security breach at Blizzard).
To use WoW for comparison the free server Mangos is pretty fully featured, but still has not support for Cataclysm content, skills etc. This is over six months after an expansion was released and the technical task of supporting it, in an already pretty impressive cloned server, is large enough that it still hasn’t been completed. Diablo 3 will be the same, the lag between release and functional servers will be so large as to stomp piracy on the head, unless of course, the pirates can convince Blizzard that the functionality to do all that has to be included in the box to support LAN (or something like Open B.NET) play. You shouldn’t call someone an idiot when you have not a clue what you are talking about. I mean, I don’t believe for a second that piracy wasn’t the reason for the change, if you want to make piracy hard you ship a dumb client, if you ship a dumb client then LAN play can’t be done, it’s as simple as that.
Now, you talk about piss poor arguments, but you don’t actually make any yourself. Can you list any reason why your LAN games can’t be done if the game requires a web connection? Bandwidth seems unlikely to be an issue and even if it was it could be solved with a decent router. If your LANS are small it’s no issue, just ask everyone to play nice with regards to internet usage, if they are large then a trivial per person cost will buy enough high quality routers / switches etc to manage everything for you. If your group includes one half decent technical guy and you can dig up an old PC to stick smoothwall linux on it will be practically free.
If your LAN games don’t require any hacks or mods then they can be done just as well over the internet, the slight extra lag won’t even be noticable in a co-operative hack and slash. So whats the real loss? One guy above mentioned running hacks and mods on his LAN games, that will be impossible for sure so he has a decent argument for why he wants LAN preserved but if all you are doing is playing the game as shipped with your mates then there won’t be any real difference.
So yeah, you can argue the modding and changing support is a big loss, and there are certainly legitimate arguments to be made there but LAN play itself is not an issue.
07/08/2011 at 05:15 Nesetalis says:
my answer to this as always…
One hot summer, with no jobs in sight, no money for gas, nothing to do, and our internet was cut off.. but we still had power.. We spent weeks playing diablo II, warcraft 3, and space empires V over LAN… Without the lan option, we would have had nothing to do, sitting in the middle of the country, in 100 degree heat… would have driven us insane.
So fuck you blizzard, fuck you sideways with a rake. I hope for the sake of all the other fools who buy in to this marketing shit, some one out there produces a good quality crack to circumvent the online only bullshit.
07/08/2011 at 16:31 JohnH says:
I couldn’t care less about internet play or some damned real money AH.
I want offline single player that I can play whenever/wherever I want, I often take a 4 hour bus ride to visit my parents which is perfect for some single player action on my laptop. When me and my mates have one of our 8-man (drinking and gaming) LAN parties it would be really nice to set up a local server and play on that instead of melting my mates dsl. Plus as the alcohol is consumed it’s really a good thing to keep the drunkards on a local server. ;)
05/08/2011 at 17:24 razgon says:
Yeah, right…
Its about control, thats it
05/08/2011 at 18:37 Josh W says:
He actually says that, he just calls it “sanctity” instead.
05/08/2011 at 20:13 Wulf says:
I don’t want anything to do with a developer that feels that offering gamers certain freedoms is in some way affecting their sanctity.
That’s like saying that LAN people are tainted yobs, scum to be watched at all times, and people whom Blizzard aren’t very fond of. Yep. Good luck with that attitude.
06/08/2011 at 02:17 MadTinkerer says:
To be fair, I think the idea is more that internet players have a significant number of tainted scum. Remember: Blizzard has all of WoW’s playerbase to deal with.
The mistake they’re making is to try to make everything fit the WoW model.
06/08/2011 at 03:24 LintMan says:
This guy is totally full of shit. Stealing my post from the coverage over at Boing Boing:
“When you look at everything you get by having that persistent connection on the servers, you cannot ignore the power and the draw of that.” What do I get from that? The required persistent connection to their servers doesn’t do anything for me. There is NO “power and draw”:
- I don’t want to be blocked from play if my internet goes down.
- I don’t want to have remember some login ID and password for this game 2-3 years from now if I decide to reinstall and play it again. I’ve already forgotten my Starcraft 2 login.
- I want to be able to play the game on a laptop, in places where I won’t have (reliable) online access.
- I don’t give a crap about achievements or whatever they call them.
- I don’t want me game saved “in the cloud”. My hard disk is just fine, thanks.
- I want to be able to play and create mods for the game.
- I don’t care about their anti-cheat measures: I’m playing SOLO.
- Hell, if I want to cheat in my SOLO game, why shouldn’t I be allowed to?
And his whole claim “that’s how things are going, the nature of the industry” is a bunch of utter bullshit. Blizzard is the damn 900 pound gorilla of the industry – it SETS the lead for how things are done.
07/08/2011 at 05:18 Nesetalis says:
+1 LintMan… I hope they get a clue, or i’ll bypass d3.. ive purchased every single blizzard game since lost viking (excluding the WoW expansion cataclysm)… but I’m loosing all respect for them.
05/08/2011 at 17:24 icupnimpn2 says:
Read a forum, VP
05/08/2011 at 17:25 Teddy Leach says:
What a muppet.
05/08/2011 at 18:05 Alaric says:
this.QuoteForTruth();
05/08/2011 at 18:16 Alextended says:
Yeah I’m still amazed by their excuses. How the hell does making a super secure multiplayer component forbid you from including an offline single player/LAN mode? If I’m playing on LAN do you think I won’t be able to tell if the other guy is cheating and go smack him (or laugh and cheat together, whatever)? Similarly, if I’m playing single player what the hell does anyone else care if I do have hacked items and shit? It just makes no sense.
The no brainer solution would be to make the single player and lan components separate from the online multiplayer without allowing people, characters and items to hop between the different modes. Not to require online access even for single player. It’s absurd to claim the reasons for it are security based. Or are they telling us that StarCraft II, a much more competitive game, is any less secure online by allowing you to play offline (with the also absurd, if less so, requirement to get online every so often)?
And W-T-F at the region lock. No words can describe that one.
I’m also miffed about the decision to not release mod tools. I’m not much of a RTS player which is why I don’t own StarCraft II but I’d love to play some of what the creative community can create with this engine. Modability is a big plus for any game. I was hoping Diablo III would not only be modable but also not have the restrictions imposed on StarCraft II mods. This really sucks.
At this point I’ll probably not buy Diablo III for full price, I’ll wait for some super duper deal which might take a while as is the usual for Blizzard games. Torchlight II should tide me over until then since it has all of what Diablo III won’t, even if it’s a game that probably can’t compete in terms of content and polish since it’s by a much, much, much smaller team. Mods will certainly make up for some of it though. Maybe Grim Dawn too, I haven’t looked into that yet.
05/08/2011 at 19:34 Froibo says:
They are making everything server side. People were still able to cheat in the multiplayer of Diablo 2.
05/08/2011 at 20:14 Wulf says:
I’d like to compile Alaric’s code, here, and offer my own support for Mr. Leach’s statement by doing so!
05/08/2011 at 20:23 Alextended says:
Froibo, I think you hit reply on the wrong post, you neither make any point against what people said nor did anyone mention Diablo II, an old and insecure title. A multiplayer mode that needs to access the servers for “everything” as you guess (so that, ideally, neither real time cheating, nor save editing can occur) doesn’t make the inclusion of a separate offline mode that doesn’t have such a requirement (and of course can’t link to the online mode due to security concerns) impossible in any way as that alone couldn’t enable cheating in the online mode so security simply cannot be the reason for the lack of such. End of.
06/08/2011 at 18:18 Baines says:
They can’t allow mod tools because of the “real money” auction house.
I can actually see someone at Blizzard being surprised by the reaction, because I don’t really think it was done as an anti-piracy measure primarily for anti-piracy’s sake. I think everything boils down to the “real money” auction house. They have to have improved security to prevent cheating, duping, modding, and the like to keep the auction house functional and fair.
Why not have a single player mode separate from online? Because you couldn’t allow single player to convert to online mode, as you’d have no way to verify that everything gained was gained through vanilla Diablo III mechanics without any form of cheating. You could allow converting online to single player, but you wouldn’t be able to convert back to online. Why is this all an issue? Because Diablo is popular, and too many people would get confused and then complain. People would play several hours in offline mode, and then suddenly complain that they can’t go online with that character. They’d play online, and then complain that they can’t take their character offline when they are in a connectionless situation. Etc.
05/08/2011 at 17:26 Dominic White says:
Some journalist with a spine needs to ask these Blizzard execs whether they have friends outside of America. If so, then why have they locked themselves outside of playing with these people? Diablo 1 & 2 had international play, so why not 3? Or is that just too hard to do these days?
These people are so out of touch.
05/08/2011 at 17:31 Squirrelfanatic says:
Valve manages to do just fine with… nearly all of their games.
05/08/2011 at 17:32 Vexing Vision says:
“Hahahaha, where are you from, some Third World Country?”
“Sir, it’s called Europe.”
“What language do they speak over there anyway?”
*sighs*
05/08/2011 at 17:32 ReV_VAdAUL says:
“We did not in any way anticipate people would want to play our games with people outside their borders. We at Blizzard play only with our close neighbours and we strongly believe that is how most Diablo III players will play.”
05/08/2011 at 17:58 Teddy Leach says:
Because, obviously, all foreigners are terrorists and eat babies. AM I RIGHT, BLIZZARD?
05/08/2011 at 19:20 Dominic White says:
@Squirrelfanatic Nearly all? Try actually all. And most all other, non-Valve games, too. Even ones from tiny indie studios.
The DRM is merely an annoyance for me – my line is mostly stable, although it has been known to fail a couple of times a day. But locking me out of playing with people abroad? That’s unspeakably regressive and has ensured that unless they pull a complete 180 on that decision, I won’t be touching their game.
05/08/2011 at 19:37 DK says:
You assume anyone in the so called games media has a spine. That is not the case, especially when it comes to questioning any of the bullshit Blizzard is pulling.
05/08/2011 at 20:23 Wulf says:
My pack is literally from all over. The Americas and Europe being just two of those places. I feel that the cultural mix actually makes us better people overall, and that there are far too many culturally stunted people in the world who wouldn’t know how to deal with cultural differences if they were given a 50 year course on the subject.
Apparently Blizzard are from this school of thought, and my multiculturalism is incorrect. Who knew? I didn’t know that acting as a group of equals with people from across the globe was a bad thing, but apparently in Blizzard’s eyes it is. I don’t like you, Blizzard.
05/08/2011 at 17:26 James says:
-pokes you in the eye, hard-
“Oh sorry, we didn’t know people didn’t like that. When we talked about poking you in the eye really hard earlier, it never came up that you might not enjoy it.”
05/08/2011 at 18:15 WPUN says:
And then they refuse to comment on the sharp stick held behind their back.
05/08/2011 at 17:26 tKe says:
What I think needs to be put across is that, although they’re right in saying it’s good to be able to take a single player character online at any point and that always-online is the solution for this, some players will still want the choice of an always-offline character. As long as they’re warned they can never take it online – they’ll be happy.
05/08/2011 at 17:35 MrWolf says:
I concur. The simplest thing is to (GASP!) give players choice when they create a character:
1) Single-player only — no always-on connection needed, but you can never take your character online. You can cheat, use trainers and character editors to your heart’s content (you know you all have done it).
2) Multi-player ready — requires always-on connection, can’t be h@x0r3d.
The VP mentions the messyness of D2, and I agree, but in D2 there was a different choice: single-player only and multi-player only.
05/08/2011 at 17:48 Aemony says:
Diablo 2 allowed you to create a local character and play it without being online. However, you could take this character online through the Open Battle.Net service, which was a service merely for the sake of playing with offline characters online. Filled with customized “cheated” characters, perhaps, but still fun none the less.
05/08/2011 at 17:48 chabuhi says:
I wonder if they simply can’t find a way to make it 100% “unhackable” without using the online-only option. Maybe i’ts hard or maybe they’re lazy. Why did Modern Warfare 2 have separate clients for single-player and multi-player? Or am I remembering that incorrectly.
Anyway – yeah. I kind of feel silly arguing about the requirement of an online connection since I already have one and it really is no skin off my back to go along with it if I want to play their game. However, on principle, I agree that it’s bad tasting.
I still have visions of Ezio frozen mid-air with a wheel spinning around his head as my client struggled to connect to Ubi’s servers in order to prove to them that I hadn’t exchanged my legally purchased copy with a pirated one in the midst of playing.
05/08/2011 at 21:38 casteel says:
@MrWolf
You still have that option: buy the game and then crack it :]
05/08/2011 at 22:29 malkav11 says:
Frankly, I don’t care if they can’t manage the same level of security if there’s an offline mode. No amount of security is worth the downsides the always-online requirement comes with. I wouldn’t care even if the cheating potentially affected me, and as someone who would be soloing or playing exclusively with friends (like a whole lot of Blizzard’s potential customers, I pretty much guarantee you)….it wouldn’t.
