By John Walker on September 22nd, 2011 at 12:56 pm.
Diablo III‘s ‘always-on’ DRM is obviously a matter of much controversy, albeit a more nuanced one than that of Ubisoft. Where Ubisoft implemented the grotesque system purely as a claimed measure to fight piracy, Blizzard’s logic at least has some elements that offer benefits to the player. Battle.net, online ranking, drop-in-drop-out co-op, the auction house, and constant live monitoring of your progress, and monitoring to prevent cheating, can all be argued to be in the players’ favour, in a way that Settlers VII crashing its single player because the internet blipped does not. But it doesn’t make the problem go away, and I want to strongly argue that Blizzard reconsider their decision, in the face of its simply breaking their game. Because no matter how perfect your connection, it will affect you.
My intention with Diablo III is to solo the game. I realise that’s not the way many will play it, it’s not what the Diablo series is most famous for, and it’s arguably not the primary way Blizzard intends the game to be played. However, crucially, it’s a mode of the game that’s deliberately programmed to work, with NPC story-based characters to join your party and interact with you, and a single-player plot to hack through. It is, undeniably, designed to be played as a single-player game.
However, the always-on DRM makes this the most remarkably annoying process. During the beta, Blizzard’s servers have dropped a few times. Of course, that’s expected during a beta, but it’s also not unexpected once a game has gone live. And here, when the server goes down, you’re left with a ghost of the game until it eventually stops you from playing at all. I found that suddenly when I fired my bow no arrows came out – I could wander around, enemies were still there, but clearly something was wrong. And then it froze, a message popped up saying there were connection troubles, and I was dumped back to the main menu with no way to play. For no discernible reason. I still had the game installed, had no desire to be online or use any online functions, and yet still couldn’t play.
Clearly that problem only arises when something goes wrong, or when there’s server maintenance, which obviously will only be a very small proportion of the time (still time when the game needlessly doesn’t work, of course.) But a more striking and regular problem has shown itself over the last couple of days of playing with the beta levels.
You can’t pause. In fact, in most ways, the game acts like an MMO. For instance, quit it, and you’re given the optional cooldown to have your player clear the server properly. But it’s not an MMO. It’s not even close to an MMO. So when I’m playing the single-player game, and I’m in the middle of a frenzied mob, and there’s a knock at the front door, there’s nothing I can do. As happened to me yesterday. Twice. On another occasion I was surprised by a phone call that led to my having to do some other things. I’d safely left my character in a cleared area, but long between checkpoints. When I came back to the PC, I’d been idle for too long and the game had logged me out.
I’d been logged out of a single-player game because I was away for an hour. And thus lost all my progress (although not my items and stats) since the last checkpoint, a long, long way back.
In fact, currently, losing your connection (either by idling or the server going down) resets huge chunks of what you’ve already played, such that the map is blank, and you need to battle through it again. Whether that’s an issue with the beta, or something that will also carry through to the finished game, we obviously don’t know. But it’s another clear example of how having your single-player, offline game require a constant connection is massively idiotic and counter-productive.
Games with occasional checkpoints are obviously a massive pain for anyone who might or need to stop playing at that moment – something that’s not exactly an uncommon occurrence. But a game where that’s the case, AND you