05/08/2011 at 17:28 Mr Pink says:
This is obviously PR BS. They could easily have an offline single player only component, just like Starcraft 2 does. It would pose zero threat to the security of online play. And if multiplayer is the “default” option, then their point about people starting single player characters and being unable to move them online is also moot.
The fact is, Diablo is a great laptop game. It’s understandable that people would want to have access to the game on a plane, or a train or various other places they don’t have an internet connection. Blizzard cannot be so stupid as to not realise this.
05/08/2011 at 17:36 drewww says:
I really strongly disagree with this notion. Your Starcraft comparison is unfair – you can create a totally credible offline Starcraft experience and other than achievements, there is no persistence to worry about. The whole offline/online character split in Diablo 2 was deeply confusing, and because I wanted to use my character with my friends Diablo 2 was effectively online-only, too. I think Blizzard felt like the split online/offline experience with no ability to move characters either way was confusing and made the experience worse for people. Plus, it’s widely agreed that botting, hacking, and duping made Diablo 2 a bit of a cesspool and online-only is the only credible way to handle that.
I mean, no one complains that WoW is online-only, right? The problem here is that everyone had an expectation that this is not a WoW-like game. But practically, all major multiplayer experiences are shifting to look more and more like WoW’s always-on nature because that persistence level is deeply gratifying to people and sells games. I understand the access argument, but the notion that a company like Blizzard needs to make their game for people like you (or for any particular group) is silly. I didn’t like it when Bungie stopped making the kind of shooters I loved (e.g. Marathon) in favor of something more broadly accessible, but I didn’t condemn them for it. Market forces are a bitch and they’re making a judgement call that the population they’re excluding is offset by the increased quality of the experience for everyone else. That’s a rational, reasonable thing to do that I don’t think they should be condemned for.
Whether or not they’re tone-deaf in thinking this wouldn’t be controversial is a separate issue, but I don’t think they’re being disingenuous when they say that they did this because they wanted a better experience for the people who are able to play their game.
05/08/2011 at 17:38 D3xter says:
Honestly, I don’t think they even talk any other language other than “PR BS” by now given all that surrounded StarCraft 2 and now Diablo III.
Of course I don’t think “We want full control over every single facet of our IPs by taking every single right you as a consumer had away, deal with it.” would sound quite as nice.
05/08/2011 at 17:39 Jumwa says:
Despite what was said, it IS about DRM and about channeling all the customers to where their real-money auction house is.
Regardless of what this clueless/lying bigwig just said, the Senior Producer of Diablo III already admitted piracy is one of the reasons for this move: http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/08/01/diablo-3-cannot-be-played-offline/
And since they want everyone to be paying for virtual items in their single-player game that already exist in the game (not talking DLC here), they don’t want people to have the option of modding or offline single player, where they could tinker with the game and give themselves these things without giving an extra cut to them.
It’s not an oversight, they’re just playing dumb because the truth of the matter makes them sound bad.
05/08/2011 at 17:58 kikito says:
They have already given their answer: “There are other games”.
What else do you need?
05/08/2011 at 17:58 Mr Pink says:
@drewww: You make some interesting points, but I stand by my statement.
“Your Starcraft comparison is unfair – you can create a totally credible offline Starcraft experience and other than achievements, there is no persistence to worry about.”
This isn’t true. Guest accounts in Starcraft 2 can still play the campaign, with all the persistence that involves (the campaign progress, selected upgrades etc etc). You are absolutely correct that botting and duping ruined Diablo 2. But simply having an offline option does not mean that the same problems will occur with Diablo 3. As long as everything in multiplayer is done serverside (like in WoW) then the multiplayer will be safe. People can cheat as much as they want in single player without affecting anyone else.
“I mean, no one complains that WoW is online-only, right? ”
Very true, but I don’t really think it’s a fair comparison. Diablo 2 has a considerable single player heritage. You argue that this is the way the market is going, but doesn’t the public outcry for single player suggest there are people who would at least like the OPTION?
At the end of the day you are right that they make the game the way they want to make it, and if I don’t like it I won’t buy it. But I really do believe the quotes in this article are disingenuous.
05/08/2011 at 18:01 Sheng-ji says:
I do believe them when they say it not DRM related, I don’t think they would have any reason to lie about that. I trust them that they believe what they are saying. I wish they weren’t so obsessed with competitive play that they nerf those who just want a solid single player experience.
And Drewww: I know D2 was a bit confusing, but once you got your head around it, it was fine. And most of us know that system now. It is rather silly to use the fact that WOW doesn’t get any complaints about being online only because the experience of the game is in playing with other people. If it were a single player game, it would, lets be honest, be awful. Also that IP was designed from the start to be MMORPG. Diablo was not and if they wanted to make this game online only, I feel strongly that they shouldn’t have given it the diablo name. Sure, launch a new IP and make that online only, they would still get complaints but no-where near as many. People have grown up over the last 10 or 15 years loving the diablo series and we don’t want to see the formula messed with.
And if the industry is shifting to a multiplayer centric formula, then those of us who don’t want this need to kick up as big a stink as possible every time not just lie down and take it. The industry may ignore us, so be it. But this many of us are not wrong and the industry moves away from what we want without respect to the customers.
05/08/2011 at 18:30 drewww says:
I’m totally being unfair saying D3 is like WoW, but I do think this is just another step in the long road from single-player being the dominant game experience to multi-player being the dominant game experience. I agree with Koster’s quote (and I’m probably egregiously paraphrasing here): “In the long history of games, single-player games are a strange and very recent creation and taking a long view we will view them as an aberration.” Obviously I’m sympathetic to the multiplayer experience (most of my game experiences these days are multiplayer), but I do genuinely think that’s the direction the whole industry is going because for most people, being able to play with friends (and sometimes strangers) is a deeply compelling experience. Sure, Blizzard could allow offline play and explain it to people, but they really don’t want someone to say “oh, sure, I can play offline because I don’t have friends that play” only to later discover friends who do play, and have to restart their character. Wanting there to be no friction between playing offline and playing with friends with the character you love and all your equipment seems reasonable to me.
This reminds me a lot of the rhetoric around Apple/iPhone and Google/Android. Apple takes an admittedly paternalistic approach and says “we’re going to craft a clean, smooth, and pleasant experience but you’re going to have to give up some things.” In contrast, Android’s ‘open’ market is philosophically compelling but ultimately app quality tends to be somewhat lower, developers tend to make less money on that market, and Android phone users tend to use their phones more as phones and less as app platforms. Blizzard is betting on the Apple strategy: a smooth, no options, well integrated story that just works (for people who can access it at all). Apple leaves behind groups of users all the time (hell, their latest desktop OS is leaving me behind one version at a time) but it’s in favor of a tighter experience for everyone else. I’m upset about it too, but I just don’t think it’s fair to describe what they’re doing as conniving or deceitful. Those stories exist and are credible, but they’re not particularly any more credible (to me, anyway) than a user experience-motivated story.
05/08/2011 at 18:48 Mr Pink says:
@drewww I agree with much of what you say (other than the suggestion that single player games aren’t here to stay, but that’s a whole other discussion!), but let me make clear what I am talking about here. A guest mode, just like Starcraft 2, which is very obviously a “second class citizen” as it were. In order to access it you are entering a clearly marked offline guest mode, which is obviously cut down from the main event which you find when you login to the games online component. That still meets all the reasonable requirements you have set, and it is something blizzard already have in an existing game. There is simply no reason for them not to include it, other than DRM. That is why I am calling BS here.
05/08/2011 at 19:39 DK says:
“I mean, no one complains that WoW is online-only, right?”
Hey guess what: If I wanted to play WoW with friends in a different country (which I do), I can. I CAN’T with Diablo 3 or Starcraft 2.
05/08/2011 at 19:44 drewww says:
Maybe you’ll get it! I agree, that’s not too much to ask, but having been in design for a while, all features have a cost. Not just in design, but in long-term support and distraction. Simplicity is a wonderful value in a design, and focusing players really tightly on the shared, online game space strikes me as a strong design choice.
Another way to look at it is that people will no doubt hack the system in a way that gets you offline mode. That achieves all of Blizzard’s goals, too. They do no engineering work on it, don’t have to support it later, and mainstream players aren’t distracted. Of course, Blizzard’s history litigating bnetd case doesn’t help. But that was a revenue loss thing on subscriptions, maybe they’d let it slide here.
05/08/2011 at 20:06 Aldehyde says:
@DK: What? WoW is as much region locked as Diablo 3 will be and Starcraft 2 is. There is the EU server, the NA server and some other servers as well.
Don’t spread lies, it makes you look stupid.
05/08/2011 at 20:12 Nick says:
because WoW is a fucking MMORPG and Diablo 3 isn’t.
And you can join US servers from the UK in WoW, I know this because I have done so.
05/08/2011 at 20:17 Aldehyde says:
@Nick: Yes, you can but you have to by an NA account first. Just like you have to do in SC2 and will have to do in D3. You will be able to play on other servers but it will cost you another 60 bucks.
I am in no way saying this is okay. It’s bullshit. However, spreading lies is also bullshit.
[EDIT] I should probably say “spreading misinformation” but “lies” is so much more dramatic, don’t you think?
05/08/2011 at 22:17 Sheng-ji says:
Drewww: I too agree with pretty much everything you say in that second post, though I too disagree that single player is a modern phenomenon: people have entertained themselves with games since before we were homo habilis. As have many, many other species. What I do think is a weird modern phenomenon is playing a game with someone who you have never met.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got nothing against remote multiplayer games per say, but I do have two issues with them. Firstly, you are reliant on someone else for your fun and they are reliant on you for theirs. Even if you are both great people, it can still be stressful and you often end up doing things to nerf your own entertainment so the other player can have more fun.
Secondly, I am female. My experiences online if someone figures this out amount to vile abuse or creepy cyber sex attempts.
So shoot me for sometimes not wanting to interact with people, especially when I am tired after work or just feeling anti social.
I’m not actually going to be affected too much by all of this, but it’s still very disappointing. I’ll not be able to play with a friend who is close enough to talk to face to face, which sucks, It’s probably balanced taking the auction house into account, which I hate and there will be times when I can’t connect to battlenet or even better get booted in the middle of a game, which is a step backwards in the gaming experience. Apart from these things, I bet I will love the game. But I won’t stop fighting, bitching and moaning about the industry sticking it’s middle finger up to me and I hope the other people who hate this do the same.
06/08/2011 at 00:40 InternetBatman says:
They need to make their game for their customers. At the very best it’s a bad idea to make a service (which an online game is) without listening to customer feedback. It’s a worse idea to make a product (which a normal video game is) more flawed than its predecessor on purpose. Blizzard is stripmining the goodwill it has built up over the years. It probably won’t seriously affect Diablo III sales, but it could be a problem for them ten years down the line.
05/08/2011 at 17:28 ReV_VAdAUL says:
A lot of the time big corps and governments make out deliberate actions are a “mistake” or unanticipated. “Oh the big contributors to my campaign made millions from this piece of legislation, how odd??” “Our products break just outside of warranty? That is unanticipated!”
So there’s a small chance this VP guy is a bit dumb but a very large chance he is just fobbing everyone off.
05/08/2011 at 17:29 Lemming says:
I love how they are sidestepping the MAIN complaint that we don’t have a feasible way to play the game without being chained to a desk at home.
I really don’t know why they didn’t go with the online-only characters + offline-only characters option. They made out in a previous interview that no one would want that…I don’t think that’s the case at all.
05/08/2011 at 17:40 urahara says:
The reason there is an always online connection is simple: its the pay-cash market. If people can cheat offline, there is no reason to buy stuff. The onlt people trading then would be the online gamers and that would reduce profits.
Who cares about the people who would buy the game but their internet connection is iffy or worse, the amount of money Blizzard would get from them is less than the people who would pay for trading (for examples of this see World of Warcraft where most the money is not from selling the game but from subscriptions and purchasable content because you play online with people).
05/08/2011 at 18:06 Snargelfargen says:
“Iffy” internet connections aren’t the only problem. Do you remember the issues that plagued WoW when it first started? Or even the authorization problems that prevented dragon age from working this spring?
Online games are vulnerable to service disruptions in a way that offline games will never be. Blizzard/Activision are gambling that their infrastructure will work flawlessly. Which it almost certainly won’t, especially inside the first week of D3′s release.
05/08/2011 at 17:30 Devec says:
Blizzard vp shocked by players just wanting to play a game without having to deal with a crapton of sign in forms as if you were playing accountant online, you don’t say.
05/08/2011 at 17:30 Tech says:
I agree with their decisions. As a DII player (hundreds of hours) I hated dupes, hacks and bots. If this makes using and creating them any harder, I’m all for it.
05/08/2011 at 17:32 aircool says:
Yet all those things will still be created.
05/08/2011 at 17:34 Tusque D'Ivoire says:
I have to agree to an extent. If you approach this in comparison to D2, where the closed battlenet was the only place NOT full of hacked and duped items and characters, this shouldn’t cause much of an uproar.
And that is how Blizzard seem to work. It doesn’t seem like they even take a look at other game companies, or the current state of PC-gaming.
05/08/2011 at 17:38 Dionysus says:
They can do that and allow offline single player. It’s not hard to give people a choice while making a character–”offline-only or online-only”–to give people the chance to migrate to multiplayer if they wish. That fixes the online-only gripe.
(Then you have no LAN, region locking, etc.)
05/08/2011 at 18:46 Big Jim Slade says:
@ Dionysus: Not to the same extent, they can’t. With an offline mode, you need a local copy of every single file in the game on your computer. All the code for the gear is there to copy, making it a whole lot easier to duplicate and then trick the server into thinking you have it for online mode. This online-only mode means that those files are on the server itself, and you’d have to somehow ‘hack the gibson’, as it were, to get them.
Now, I’m not claiming that there won’t be a way to hack or dupe, someone always finds a way. But I don’t think that it will be done as quick, be nearly as widespread or be as easy to hide as if you gave the hackers/botters access to all the files.
05/08/2011 at 19:14 steviesteveo says:
So it’ll be hacked next week rather than today.
Well, that makes all the inconvenience worth it, doesn’t it?
05/08/2011 at 20:35 Wulf says:
Let me look into my crystal ball, here.
I foresee dupes, hacks, bots, AND pay-to-win via Blizzard’s microtransaction system. And a very ticked off Tech.
05/08/2011 at 17:31 Cooper says:
The backlash is not because this a form of DRM and all DRM is eveil, but because online singleplayer is just, well, nonsensical for a whole host of worn-out reasons.
Surely part of his bloody job is to be aware of consumer attitudes to his online technologies. Way off the ball here, Mr. VP.
05/08/2011 at 18:01 briktal says:
People aren’t crazy with rage at Guild Wars for being online only.
05/08/2011 at 18:26 Malk_Content says:
@briktal. Thats because it is an MMO. Diablo 3 isn’t. Small difference I know but some people seem unable to get their heads around this apparantly unobvious facts. Although I will agree that GW1 wasn’t much of an mmo, but it was built and marketed as one. Diablo follows a history or rich singleplayer experience, great for when you’ve got a 2 hour long train journey, or your plane as been delayed for hours and you can boot it up in the departures lounge or various other places where you either wouldn’t have internet or would have to rent internet at ridiculous prices. Guild Wars is an mmo…
05/08/2011 at 18:35 urahara says:
Guild Wars was built to play co-op, and whatever the developers say it is a MMORPG. If only I could think of a Blizzard game to compare it to…
For people with iffy internet connections or people who play on the go (long train journeys with rubbish wifi), Diablo 3 fails to support an important need…the ability to play a singleplayer game on the go. Guild Wars isnt a singleplayer game so it doesnt matter. But then again people dont complain that Mario Kart DS needs you to own a DS to play it legally, so you might have a point.
05/08/2011 at 18:44 bjohndooh says:
Diablo 3 isn’t an MMO?
Here I was thinking it was a F2P MMO with a $50 entry fee…
06/08/2011 at 00:56 malkav11 says:
I would greatly prefer to have an offline version of Guild Wars that I could play indefinitely without any worries that they’ll stop hosting the game. I am not enraged and boycotting their game because it is an explicitly multiplayer game. You can technically play without other people, but the design is still multiplayer. You’re just substituting bots for the other players. Nothing I’ve seen about Diablo III suggests that it is any more of an explicitly multiplayer game than its predecessors, which I played completely solo and offline almost exclusively.
05/08/2011 at 17:32 Dionysus says:
But… but… it’s what the fans want!
05/08/2011 at 17:32 Vinraith says:
Well, if this is representative of Blizzard’s general awareness of what their players want I’m sure this game will be just fantastic.
05/08/2011 at 18:34 Zogtee says:
The current state of WoW would indicate that this is indeed a fine example of Blizzard’s awareness of what the fans want.
05/08/2011 at 17:32 bleeters says:
“Rich and powerful” in “disconnected from reality” shocker.
05/08/2011 at 17:51 The Sentinel says:
I suspect large amounts of money are vaulted away in bowels, hence the reason why rich people suddenly spend so much time with their head jammed up their arse.
05/08/2011 at 17:32 Vexing Vision says:
So Diablo 2 had this system where I could play my character, and then at some point decide to make him multiplayerable.
Why can’t I have that?
05/08/2011 at 17:38 johnpeat says:
Because people CHEATED LIKE FUCK using that very mechanism…
That’s not to say you shouldn’t have offline single player – but allowing people to move between that (uncontrolled) environment and the online arena is just a minefield…
05/08/2011 at 17:39 Bhazor says:
I can understanding blocking mods online in uber competitive Starcraft but in a co-op focused dungeon hack played with friends? Not so much.
05/08/2011 at 18:42 Squirrelfanatic says:
@Bhazor: The hacks weren’t all playerfriendly, you know? Things like auto-grab-mods that picked up ANY gold and worthwhile loot before human reflexes could kick in, maphacks that teleported the user directly beside another player, making ambushes unavoidable, or simply doing an almost unlimited amount of damage to your – human – enemies. It actually had a huge impact on multiplayer “co-op”.
05/08/2011 at 19:19 steviesteveo says:
Well, yeah. And some of them were quirky and pointless, but so what. It’s a game.
It’s kind of nice that video gaming is now at a stage where we’re protecting the “sanctity of the game” but it’s just as nonsensical as when a stranger comes to your Saturday afternoon 5-a-side with the FIFA handbook and tells you how you should have fun.
05/08/2011 at 20:46 Wulf says:
@Squirrelfanatic
I’m sorry but, to me, that sounds like you’re talking about bad game design and then trying to foist the blame off on mods. For example: Guild Wars allotted loot to people based on a system of personal player wealth, and money it split equally between all players (even bots if you brought them along, which was a really clever choice, since you had to choose between getting help and keeping all money for yourself or taking them along and letting them have their share).
If Diablo II had had better design choices in play then the bots that are spoken of wouldn’t be an issue. If Diablo had had a Master Looter system, then the bots wouldn’t have been a problem. Now, I know that was then and this is now, and that hindsight is 20/20, but if you think about what I’m saying here, that’s actually my point!
My point is is that Blizzard are still trying to make up for bad design choices with DRM and oppressive player monitoring and control. If the game is designed with the expectation that there might be bots, then it can be designed in such a way where the game can remain fair regardless, except this seems to escape Blizzard’s field of reason.
ALSO: Comparison with competitive games is irrelevant here, because Diablo is NOT a competitive game, it’s a co-operative one. Yahtzee recently did a review of Call of Juarez (the new one) and pointed out how dick moves should be kept out of co-op. And I completely agree with him! Dick moves SHOULD be kept out of co-op. In co-op you should be helping your fellow players, because if you’re constantly being a douchebag then you’re only going to die anyway when the scaling is set to 4 players, but 3 of the players are massively underpowered.
All you have to do is design the game in a way that encourages the players to be fair and rewards them to do so. If you do that then all the bots in the world cease to matter. Do you see? This is about how Blizzard can’t design a game these days to save their lives.
06/08/2011 at 03:08 LintMan says:
>So Diablo 2 had this system where I could play my character, and then at some point decide to make him multiplayerable.
No. Diablo 2 let you create a single player character that was permanently offline single player, or you could create an online multiplayer character (but still play the game online solo). You could not move an offline sp character into multiplayer because of the potential for cheaters hacking their offline sp chars and then moving them online.
This potential for confusion is part of the lame excuse for why they went online-only, because god forbid someone doesn’t read the warning about not being able to take their SP char online and then whines about it later. Far better to take away all offline capability.
06/08/2011 at 05:15 malkav11 says:
Actually, Diablo II had two types of character: singleplayer that could be brought to LAN/direct IP/open Battle.net games, which had no security to prevent hacking or duping or any of that; and closed Battle.net, which could be played solo but only online and was stored remotely on Blizzard’s servers.
The latter is apparently the only option in Diablo III. They have still failed to convey why it was necessary to omit the choice of the former sort of character, presumably because there is no good reason for it.
05/08/2011 at 17:33 Chris Livingston says:
From the new Torchlight II site:
“Play with your friends over the internet for free. No subscriptions, no item sales. Of course, you can play single-player offline as well.”
Of course. Because to not have that would be, well, stupid.
05/08/2011 at 20:48 Wulf says:
Hahahaha. I like how they’re taking a shot at Blizzard. And Blizzard deserve that and more.
Love you, Runic Games.
05/08/2011 at 17:37 chaosdeathfish says:
He says “I don’t look at DRM solutions and go, ‘Wow, those are awesome.’ I look at those and say, ‘Wow, those kind of suck”
How does he not realise that the reason the DRM sucks is because it forces people to always be online to play the game? Don’t get me wrong, DRM sucks in general, but the really offensive part for most people is when it makes it harder for them to play the game.
Seriously. WTF.
05/08/2011 at 17:37 Vandell says:
So, Robert is either the dumbest developer in the world and is out of touch with the needs of a large portion of users.. Or he’s lying.
05/08/2011 at 19:20 steviesteveo says:
I have a feeling that “VP of Online Technologies” and “developer” are two different job titles within Blizzard.
05/08/2011 at 17:39 HeavyStorm says:
First, and foremost, Fuck Blizzard. Something broke when those guys left for Flagship, or maybe it was something else, but the enterprise I used to deeply LOVE as the best is completly gone. Starcraft II was a great example of a Blizz game, minus everything that made those games great, not just best value or top quality.
It’s incredible how those companies love to get out of touch with their customers. Do we want offline single-player on games that we buy? YES. Anyone has any different feeling?
I will only abidicate those rights if:
a) It’s imperative to play that there is a online connection (MMO’s, TF2 kind of games that doesn’t have bots, etc.)
b) If Blizzard can provide me with a permanent internet connection. Wherever I am. Because maybe I want to play Diablo 3 on a boat deep into the Amazon river.
I know, the software is theirs, so they can do whatever they want with it. Once I buy, however, I will be glad to hack away that stupid protection.
They can justify as much as they want, but the bottom line is that they are taking out a feature that everyone likes (or is, at best, neutral) and then telling us they are doing a favor.
05/08/2011 at 20:52 Wulf says:
Holy crap, someone else sees it too!
Yes, I used to like Blizzard, but mostly I liked Blizzard North.
And think on this: I still absolutely adore Blizzard North.
Because? Because Blizzard North now goes by the names of Runic Games and ArenaNet.
What was left when those guys left was just the dessicated remains, the soul of once-Blizzard, the good Blizzard, the we-actually-value-our-customers-as-much-as-their-wallets Blizzard has gone with them. It is there. You can see it in ArenaNet and in Runic Games. I love both developers for it. I have often professed my love for both. There is the Blizzard you remember.
What carries the name Blizzard these days is just a shambling abomination that doesn’t deserve the name, and everything they do is either or eventually turns to shit.
06/08/2011 at 01:00 malkav11 says:
I won’t even accept situation 2. It’s not just about having a permanent, reliable path to their servers. This sort of setup also requires their servers to still be up and running. That not only can’t reliably be guaranteed, but it is almost certainly guaranteed that there will come a time when they won’t be. Ever again.
05/08/2011 at 17:41 johnpeat says:
I think the most worrying thing about this whole deal is that people developing games don’t realise that not everyone HAS a permanent, reliable internet connection.
It’s wonderful working in your superfast-connected office and you’re likely, as a techy, to have chosen a fast solution for your home too (maybe even moved to ensure it was possible) BUT your players aren’t in the same position.
The same deal exists in other spheres too – I develop for Android and the number of people who seem to assume that an Android device will be ‘always online’ is similarly gauling – they have good Wifi and 3G and so everyone else must have too (3G in the UK is still a massive con for most people).
End of the day, that decision will cost them sales – no argument about that – they either don’t realise this, or don’t care, either way it’s no way to run a business.
05/08/2011 at 19:22 steviesteveo says:
Totally agreed. It’s very dangerous for a person who develops 3D online multiplayer video games for a living to believe that everyone is as technically minded as you.
05/08/2011 at 17:51 Symitri says:
This wouldn’t frustrate me as much if I lived in a country where I had faith in my internet connection. But I live in Australia and at any moment, the weather can screw up the cables and leave me without internet for days (it’s either that or the kangaroos powering our CRAZY ISPS WITH THEIR CRAZY KANGAROO WHEELS OF KINETIC POWER escape).
It’s bad enough that Steam sometimes refuses to work in offline mode when this happens, shutting me out of 90% of my game collection, but for a game that’s main appeal is a mindless time sink to help pass such moments by… Well… It just shows a lack of foresight. I think by now most people realise that their excuse of not wanting to disappoint people who max out their single player character and then can’t port him over to multiplayer is malarkey; I’m sure the number of people who are disappointed they won’t get to play the game whenever they want far outnumber the idiots who can’t read the fine print before they start a character that is labelled as having no multiplayer access.
05/08/2011 at 18:29 nootron says:
I played wow with a guy from australia for years and he was always having connection issues. I think the issue is those pesky Drop Bears. They just drop out of the trees onto your cables and chew through them.
05/08/2011 at 21:02 Wulf says:
…wait.
Wait.
What?
Kangaroo wheels? How can that work? How does that work? Has Australia adopted a new set of physical laws and I didn’t get the memo? Kangroos tend to bound along in interesting ways, it’s not the same as putting a rabbit in a wheel. If you put a Kangaroo in a wheel then more likely than not they’d just end up upside-down due to the nature of their gait.
05/08/2011 at 17:54 pazmacats says:
I wonder if those people have to memorize what they are supposed to say. Marketing. The main difference between Diablo II and III
05/08/2011 at 17:55 DSR says:
Easy, guys!
Hes NOT just a moron. He WAS hired to BE a moron.
05/08/2011 at 19:40 Urthman says:
He’s not just a regular moron. He’s the product of the greatest minds of a generation working together with the express purpose of building the dumbest moron who ever lived.
06/08/2011 at 01:09 gwathdring says:
Well done sir. Nice to see the less meme-ish bits seeing some sunlight. Or maybe I’ve been out in the sunlight too much to notice all the bits that have been made meme-ish.
06/08/2011 at 18:30 EOT says:
Carlsberg don’t make morons. But if they did…
05/08/2011 at 17:57 Ham Solo says:
I’m still buying Torchlight 2…
05/08/2011 at 21:15 Wulf says:
You and me both. Torchlight II is everything I want out of that sort of game, really. They’re doing everything that Blizzard isn’t in regards to that. But as I said in an earlier post, the real soul of the Blizzard that was, long in the past, now rests with ArenaNet and Runic Games. Blizzard died when those guys left, long before Flagship Studios, long before Activision, and now they’re just dragging their feet and postponing the inevitable, hoping that people won’t notice that they don’t have a clue for just a little bit longer.
05/08/2011 at 18:00 Visualante says:
So instead of putting the player experience first, they’re putting the secondary, market and monetary features as a priority.
05/08/2011 at 21:39 bleeters says:
Of course they are. The secondary market feature is going to make them money hand over fist, without requiring them to really do anything. And, what with us being little more than mobile wallets ready to be sucked dry, that’s where their priority is.
05/08/2011 at 18:00 Unaco says:
Initially, a lot of people were quite surprised about the permanent Online connection requirement to play, even in Single Player.
Now, this guy says “I’m actually kind of surprised in terms of there even being a question in today’s age around online play and the requirement around that.”
Really? You’re surprised that there has been a reaction? Would this be because, whenever something like this has been announced for any other game, the gaming community have shrugged their shoulders and ignored the comment, as if they’ve been told the game doesn’t support Windows 3.1? Because, surprise surprise… whenever something like this has been announced there has been a veritable sh*t-storm of discussion in the gaming community about it, backlash, threats of boycott, angry editorials, vicious mocking, facebook petitions, twitter trends, and a strange after taste.
And so, I am genuinely surprised at this guys surprise. In fact, I’m so surprised that he is ‘surprised’, that I am willing to call Bull-Sh*t on this guys surprise. He isn’t surprised… he just wants you to think that he’s surprised by the reaction, because the whole online only thing is an attempt to f*ck you (the “customer”), and if you think he’s surprised you’re less inclined to think that they’ve been intentionally evil. But I reckon he’s not surprised, and they were waiting and planning for the surprised reaction to the announcement, and prepared for it by crafting this line about being surprised.
Therefore, in short, the world is full of surprises, and this guy is full of Bull-Sh*t (though not quite as full as he was yesterday, since he’s squeezed some out and given it to MTV).
05/08/2011 at 18:01 Stardog says:
Retard.
05/08/2011 at 21:18 Wulf says:
No, not really, no. This guy knows exactly what he’s saying and why. Thinking that he’s a retard is just buying into this. They’re trained to make people think that they’re vulnerable idiots. It’s the same thing that Murdoch is trying to pull currently. If you can make people think that you made mistakes simply because you’re not very bright, or because you aren’t in control, because you’re an idiot or a bumbling yet lovable old man, then you can avoid blame in the public eye.
This is the oldest trick in the book, and this man is most certainly not an idiot.
06/08/2011 at 01:19 gwathdring says:
Also it leaves you a safer exit if you change your mind. “We were genuinely surprised. Once we realized, we decided …’well, if they really think it’s a bad idea we can tone it down a LITTLE.” Again, one of the older marketing tactics out there. Play dumb, keep your options open, maintain positive spin AT ALL TIMES, and NEVER admit to caring about something more than the customer.
And then in the future, if you decide not to screw over your customers for whatever reason, you can then turn it around and turn the negative spin on (but only in hindsight). Then you get to pull the humility card and look all honest. Like when Dominoes pulled the “Our pizza sucked. REALLY sucked. So now it doesn’t taste like cardboard. Try it!” And then everyone thinks you’re being cute and friendly and gives you another go because look at the cute little corporation trying to apologize for being all bumbling and bad at things … let’s give the awkward little scamp a chance.
Developers have souls. If they appear not to, it’s usually because they have to toe the corporate line as part of their contract. Corporations are machines. They aren’t evil. They don’t hate you. But they do run on your money, and they will tear you apart in a dispassionate, neutral way to get at it. Many of them are fantastic machines that do quite beneficial things. But do not mistake them for being as human as their employees are in their private time with their friends and families. They do not make mistakes. They make miscalculations. Keep that in mind.
05/08/2011 at 18:09 Calcipher says:
“Things that came up were always around the feature-set, the sanctity of the actual game systems like your characters. You’re guaranteeing that there are no hacks, no dupes.”
What about when I want hacks, dupes, etc.? I used to generate tons of that kind of things with Diablo 2′s offline characters. Why? Well:
1. Sometimes I wanted to play with a new build without bothering to level it up or gather the equipment I needed.
2. Sometimes we’d have a friend over to a LAN party who hadn’t played before, we were able to run him through the first few levels and then bump him up to our level (plus a little to compensate).
3. Sometimes my friends and I just wanted to screw around and generate fun/horrible/whatever characters for each other.
05/08/2011 at 18:10 Jacques2 says:
As has been said and will be said again, this isn’t a mistake, this is dealing with the blow back of a decision that Blizzard knew alot of players wouldn’t be happy with before they made it, but to make sure their item trading system isn’t broken by modding. They can keep adding simple little items that are extremely rare, and they can continue to make money off of the cash for items trade system. Region locking seems counter productive to this, though it may be their way to avoid further bad press related to gold selling
05/08/2011 at 18:12 rubberpants says:
Us: We’ve been playing single player games for decades without an always-on internet connection and there are a lot of things we like about that.
Rich Guy: Now you can’t do that. You have to have a connection.
Us: Why?
Rich Guy: So that we can prevent cheating.
Us: Why do you care if people cheat in a single player game?
Rich Guy: We want you to be able to take your single player character and use it in multi-player.
Us: We don’t care about that feature. It’s not worth it to us.
Rich Guy: I”m confused.
Us: Clearly.
06/08/2011 at 01:03 malkav11 says:
That’s it in a nutshell.
Mind you, it wouldn’t be worth it to me even if I planned to play multiplayer. It’s just such a “fuck the customer” move.
05/08/2011 at 18:17 pipman3000 says:
Someone kidnapped all the employees of Blizzard and replaced them with a bunch of incompetent people.
I JUST WANTED TO DESIGN A GAAAAAAME!
05/08/2011 at 18:18 pepper says:
That fella now owns me a new bullshit meter. Mine just exploded. I can say im fortunate I’ve survived.
05/08/2011 at 18:18 Joof says:
So Diablo 3 is now a not MMO but an MMO like Guild Wars?
05/08/2011 at 18:24 Dominic White says:
Even when you were playing solo in Guild Wars, you basically had to bring a bunch of player-replacement bots with you, highlighting that the game is designed for multiplayer. Diablo 3 has no such excuse.
In fact, they’ve lowered player party sizes in D3, so despite requiring you to play online, it’s even LESS of a multiplayer game. Impressive!
05/08/2011 at 22:03 Wulf says:
And my problems are far less with that and much more with:
- Your multiculturalism is an evil, dirty thing, get it away.
- Our game provides more of a single-player experience which must be played online.
This is versus Guild Wars:
- Your multiculturalism is a good thing that we support.
- Our game was built around and encourages a co-operative play environment.
05/08/2011 at 18:23 Alphabet says:
“I’m actually kind of surprised in terms of there even being a question in today’s age around online play and the requirement around that.”
But he expresses himself so clearly, and so beautifully, that we should forgive him, right? Right?
05/08/2011 at 19:24 steviesteveo says:
The guy’s a modern day poet.
05/08/2011 at 18:27 nootron says:
*shitstorm visor deployed*
I don’t really care that its online-only.
I wont ever play a lan game, or mod D3 so I guess that’s why it doesn’t bother me but I also just like the persistent feel that online-only games provide. I suppose im a bit bummed I wont be able to play on a plane or bus, or on the off-chance my ISP explodes, but that would be like .0001% of the time anyway.
I enjoy the feeling that a game is there even when im not playing it; that it can be hotfixed/patched quickly; that I wont lose my characters if my HD dies and I forgot to back up.
As for hacking/modding, that’s what Bethesda games are for right? :D
edtior’s note: don’t hate me. I love you.
05/08/2011 at 18:39 MiniMatt says:
Would you like to play D3 in a few years when they turn off their servers?
How about when they go bust? Would you like to play D3 then?
05/08/2011 at 22:08 Wulf says:
Do you also support their region-locking?
I’m honestly asking, because whilst I can understand the others bothering you, you’d literally have to have zero friends outside of your home location for that to not bother you.
06/08/2011 at 01:05 malkav11 says:
That stuff? All of that stuff? That can be there without leaving the rest of us out in the cold, or giving the game a lovely inbuilt kill switch.
05/08/2011 at 18:33 terry says:
So the always-on thing is down to the RMT auction houses? Sweet, then just remove the auction houses, done and done.
05/08/2011 at 18:34 povu says:
I thought it was a Magicka screenshot.
05/08/2011 at 18:37 MiniMatt says:
The really galling thing – VPs at Blizzard likely get paid far more than each and every one of us posting here. And if he’s “suprised” by this reaction – if Blizz really hired someone to be VP of online technologies who gets suprised by an online backlash – then he’s quite plainly and simply retarded. Now we shouldn’t mock those with the IQ of a labrador but neither would we typically expect those of canine intellect to land cushy jobs paying a crapton more than we get.
The other possibility, as alluded to already, is that he really isn’t suprised, that nobody of average intelligence and experience sufficient to be VP of online technologies would be suprised and that therefore this “suprise” is all part of a managed PR strategy. So he’s lying.
Either way, this means liers and retards get paid way more than you do (and me). My poor little ego was already fragile.
05/08/2011 at 18:39 Trelow says:
Meh, doesn’t bother me.
05/08/2011 at 18:44 Rohrmann says:
Wow, I’ve been struggling with being a Blizzard fanboy since Burning Crusade(when I stopped playing WoW). I love all of Blizzards games(even WoW Classic…a bit) and found it really hard to keep believing that D3 will be a decent game that kinda fullfils what I expect from a Blizzard game, ever since they published the infamous first screenshots. But I always managed to calm myself saying ‘this is Blizzard we’re talking about and it’s friggin Diablo so they can’t possible f*** that one up’.
Since yesterday, not so much anymore. I think we can bury our hopes that D3 will be anything close to D2 when it comes to what most people loved about the Diablo series. Instead it will be a more arcade controlled (permanent dodging of melee attacks in order to survive ALL THE TIME as part of the gameplay experience, are you fucking kidding me? Sounds console-controllerey to me…) easy to handle since lack of complexity (good bye individualistic character builds, hello WoW-’choose your class and have ‘fun’ with 3 different ways tops to play it’) and ugly to look at since outdated graphics(nothing bad there for a blizzard game) + crappy style(low poly WoW-model crap) = HUGE slap in the face for the people that made Blizzard. It’s just sad…
05/08/2011 at 22:10 Wulf says:
That’s because Diablo is not a Blizzard game. It’s a Blizzard North game.
06/08/2011 at 12:42 Rohrmann says:
I guess you’re right, closing Blizz North and letting people like Bill Roper go was the worst thing that could happen to Blizzard’s games.
05/08/2011 at 18:45 Squirrelfanatic says:
I’m now waiting for Blizzards response to the internet’s response to their response to the internet’s response to their announcement. Exciting times.
05/08/2011 at 19:26 steviesteveo says:
I bet you they’re surprised.
05/08/2011 at 18:46 Homo_erectus says:
No mmo’s have EVER had problems with exploits, botting or duping, right? Making a game require an internet connection to play auto-magically prevents all forms of exploitation.
05/08/2011 at 18:59 cjlr says:
I know, right? That’s why this makes so much sense to me.
05/08/2011 at 18:51 Deano2099 says:
Game balance.
Even for single player.
Here’s the thing, once you go down the big auction house trading route (bad idea? I think it probably is, but once you are married to that…) you either balance the game around players having access to it, or you don’t.
Option 1: I’m playing a Demon Hunter, go through the first three dungeons okay, loads of Barbarian gear drops that is of no use to me. I hit the fourth dungeon, get my ass handed to me because my gear sucks? Why? Because I was expected to go on one of the auction houses and trade that gear for stuff I could actually use. But I have no internet connection, so I can’t, so I have to go back and grind the first three dungeons over and over until I get good gear. This pattern repeats throughout the game, and I go on internet forums and moan about how grindy the game is.
Option 2: I do go online, and trade all my gear from other classes to stuff that totally suits my spec and class. I then go in to the fourth dungeon and it’s so simple as to not be fun, as it was balanced for someone not using the auction house. I get more amazing loot, and trade for more stuff, and the whole game is trivial.
Introducing trading like this completely unbalances the game. That’s why I think it’s a bad idea. But if Blizzard are doing that then they’re perfectly justified in claiming it’s an essential part of the game and that providing a single-player offline experience isn’t possible [note: this also means that the game will be nigh-on unplayable in five years time, because of no-one to trade with].
05/08/2011 at 19:02 Rohrmann says:
I guess it depends on how they implement the auction house, I don’t see D3 failing just because of this.
05/08/2011 at 19:45 Urthman says:
Then explain how the single-player game can be balanced both for people who trade at the auction house for optimal gear and people who don’t.
The only way I could see to do it is if creatures are always exactly balanced with whatever stats/gear your character has, so that stats and gear are meaningless, which would be even worse.
05/08/2011 at 19:49 Chris D says:
You could mitigate it to some extent by weighting the proportion of item drops in favour of the character’s class if playing alone. Doesn’t solve it completely as there’s no way to do that for specific builds, though.
05/08/2011 at 21:49 Rohrmann says:
Well if they’re doing it the ‘smart’ way they won’t balance anything for the auction house. Why should they? They sure didn’t balance WoW for the auction house so why do it for D3?
06/08/2011 at 00:22 Deano2099 says:
It can’t be. The single-player will be balanced with the expectation of players using the auction house. If you don’t you’ll fall behind the curve.
They didn’t do it in WoW because WoW had class specific quest rewards and most things couldn’t be sold.
05/08/2011 at 19:11 Mavvvy says:
That guy must have so much ivory in his tower that his ancestry is responsible for the extinction of mammoths.
05/08/2011 at 19:27 bluebogle says:
I’d upvote your comment if we had that option.
05/08/2011 at 19:48 ReV_VAdAUL says:
I too would upvote, this is an excellent comment.
05/08/2011 at 22:12 Wulf says:
Amazing.
+1 from me, too.
05/08/2011 at 19:17 Web Cole says:
VP: I’ve got an idea; lets tell everyone that we were “surprised” by the reaction to the D3 news.
Some Other Guy: Were we?
VP: I don’t know. I wasn’t really paying attention.
Some Other Guy: Oh, ok. Well, what will that achieve?
VP: It will make everyone think we’re incompetent and don’t know how the internet works!
Some Other Guy: Right. Er… right. Maybe you should talk to one of the PR guys…?
VP: No, no, don’t be silly.
05/08/2011 at 19:18 bluebogle says:
I wonder what it’s like, living in a bubble…
05/08/2011 at 19:19 jay35 says:
What is so esoteric about players anticipating an enjoyable hack-n-slash sp experience? Particularly given it is essentially the genre of game Diablo belongs to, like Torchlight and Dungeon Siege.
What is so difficult about offering a separate singleplayer game experience completely divested from the multiplayer one so that there is no threat of hacked characters, etc? To be so blind to a significant market segment means this fellow should not be making decisions.
05/08/2011 at 19:19 RegisteredUser says:
Have we had the piracy justification yet? Yes? No?
One way or another: THAT’S IT IMA PIRATE IT NAO JUST BCOZ.
There, feels much better.
Btw: Yay, Hattrick! Owner of three HIBs now. :D
05/08/2011 at 19:30 TreeFrog says:
All we need to do is get a journalist to ask him why Blizzard hates soldiers, who can’t just go online whenever it suits them, but MIGHT JUST want to play a game during down time. Then hand the recording to Fox News. Job done.
05/08/2011 at 20:54 Ajh says:
Good point.
Hey blizzard! Think of the troops!
05/08/2011 at 20:57 Vinraith says:
I don’t understand why every “online connection required for SP” game isn’t getting slammed on this point, really.
05/08/2011 at 19:39 Chikiwikie says:
I never played Diablo 2 in anything else but Closed Battlenet… just saying…
for the simple fact that it had a gazillion less cheaters haxors etc.
05/08/2011 at 22:15 Wulf says:
You didn’t run your own server comprised of you and all your closest friends/family who were interested in playing, then? I did. That was via OpenBNet.
06/08/2011 at 00:42 InternetBatman says:
I never played online at all, just saying. It had no cheaters, hackers, or lag problems.
06/08/2011 at 01:08 malkav11 says:
This. Even if I were to play multiplayer, I have no interest whatsoever in playing with random Battle.net denizens (surely the lowest form of internet life I have ever encountered). Cheats, hacks, duping and so on have no possibility of impinging on my offline singleplayer play, nor on online friends-only games.
06/08/2011 at 11:36 MrNice says:
There was plenty of dupes on closed bnet server.
05/08/2011 at 19:49 BreadBitten says:
“I’m actually kind of surprised in terms of there even being a question in today’s age around online play and the requirement around that.”
I think being a developer at one of the most successful and highly regarded game companies on Earth is getting into his head a smidge. Seriously, try visiting one of the more unfortunate countries around the world where access to the internet (let alone a fairly high speed connection) is a major luxury, where people literally spend thousands on video games old and new or rely on piracy purely out of necessity not greed. I’m in the unfortunate position of having to live in such a country but that does not stop me from trying to appreciate video games…
I would also like it to be known that I’m they guy who spent a hundred dollars on the regular edition of ‘StarCraft II’ only to ‘initially’ be denied to play my game without an internet connection as my subscription had ended the following day.
05/08/2011 at 20:04 Tei says:
Heavely monetized games are very unwellcome. Diablo 3 seems aiming to be that, a enviroment where everything is designed so the item shop generates money for Blizzard.
05/08/2011 at 20:07 CommentSystem says:
Strange that with all the discussion of this issue I haven’t seen it mentioned that Blizzard already had working solution in Diablo 2. In that game there was a separate pool of characters. One for locally stored characters that could be played offline, on Lan, and on unsecured Battle.net and the other for characters stored on Blizzard’s servers that could only be played on secured Battle.net.
Locally stored offline characters were easy to hack but allowed the player freedom, whereas characters stored on the servers had protection from dupes, cheats, and other economy destroying practices. Since these two pools of characters could never interact, even on Battle.net, the “sanctity” of the experience was maintained and customers got what they wanted.
It was an eloquent solution to a difficult problem and taking what they are saying on good faith, it’s strange to me that Blizzard would throw out half of the solution for an already solved problem.
05/08/2011 at 21:12 firefek says:
Easy, they want more money
05/08/2011 at 22:51 Hmm-Hmm. says:
Yup. Just like with the no LAN thing for Starcraft (I suspect), they want people to play together and get competitive lootgreed (yes, now it IS a word) going.
I mean, it’s Blizzard. Sure, they can find a way to do both online and offline perfectly well. They simply choose not to give their players that option.
05/08/2011 at 20:08 MythArcana says:
This just goes to show the calloused and ignorant nature of the sequestered mad scientist game developer who finally opens the window shutters to reveal an angry mob waving torches and pitchforks stemming from rumors of a hideous beast being constructed in his basement after hours.
Yes, that’s right, folks…we are living the sordid tale of Kotlickstein’s Monster and the bugger hasn’t even stumbled out of the castle yet.
05/08/2011 at 20:08 Lantzalot says:
Clearly Blizzard has just come to the conclusion that they have created the best possible experience for Diablo 3, and as such, want to prevent anyone from having any other type of experience with their game than the official Blizzard Experience. So, always on internet connection for no ‘cheating’, required download of any patches to tweak the Blizzard Experience (regardless of whether or not the patch would alter the game in a way the customer, say, didn’t like), and no mods allowed.
For example of the thought process of the official Blizzard Experience, see quote ” the sanctity of the actual game systems like your characters.” Sanctity. Bit of a strong word choice. Especially considering it isn’t the sanctity of my character that is truly being considered, but the sanctity of their character creation system. Saving MY character to YOUR server doesn’t protect me, it protects you. In fact, the ‘sanctity’ of my character is more likely to be violated in this way. Say you update the game with some balance fixes, making my incredibly powerful barbarian that I love playing with a bit weaker, because some people complained that playing with that class was way easier than other classes. I play in single player, alone, making that argument rather pointless, but nonetheless my character is different when I log on to play my game. I cannot change this or go back to the last patch, cause that version would be incompatible with the server. Hell, I probably didn’t even patch it, Blizzard did it for me during my login process. How convenient.
Not to say they will patch it for balance all the time or anything like that, but it sure will be easier with everyone being always online. And if there’s one thing I know, if there is the possibility of something going wrong, it won’t.
This also neatly answers all those quaint little complaints like “but what if I wanted to … “mod/play offline/’cheat’ cause I don’t want to level up my alt just to see what high level play is like/etc.” None of those complaints make any sense. Why would you want to play Diablo 3 in any way other than the one they intended? That isn’t Diablo 3, but some terrible mutant game that can’t have the Blizzard logo on it because they can’t verify the experience. Let’s get this straight – we aren’t creating experiences with Blizzard in their game. They are handing us the experience, and letting us play with it a bit. Until they close the servers.
Also, “We didn’t lock the door to keep thieves out, it just keeps the room from getting drafty.”
05/08/2011 at 22:18 Wulf says:
Heh, nicely done.
That was one of my complaints a page back or so. I don’t want anything to do with a developer that feels that oppressing players is the right thing to do to preserve the ‘sanctity’ of their game.
05/08/2011 at 22:23 Spoon says:
Nah, protecting the experience is bullshit. They just want it to be hard for you to get nice items so you buy them with real money in the auction house and they get their fee.
06/08/2011 at 02:04 Gnarf says:
Let’s turn that on its head and ask why they would make Diablo III in any way other than the one they intended.
O KAY WAT
06/08/2011 at 03:58 Lantzalot says:
I’m not sure what you mean with that statement, so I’ll just cover a few bases to make sure everything is clear. My quoted statement was sarcastic, as there are many ways to enjoy any game other than to follow the intended path, so to speak.
The makers of the video game certainly aren’t required to provide alternatives to their designed objectives, or even support the creation of alternatives. However, to actively attempt to suppress modification, alteration, or variation in their up-to-the-minute design they have officially approved, while not actually Wrong, is certainly a dick move. Kind of like one kid stomping all over the sand castles other kids have made in the sandbox because he built the sandbox, and he said to build this one particular type of sand castle. Certainly it is his right to determine what goes on in his sandbox, but he’s still being a bit of a dick about it. Perhaps all the kids will go off and play in another sandbox, built by someone who understands that they all like to have a bit of control in what they are doing.
It’s a matter of taste, I suppose, And you could argue that a lot of alternatives are similar to this approach. At the same time, though, they say why they are doing it. In this case, they want this unified experience and to have maximum control over their content, and they want to curtail piracy, so they require always online and don’t provide modding or such. Fair enough. I don’t love it, but its the choice they’ve made with their game. That is not what is being said here. Instead, they are saying things like “stable, connected, safer experience,” and implying that creating the option for offline characters would simply confuse players. They say they want a smooth, simple experience. And that DRM has nothing to do with it. And that the players have demanded it, and its basically an industry standard now so what can they do?
So, I’m not so much annoyed that Blizzard has created the game they intended to create as I’m annoyed they’re pissing in my pocket and telling me its raining. The choices they have made make this a weaker game in my view, but that’s their choice. Explaining why they made those choices in this manner have made them a game company of weaker character in my view. If the choices they have decided to make are so uncomfortable to say to their customers honestly, maybe they shouldn’t have made those choices.
06/08/2011 at 18:04 Gnarf says:
“However, to actively attempt to suppress modification, alteration, or variation in their up-to-the-minute design they have officially approved, while not actually Wrong, is certainly a dick move. Kind of like one kid stomping all over the sand castles other kids have made in the sandbox because he built the sandbox, and he said to build this one particular type of sand castle.”
It’s more like he didn’t let anyone else build stuff in his sandbox. And then it’s like everyone else had a bunch of sand and all the stuff they needed to build their own sanboxes anyway.
Really, the “stomping all over the sand castles” bit is where I don’t follow. Blizzard aren’t destroying anything. They’re not taking anything away from anyone (more like the opposite). There’s just some stuff you’d like them to make, and they’re not going to make that.
And I mean, I get being pissed or whatever. Because you thought the game would be really cool if they made it this way instead of that way and now you don’t think it will be any cool and that’s not cool. I kind of am myself (I was a little interested in the game, but the buying things for real money-thing might be a deal breaker for me). But everyone makes it out to be this “halp I’m being oppressed” thing. Like, I’m being oppressed because I don’t get to boss a bunch of programmer dudes around and decide what they should spend time working on. What about my freedoms!?
07/08/2011 at 06:07 Lantzalot says:
Ah, I feel like you didn’t actually read the whole response I made, as I clearly state at the end that I’m not angry at them for not creating mod tools, which I guess is what you’re gathering from what I’ve said. Not that I blame you for not reading my big-ass posts all the way through. Anyway, I’m angry at them lying and/or misleading about why they have made their choices. That is the takeaway statement from everything I have said. I don’t like that they are lying and/or misleading.
And yes, the simile is slightly flawed in that there is no actual destruction of anything created, just the active suppression of the Potential to create. And that’s another different point that I think you have misinterpreted from my post. It’s not that I want Blizzard to make anything more or work harder. In fact, I want them to work less (at suppressing mod creation and trainers and playing the game the way you want in a single player experience.)
However, I agree with you entirely on “oppressed.” That word choice is just as strong as the word “sanctity” which provoked me in the original post. Which I tried to convey with my child-like and lighthearted example of making sand castles in a sandbox, and clearly stating that what they are doing is not Wrong. It’s just not cool. But nowhere in any of my posts did I say that I wanted the game creators to make something more, or different, about THEIR game. I just like to have some choices. They don’t have to give me the choices. But I find it odd they are so actively against the ability of someone else to make some choices. Again, I am not asking them to do something, I’m asking them to stop working so hard at something they’re doing. And I’m not pissed about any of that, I’m just disappointed. I’m actually pissed at the PR stunt they pulled, and the justifications, implications, and arguments they made in that. Sorry for any confusion.
07/08/2011 at 12:42 Gnarf says:
Yeah, uh, I think I did. But I’m pretty sure you can take a lot of what I said as elaborating on why I’m disagreeing with you all, rather than just you in particular.
I still don’t get the “active suppression” thing though. I’m sure you understand why the “sanctity” is kind of a big deal. Why they’re want the no hacks/dupes thing. Why a significant number of people play Diablo II as an online-only game anyway. Like, the problem seems to be that they don’t add in all this other stuff, like extra modes or something? Which would actually take actual work.
It’s easier to understand it when people complain that way about Ubisoft DRM and that. Because it’s like, I wish you didn’t put this thing in, and the game would actually be better if you just ripped it out. But in Diablo III the servers are presumably doing something useful. At least handling some game logic stuff. It’s not like you could just rip out the online requirement and the game would be better. Chances are someone would have to put some stuff that the server is doing into the client, or make some lite variation of the server that the players could run, or something. (And then they’d have that to test and maintain.) And obviously that’s doable, and I’m not saying it would necessarily be that much work or anything. It’s just that it’s more like not going out of their way to give players more choices, and not so much going out of their way to take away choices.
07/08/2011 at 17:36 Lantzalot says:
Ok, makes more sense now. Wasn’t trying to be condescending or anything, but you can see how responding to “you all” with points opposite of the ones I made can confuse me when it is blended into a response to my post.
I get that the ‘sanctity’ of the Online experience is entirely different. And sure, it might require a bit more work to add in a new offline mode NOW, after all the announcements and uproar and game almost being done. But they made the choice somewhere down the line, and they already have plenty of games with ‘multiple modes’ of connectivity, and a historical tendency to provide such options. So I don’t think it would have been complicated or tough to do when they decided to go the other way. And then it all just links back to my original complaint of lying about why they made the choices, cause I think it has a lot less to do with the sanctity of the experience than it is a grab at player statistics, money for the in-game store, and DRM.
A person who likes to play diablo games single-player is presented with these requirements which have the most obvious benefits of piracy protection and forcing usage of a Real Money online store for additional content or grind until they find it in random drops, which is just as good as money for Blizzard since its that many more tracked hours of gameplay on their server. Which is Totally Fair to do with their game. They just shouldn’t present it as something solely as a result of player demand for a continuous, online-only experience and that creating the option for offline-only single player would confuse me. They’re calling us stupid while they carefully choose to track gameplay at all times and replace free community-generated content with a cash shop in the game, and we should feel insulted.
These are all issues created by the press release, not the game. The choices they made for the game are entirely theirs to make, and I either buy the final product or not. The amount of choices available to variate the entire experience are huge, and nitpicking at a few of them this late in the process is a fool’s errand for anyone looking for actual results to the complaints. I’m already more likely to get Torchlight 2, because I like the design and gameplay choices they have made. If they made a couple press releases explaining controversial design choices, and those press releases gave off the scent of bullshit, with a few choice outright lies scattered throughout, I’d hesitate. Why give money to people who treat me like that?
07/08/2011 at 22:26 Gnarf says:
Hah. Yeah. My first comment was kind of randomly in response to you, because hey, I had this line I wanted to use for that, and this other guy that responded to you said something about oppressing the players and I thought that was pretty funny. And when you picked me up on that I went a little YA OKAY SO HERE’S MY RANT IN IT’S ENTIRETY! So anyway…
So long as they would doing the same stuff in order to deal with hacks and that, it would still have been more work to go the other way. I think that’s a moderately important point (and an important one when it comes to things like mod tools). I don’t think “well you could just have done this instead” carries that much weight when “this” doesn’t amount to just the flip of a switch.
And the stuff about “what do we do when the player has been playing singleplayer and wants to go online” thing is a legitimate issue. At least I’ve had to explain that to someone once (“no, log into Battle.net and create a game that no one can join instead, that way you can use that character when we play together later”). And they’ve dealt with it. Even if they could have dealt with it in another way, and it might not have been that much more work. The thing they did actually addressed the issue they said they were trying to address. And if that’s where we’re at, people calling bullshit just sounds like “you’re lying because I say so”.
(And then I should probably say something about how I might not have read all that press release stuff and they might be full of lies anyway. Like, I never read anything that I took as “because the players have demanded it” (just “we think it’s better like that” (parenthesis)), but maybe they say stuff like that somewhere and you’re totally right about that.)
08/08/2011 at 00:36 Lantzalot says:
Fair points. As far as cheating goes, I feel it’s a battle that’s pretty much always going to be lost to a degree. There’s two main approaches to fighting it, which is 1) make everything go through the company so they can monitor stuff, or 2) give players more control, like having dedicated servers or LAN parties or artificial LAN through programs, to administrate their own experiences as they see fit. The first option always seems to fall through, in my experience, much more than the second, because it is much easier for a small group of dedicated players to kick out cheaters where they play than for a company to monitor the whole batch of players all the time. And the second approach lets players make a million different flavors of the experience to play the game exactly how they want to play it. But each approach has plenty of pros and cons, I just have a preference. Not too terribly strong of one, anyway, I only mocked them for it in the original post because of the arrogance I perceived in the justification provided in the press release.
As far as confusion over offline players and such, I halfheartedly agree that it was an issue before. But solving that confusion is ridiculously easy without taking away the option. You would have to choose whether to have an online or offline character in the creation process, so it wouldn’t be too hard to have a little warning about the offline character having to be permanently offline. Sort of like how if you choose your difficulty as hardcore, you’re character stays dead when it dies. Not that confusing, cause they say so when you make that choice. So it seems like more of an additional justification given after the decision was made, not a reason they made the decision. Still smells of bullshit to me, given that, but I definitely see your point of view, and you could be right. However, even that won’t save them from my opinion that they’re messing up, cause solving cheating the easiest way isn’t solving cheating the best way. And for a game with such a loooooong development cycle, I think they might have had a bit of time to think of a few other options that didn’t expressly forbid modding and LAN.
If only they had never said that the thought of piracy never crossed their minds in the entire process, everything they said wouldn’t have to be so suspect. Even if it wasn’t the driving factor in the decision, it was still identified at least at some meeting in the plus column for “should we have always-online as a requirement?” Saying otherwise was an attempt to try and mitigate the backlash, and is a lie. And lies tend to travel in packs.
Good talk though, and a nice wall of text between us, haha.
08/08/2011 at 16:06 Gnarf says:
Yeah. Is cool. Like, when you’re actually able to see that there are pros and cons to either and that it’s possibly for other guys to just like prefer the other. And it sounds like you do, so, yeah. Is cool.
And I agree that the “no that has most certainly not evered crossed our mind” stuff on piracy sounds a little silly. I’ll at least agree up to the bit where it did come up and was put never in any minus column.
I dunno. I’m probably coming at it from another angle. I think Guild Wars has been mentioned here, and I’ve always thought of it as being closer to stuff like Diablo II than to “proper MMOs like WoW”. And Diablo has been heading in that direction anyway (like, latest version of Diablo II is more MMO-like than early version of Diablo II is more MMO-like than the first Diablo). The online only thing doesn’t strike as way far out and totally uncalled for or anything. And when presenting those news they’re going to talk about the cool stuff. And then when people are all “well you could have done like this instead (or atually more in addition to)”, then I’d imagine that if I was a Blizzard I’d be all “yes, uh, we could have done that. That would not have been outside the realm of the possible if we was making a videogame like that instead”.
(I did not see the buy loot for proper money thing coming though. WTF.)
Anyway. Yeah. We sure wrote a lot of STUFF! Hell yeah! You’re like all nice to talk to and all coherent and stuff.
05/08/2011 at 20:09 merakai says:
A lot of these comments seem to be ignorant of reality, which is that Diablo/Diablo 2 were actually extremely mediocre single player experiences. If you compare it to other RPGs, such as Fallout 2, Arcanum, or Baldur’s Gate (just a few examples) you’ll see that Diablo was nothing special except for having a decent amount of polish. Once you understand the system, beating the game is done by holding down a button and running/walking past the game, and chugging potions.
What set Diablo/Diablo 2 apart, and what made it a runaway success was Battle.net. Right now, Diablo 2 USEast has over 100 thousand players online. This is Blizzard’s fanbase, the people who have played this game constantly (maybe obsessively) over the course of 10 years. I’m not really sure why they keep playing it, (or even why I kept playing) but I suspect it has to do with the variety of types of characters I could create from silly, to disgustingly effective, and the ridiculous amount of gear customizations (something Torchlight failed to do for me).
If you still can’t understand, go solo Hell Baal, and come back and say with honesty that’s the experience that keeps people playing for 10 years, and that’s the single player experience you want, which Blizzard is dropping the ball on.
05/08/2011 at 20:27 Lantzalot says:
Perhaps part of the reason they want always online for everyone is so they can say things like “Right now, Diablo 2 USEast has over 100 thousand players online.” But with bigger numbers. Also, since you can’t easily look up a statistic on the number of people who play it offline and alone, they don’t exist.
05/08/2011 at 20:50 Dionysus says:
Hi. Single-player Diablo 2 player here. 75% of the time, actually. (Then 5% Open BN, and 20% Closed BN.) I played it for years and years. Just for the glorious loot plonking down; no other players needed.
What you don’t seem to be considering is that people can prefer it to multiplayer. In fact, they’re including a single-player experience, so it should be no great effort to include an offline only mode. So those who prefer offline-only (and can play on a glacier in Antarctica if they want) get what they want. Those who cannot fathom why anyone would ever suffer through such an experience can get their online-only fix too.
This is just sound customer service: maximizing the number of people who are happy. I won’t be buying it unless they allow offline single-player characters. (Similarly, I won’t be touching an Ubisoft game till they stop their customer abuse.)
05/08/2011 at 20:51 Ajh says:
I liked single player. It was great for those days you just wanted to come home and slaughter everything in a hack and slash adventure game.
Yes, the story was non-existent, but I want story i’d play some of the other games you mentioned. What single player diablo 1 and 2 represented to me was a time to just turn my brain off and watch the pretty explosions.
This kept me playing it on and off until 2009ish was the last time I played it.
05/08/2011 at 21:24 Nick says:
I only ever played it single player and local coop.
06/08/2011 at 00:59 merakai says:
It’s not that you can’t have fun with it, it’s just that single player games have surpassed Diablo’s style of hack n slash action. There’s many ways to sit down and unwind by clicking away at the screen, and there’s more reasons to try other single player games than to play Diablo 2′s single player.
06/08/2011 at 01:11 malkav11 says:
It may have been a mediocre singleplayer experience (an assertion I don’t really disagree with), but nothing about multiplayer was any more compelling to me. And once again, none of this is any reason to deny people the option, or deliberately curtail the potential lifespan of the product by limiting it to the lifespan of Blizzard’s servers.
05/08/2011 at 20:46 mmalove says:
My desktop, as I speak, is currently separated from the internet as I’m on vacation. The fact that piracy or the desire to play offline “never occured” to the game designers is a sign I need to stay away from supporting these people. They clearly don’t understand gamers.
05/08/2011 at 20:46 Ajh says:
….Sigh. They’re missing the point entirely.
World of Warcraft being online only is okay because it’s a …wait for it…MMORPG. That O there stands for Online. People are expecting online play to be a requirement.
We could play single player battlenet games with diablo II. Whatever. I never personally did this. I preferred to play the offline ones, mostly because I liked to play Diablo where I didn’t necessarily have an internet connection. I liked to play LAN games with friends. No they may not happen that often anymore but diablo II is over 10 years old. To expect people to be still playing it in large groups 10 years later is a bit silly.
I understand not wanting hacks on mods in Diablo 3 on battlenet. I’m all for that. Hell yes. Diablo II’s hacks getting into battlenet were a big problem, but why is it looking like i’ll have to hack my game like a pirate just to be able to play it when I don’t have internet? They say it’s not a DRM issue, then why do they require us to log in to battlenet servers to play a character we NEVER intend to play online with anyone else? Sounds like a DRM issue to me, no matter which way you look at it.
I’d love to see where they get they’re listening to their player base over there at blizzard these days, because more and more it’s seeming like they’re losing touch with us. They’re losing sight of what made blizzard so great a name for computer games in the first place.
05/08/2011 at 20:47 Plasmamate says:
People, if you are not happy about it, just DON’T BUY THE GAME.
Blizzard doesn’t take angry gamers seriously but I’m sure they do care if gamers don’t buy their games (I ‘m not sure, but I think they used to call it “boycott” ).
Plus, Gandhi did it and it worked ! ( as far as India is concerned.)
05/08/2011 at 20:49 Tei says:
People can do both. Avoid buying or buying wen is cheap. And voice his opinion about why this is wrong, or affect his life.
05/08/2011 at 20:52 Dionysus says:
Gandhi also complained vociferously. ;)
05/08/2011 at 21:52 mwoody says:
They don’t take angry gamers seriously? But, they claim that they implemented the real-money auction house in response to user complaints regarding doing business with non-blizzard third parties.
06/08/2011 at 01:13 malkav11 says:
I will certainly not be buying it if they continue with this policy. But being vocal about it being a terrible idea might have some possibility of getting them to change things. This is, after all, a game I used to want.
05/08/2011 at 20:53 PanzerVaughn says:
With the Market system theyre putting into D3, where you can sell items for Blizzard-Store Credit, then buy merch or WoWtime, i completely understand trying to ake this unhackable.
Also, playing Diablo offline and alone is for people with no friends. Stop being grinches and go have some Christmas.
05/08/2011 at 21:01 Dionysus says:
Bah humbug. Even if I had a friend, mostly likely said friend would not enjoy online gaming. Or, if I lucked out and got one who did, he/she would prefer LAN sessions!
See, I just can’t win.
05/08/2011 at 22:26 Wulf says:
I’m a grinch? Well, how bout you not making assumptions which are entirely too snarky and dickish? Really, look at yourself before you project at others.
The single-player side of Diablo also meant for LAN games, or games through Open Battle.Net where you could do whatever you wanted, where you could customise the game experience for you and your friends. Now Blizzard is telling me two things:
- I cannot customise the experience for myself and my friends because that impacts upon the ‘sanctity’ of their game. They’re not even going to let me have a server so that I can distance myself from their official stuff. It’s just not happening at all.
- My friends and I should not be friends. We’re of different regions, so we should hate each other and reality should be like WoW and its factions. Or something. Because no one can have friends who don’t happen to inhabit the same continent as them.
If you think either of these things are right, then I clearly cannot understand your ways of thinking, which are alien to me. But you should at least be able to see the validity of my concerns. If yu can’t then I really don’t know what to say.
But yes, to wrap this up, I HAVE friends but not all of them are on my continent. I don’t want to disclude some of my friends like ‘filthy commoners’ just because Blizzard thinks that that’s how we should be behaving. The more single-player oriented nature of Diablo II meant that I could play alongside my friends however I liked, but this new always-online approach means that I can’t do that. I’ll never be able to do that. Whereas I could do it in Diablo II with ease.
05/08/2011 at 21:21 Nick says:
So..incompetent or a liar. Top marks either way.
05/08/2011 at 21:31 Paool says:
honestly didnt think that many people gave a shit about LAN play. When playing D2 with local friends back in the day (and we had a quite sizeable nerd grouping) I couldn’t remember one person playing/utilizing the LAN. Not one of us ever used the offline function. We’ve been talking amongst ourselves about getting the old clan back together and we’ve been reading these threads and I’m amazed that so many are turned off by what I consider so little. OMG I won’t be able to play it if the servers are down for maintenance holy shit balls. I guess I’ll have to…read…or…contribute to society….or…play a game on STEAM! phew, I was sweating not having offline play for a second, but remembered there is always steam.
All in all, I think people need to get back to what makes a game worth buying, is it fun? I know there are other titles out there for less money that might contribute as much, but I found the Diablo universe fun and exciting and if that means I have to shell out some extra wompum to enjoy that experience over other titles like Torchlight 2 so be it. D3 looks like it will be FUN and will be FUN to PLAY because its a GAME and game politics are starting to put me to sleep.
05/08/2011 at 21:56 craigdolphin says:
I don’t give a rip whether the requirement is for 100% non-DRM reasons or not. I give a rip that the requirement prevents me playing the SP game I want to play without forever using up my capped bandwidth on downloading endless patches over my very slow, high-latency sattelite internet connection (no broadband available in this part of the USA), and then having to wiat hours for the SP maps to redownload from the server as happens to me now with SC2.
I do not play MP both because my internet connection prevents it, and I like SP better anyway. The only reason for me to buy SC or Diablo is SP. I already have decided against buying more SC because it requires the battlenet log in at startup. There’s no way in hell I’ll consider Diablo with the always-on requirement. Arrogant jerks.
05/08/2011 at 22:29 Wulf says:
Once AGAIN: If you don’t think that Blizzard’s attitude regarding how we should see our overseas friends as ‘filthy foreigners that we shouldn’t be playing online with’ as a problem, then Blizzard’s social engineering tactics have worked entirely too well on you or you just don’t have any friends outside of your local homestead.
Either way, if I want to play with friends from the US, Norway, Brazil, Canada, and the UK, then I should bloody well be able to do just that!
06/08/2011 at 12:31 wengart says:
Blizzards choices for Diablo 3 are limiting and preventing the player’s ability to have fun with a game they paid 60$ for. What do you not get about that?
05/08/2011 at 21:39 ocybin says:
Edit ( whoops, totally replied to the wrong thread here )
~ As for this topic, yes it seems ridiculous not to include an offline mode.
05/08/2011 at 21:50 mwoody says:
So when implementing the real-money auction house, they claim it won’t imbalance the game or cause problems because “it’s not an MMO.” When people complain about their DRM, suddenly it’s an MMO.
05/08/2011 at 22:05 Westcreek says:
Isn’t it possible that they are just doing this to generate publicity? I really doubt they would release a Diablo game without single player.
05/08/2011 at 22:28 Thirst says:
Really? I’m suprised they are surprised, with the huge backlash from no LAN for Starcraft they already knew this reaction was coming.
06/08/2011 at 04:42 drewski says:
Starcraft II sold millions and millions of copies, even after the “backlash”.
People like to whine. Blizzard don’t care because they still make more money than God.
06/08/2011 at 17:29 InternetBatman says:
Starcraft II has sold millions yes, but will it sell over 10 years? Blizzard is still making money from the first over that time frame. It can make millions and still do noticeably worse than previous games. Dragon Age II had a higher initial burst but much lower total sales.
05/08/2011 at 22:32 Shortwave says:
Kay let me get this right?
I can’t play with my friends across seas?!?
I can’t be offline and play? ..
Theres an in-game items store?
No mod support.
As it stands right now this game to me is worth about..
Nothing.
I’m done with crap games like this..
I excused Starcraft 2 for not having LAN support and even fork out the extra money for a connection so our LAN could play it. Yes that was harse and I felt like a tool for doing it. But I remember specifically saying “At least it can’t get any worse” but it did apparently.
: ( : ( : ( : ( : ( : ( : ( :( : ( times a billion.
BTW Blizzard the internet is great for making friends around the world, that you can game with! OMFG.
If I can’t play with game with friends, what’s the point?
And yea’ sorry most of my friends are half way across the world..
And what about all our Soldiers who are across seas? What if I they wanna’ play with their family? Blizzard are terrorists.
05/08/2011 at 22:34 Wulf says:
Does the region lock not astonish and disgust people as much as it does me? I hated that in WoW because it meant that they made it impossible for me to play with friends I have from all around the world. Guild Wars allowed me to do that, Champions Online allows me to do that, but WoW still does not. At least not easily. Whereas Guild Wars and Champions Online both allow this as an in-game element.
MOST online games allow people from all over the world to play together. So what are the excuses for those that don’t? This is yet ANOTHER nail in the coffin for this game. See, I had been wondering if I’d pick this up because one or two friends of mine were interested and I hate just dismissing anything out of hand no matter how much I complain. I’ll give anything a go. But now I’m having a hard time not being as smug as hell because none of them want to play it, due to the region lock.
I’ve managed to convert everyone I know over to Torchlight II love, and I seriously hope that more and more people are just considering that and just thinking of not buying Diablo III at all. Region locking is something that we need to send a message about. That message needs to be: No, it is NOT okay.
05/08/2011 at 22:58 Hmm-Hmm. says:
I think you’ll find that a lot of people agree with you whether you’ll read it here or not. Whether it’s WoW or Starcraft 2 or Diablo 3, Blizzard has made it quite clear they don’t care if you can’t play the game with friends from across the world. Although I assume they don’t mind the fact that plenty of people import games of theirs from different regions so that they will be able to anyway. More revenue and all that.
Otherwise I imagine they’d have stopped the many people doing so a long time ago.
05/08/2011 at 23:18 Reikon says:
It almost seems like Blizzard is just trying to see how much their fanbase is willing to take before they stop buying the game. Unfortunately, I don’t think many will avoid Diablo 3.
06/08/2011 at 00:03 cjlr says:
It IS a powerfully stupid idea, but they have their reasons, and it’s not because they’re closet racism-mongers or whatever you seem to be getting at. Social engineering re: filthy foreigners? Give me a break.
It’s the economies, stupid. Purchasing power varies globally, a hell of a lot. Where real money for in-game items is involved, they see a need for preventing the mass of exploits and scams that would otherwise be. Either you use one global price, alienating those not from the cream of the first world, or you have segregated pricing, in which case if the items can be exchanged globally in-game you have a massive loophole. I don’t think locking things out is worth the trade-off, but then, I’m not the one whose job it is to make that decision, nor do I actually know anything about economics.
06/08/2011 at 00:30 Deano2099 says:
Yes, I’ll defend the always online thing and no hacks for being necessary for the trading system to work, and I can see there are issues with money-laundering that makes cross-region trading a problem.
But there’s no reason not to let people play together cross-region. If nothing else, they’ve really dropped the ball on that.
06/08/2011 at 01:17 malkav11 says:
I would care about the region locking if I planned to buy the game. Wake me when they have an offline singleplayer mode (and thus I can conceive of buying it) and I will happily join you in being vocal about removing the region locks as well. Until then, it’s wasted outrage.
06/08/2011 at 12:53 wengart says:
I intellectually understand that many people have a real issue with the region lock and I abstractly dislike it, but I don’t have any emotional investment in whether it’s region locked or not.
I only play with people I’ve physically met and other than that I just hop on a server frag guys and bullshit with people I probably won’t meet again.
Actually the knock against Blizzard that I’ve been reading describes me pretty well. I intentionally play only with people that live within 10 miles or so of me.
05/08/2011 at 23:07 Text_Fish says:
Bilzzard. The company responsible for the biggest online game of all time. And their VP of Online Technologies isn’t aware that persistent online connections for singleplayer content is hugely unpopular? No, scratch that — an ENTIRE design team working at one of the biggest games developers of all time failed to notice the huge backlash against any game that requires persistent internet access for singleplayer content?
And the VP is willing to admit it? Bravo.
05/08/2011 at 23:27 Lantzalot says:
On that note, it’s rather amusing/insulting to hear his half-assed excuse “it really is just the nature of how things are going, the nature of the industry.”
How can they possibly resist this current of change, the tide of modern games requiring online connections all the time. They’re just one company, poor little old Blizzard, and they don’t get to make their choices on anything. They simply follow the signs of the times. They’re even discussing having firm release dates on future titles, because “everyone else is doing it, really almost the entire industry.”
06/08/2011 at 04:37 drewski says:
They know. They just don’t care, because 8 million people will buy it anyway.
05/08/2011 at 23:17 sexyresults says:
And I’m surprised their VP is so out of touch he didn’t see this coming.
06/08/2011 at 00:00 Real Horrorshow says:
Who has LAN parties anymore? I mean really? Stop bullshitting.
All LAN support does nowadays is give pirates a loophole to play online with Hamachi and Garena.
06/08/2011 at 00:15 steviesteveo says:
Me for one – it’s easier now laptops are so powerful. A LAN party is the difference between sitting in front of your computer alone or eating pizza and laughing with people over beer.
It’s amazing how pizza, beer and video games are more fun with other human beings. It’s as if we’re instinctively wired to be social.
06/08/2011 at 00:17 Kaira- says:
Also, me and my pals. I’ll take LAN over “default” online-gaming any day all day.
06/08/2011 at 00:25 Dionysus says:
I hear humans on Earth have LAN parties, still. I certainly was surprised.
Releasing the game will enable the pirate to play it, so perhaps Blizzard should reconsider the whole project.
06/08/2011 at 01:48 Nick says:
Honestly, who has MORE THAN ONE COMPUTER IN THEIR HOUSE these days?
06/08/2011 at 03:11 Mattressi says:
I exclusively played Diablo 2 in SP and on LAN. After having owned and played the game for several years, I decided to make an online account. I joined some regional server, had 250+ ping (I live in Australia), couldn’t look for a server with a better ping (because the whole damn thing was locked like an MMO) so I quit and kept playing SP. The only reason I even tried playing online for a little bit is because no one was coming over to play LAN that weekend.
I still play games online – though I only play games with shortish rounds or a completely free MMO (so I don’t feel like I’ve wasted my money when my connection goes again, or when their US based server shuts down for maintenance at Australia’s peak playing time) because my internet connection isn’t very reliable – but Diablo and other ARPGs have always just been much more fun in SP and on LAN for me. They’ve been sorely lacking now, though: I’ve had to settle for Borderlands, Dungeon Siege 1&2 and Diablo 2 for a while now. Luckily Torchlight 2 is coming out this year – it’d be nice to have a new LAN game to play.
06/08/2011 at 07:47 Shortwave says:
I help operate a 40 person lan in a small city.
We’ll do nothing but slowly grow and I hope to create a competitive gaming center for kids here one day.
I build multiple gaming PC’s monthly for people locally, free of charge.
I like PC gaming and want it to grow.
Support LAN, it’s pretty fucking awesome.
: )
06/08/2011 at 08:56 DarkNoghri says:
I just got home from an impromptu LAN party an hour ago. 3 laptops and a desktop, playing an RTS over wireless.
06/08/2011 at 13:00 wengart says:
Currently there are 9 people at my house and as I type this we are taking a break in a 6 hour marathon lan of Call of Duty 4.
We have lan at someones house nearly every week and we have between 5-10 people show up, and 6 of these people essentially play games exclusively at the weekly lan and buy games exclusively for play at the weekly lan.
06/08/2011 at 17:36 InternetBatman says:
I use Hamachi for many games I purchased and D&D with maptools. VLans beat the hell out of using something like Gamespy to play with friends. Assuming that people who use tools that make things easier are pirates is both silly and a far cry from the old PC days where everyone tweaked their programs to make things better.
Also I had a lan party about two months ago.
06/08/2011 at 00:19 Corrupt_Tiki says:
You know, I am a blizzard fan boy, through and through. But I am starting to wonder if that should still be the case, I mean, I agree D2 was a horrible mess online, but the real joy was Co-op and I mostly played SP anyway. My internet connection is ok, better than a lot of peoples but still I think it’s pretty shit imo (only get 1mb/s dl on steam, tops.) and I think the latency will take quite a lot of the joy out of this game. my favourite part of D2 was the fast frantic pace – I don’t enjoy minecraft spec lag tyvm.
Oh well have to wait and see, and I will probably buy it, because I am their bitch, but still, am dissappoint.
06/08/2011 at 00:27 My2CENTS says:
This VP is really talking trash. But then again Blizzard enforcing this fuckin’ stupid DRM moves is really pathetic. I mean its one thing to want to protect your intellectual property, but fuckin’ your users just because you can’t properly protect your software product is truly pathetic.
06/08/2011 at 01:37 virtualmatrix258 says:
I’m not. The fact that I live in Florida means that I get a lot of brown-outs and bad tropical weather which during the summer causes my ISP to turn off their servers, naturally because we’re the lightning capitol of the world. Now, with that in mind I really like to play single player games that require no constant internet and Diablo would be perfect for that. Unfortunately for that I’m going to wait until its a bargain bin special or not get it at all. It’s Blizzard’s way of “Ubisofting” their software, and I’m not a fan of constant internet DRM.
06/08/2011 at 02:04 Kamos says:
“In the end, there’s little option but to accept that this is where the most successful gaming company on the planet has decided to go. You could, I suppose, not play “Diablo 3.” But really, what are the odds of that happening?” – Russ Frushtick
Yes, what are the odds of me not buying a game that removes all my freedom, from a developer who insults my intelligence and calls me an ancient retrograde? I WONDER!
06/08/2011 at 02:12 Gnarf says:
06/08/2011 at 02:05 JohnnyMaverik says:
Having recently spent 2 weeks with out internet after moving into a new house, I understand why he’s very surprised, but shit happens, internet is not a given even in this day and age, and if I can’t play my SP games with-out a connection, that’s a massive annoyance waiting to happen and we have a problem.
06/08/2011 at 03:22 Mattressi says:
Yeah, when I last moved I remember being a bit bored since we had no internet for a few weeks. I still had most of my games though. I’m wondering what it’s going to be like in a few years, where a gamer moves house and realises that not a single one of their games is playable because they have no internet connection. I desperately hope that it happens to those who constantly come one here and say “OMG, WHO DUZNT HAF DA INTERNETZ!?”. But alas, they’ll probably continue leeching off their parents in the inner part of some well-connected city where internet flows around the whole city like air. If only they’d try living in a town, rural area or a DIFFERENT FRIGGING COUNTRY TO YOU KNOBS THAT HAVE GREAT INTERNET AND DON’T EVEN REALISE THAT AUSTRALIA AND OTHER COUNTRIES WITH POOR INTERNET EXIST. Hmm, perhaps I got a little carried away with that last bit.
06/08/2011 at 03:06 _PixelNinja says:
Alex Mayberry of Blizzard has explicitly said in an Interview with PC Gamer that the online requirement is also for DRM reasons — contradicting Robert Bridenbecker’s affirmations.
ProTip: for better results when making something up, make sure all people involved stick to the same version of the story.
06/08/2011 at 04:34 drewski says:
I chuckle at the idea that this will in any way affect Diablo III’s sales.
I chuckle at the idea that Blizzard care remotely about what a tiny, loud corner of the internet thinks.
I find naivety so damn endearing.
06/08/2011 at 13:04 wengart says:
In the immediate future the number of players who decide not to buy Diablo 3 won’t effect Blizzard in any appreciable way. However the players who decide to buy Torchlight 2 instead will probably be significant for Torchlight’s developers, and overtime may allow them to challenge Blizzard in a more direct way.
06/08/2011 at 04:41 wab1981 says:
Lets also remember the link between to mod suport / actively anti mods and seeling shit via micro transactions, can’t mod a cool weapon or new skins but for a couple of quid you can buy something similar. Check out a bioware dlc or DoW2 on steam, that shit used to be fan made for free!
06/08/2011 at 04:46 wab1981 says:
that should have been “no” not “to” ans “selling” not s”eeling”. I am drunk BTW
06/08/2011 at 04:44 Metonymy says:
I purchased every Blizzard game since Warcraft 1.
Starcraft 2 was the first game where I realized they weren’t worth my money anymore. They quite obviously lifted every bit of creativity from the forum posts of players, (and other games) brazenly riding the coattails of starcraft 1′s unexpected success by changing nothing whatever. They just vomited all over the story with burning-crusade level incompetence, and restricted player choice just to hinder piracy…which OF COURSE, completely failed. The crack took a couple of weeks instead of a day, and as a result, the paying customers have a crappy product.
Now they’re stepping up the exposure diablo players have to online hacks, phishing, keyloggers, and worse, and have the audacity to say they are IMPROVING the player experience?
Blizzard, honey, suggestion? Create your draconian DRM, let it ride until the crack is complete, at which point DRM no longer has a purpose. Then, release a new version with LAN, offline, and any other options you can give the paying customers.
08/08/2011 at 16:15 Sian says:
That’s exactly what I would’ve written, except I started with Warcraft 2 and didn’t buy any WoW expansion after Burning Crusade.
06/08/2011 at 05:51 JKjoker says:
i doubt they even care about pirates any more, this is about control, control over esports, control over tournaments, control over how you play it, where you play it and whom you pay to play it, since the whole korean esport thing, the dota thing and the garena thing they want absolute control even at the cost of killing their product, theyll never give you lan or singleplayer back without completely changing strategies
06/08/2011 at 06:29 Big Daddy Dugger says:
Only legit customers can’t play offline. Good thing I’m pirating this one…and all of them for that matter, that’s just how we do it in the durty south. TEJAS REPRESENTIN’ SON!
06/08/2011 at 07:45 Shortwave says:
gjkj Was trying to reply..
06/08/2011 at 10:00 Nameless1 says:
Then I won’t buy their game (after the shamefully horrible starcraft 2 single player that’s probably the right choice)
Surprise!
06/08/2011 at 13:58 slaine says:
What i don’t get are the commenters who don’t get why anyone would want to play diablo single player. I only played d2 single player and quite enjoyed it. I don’t see why i should be required to go online to play a sp game. Now i don’t have the option of doing that without having to go online. F u Blizzard. You just lost a sale and Torchlight 2 has gained a customer.
06/08/2011 at 14:22 Fameros says:
This is about control and data mining. The permanent online connection allows the company to harvest lots of statistics about the players and their gaming habits. The statistics are mined for patterns of usage and group preferences which are then used to develop more profitable games. Also, of course, piracy delay. Frankly, as long as the industry as a whole does not move to perma connection DRM, for me it is a slight annoyance. There are more games out there than what I will ever be able to play and we can afford to boycott any publisher insisting on herding their customers. I did not buy any recent Ubisoft game until they dropped their DRM recently. Diablo 3 was a first day buy for me. But I will never pay to be a lab rat for a corporation while having my privacy violated. My money goes to Desktop Dungeons, as soon as it hits Steam.
06/08/2011 at 16:21 enVy says:
Its just another way to bind their customers on the BNET! They want to have full control about everything, gamestats, piracy, cheating, socialism and so forth. I mean i dont have a big problem with “Online only” as long as i have the option to restrict the access only to my friends! When im forced to play with random people from the internet i will never touch that game.
06/08/2011 at 20:47 Zaxwerks says:
“Let’s say we want to create an offline capacity,” he explained. “You’re introducing a separate user flow, a separate path that players are going to go down. And, at the end of the day, how many people are going to want to do that?”
…errr, everyone that’s complaining and that you’re apparently so “surprised” about Mr Vice President.
These people knew exactly what they were doing, unless they are complete morons, and must be aware of what’s happening in the industry with Ubisoft and to a lesser extent EA trying to screw people over with their “always online DRM solutions”
So either Mr Bridenbecker is:
1) Completly out of touch with the user base and what’s happening in his industry and therefore should be replaced as apparently he’s not qualified to do his job.
2) An idiot if he thought that this “always online for single player” wouldn’t be met with this sort of response, therefore he should be replaced because apparently he is a moron and shouldn’t be VP.
3) Is perfectly aware he’s screwing everyone over and now there’s been a backlash lyng to us through his teeth pretending this is a some big unexpected surprise. (If this is not true see points 1 and 2 above).
07/08/2011 at 01:41 kud13 says:
well, now I just have to ho[pe this game is out by next spring. Because in May I’ll be going back to Ukraine for the Euros, and if D3 is out by then, i’ll be able to grab a shiny cracked copy, with no multiplayer whatsoever from any market stall for an equivalent of 5 bucks.
07/08/2011 at 02:54 ChowTOdust says:
Ofcourse it factors in. Why all the bullshit blizz?
07/08/2011 at 09:06 Captainhowdy says:
This guy wants to talk about the sanctity of the game, when they’ve gone and changed it so much >.>
07/08/2011 at 11:35 Kaldor says:
Oh, surprise, surprise, Blizzard are not masters of the universe yet.
07/08/2011 at 13:12 Kent says:
Well personally I’m offended that Blizzard still exists and they release this game at all.
08/08/2011 at 01:29 C4Cypher says:
Back in 2004, I was stationed at Elmendorf AFB, Anchorage, Alaska, in the airmen’s dorms. One month they booted us out of our regular dorm rooms and into an older dorm building so that they could renovate. We spent that month without internet connections, and to make matters better, the heating pipes in the temporary building burst, leaving us without heat in an Alaskan winter. One weekend myself and three other buddies set up our gaming PC’s in one of our temp dorm rooms, spent all weekend running through Diablo II’s acts one through five in one sitting. Four Gaming PC’s lanned up will heat up a room like you would not believe. Very fond memories.
That is what LAN capabilities means to me. And for the record, all four copies of Lord of Destruction were legally purchased.
08/08/2011 at 09:11 Screamer says:
I’m surprised that he is surprised……..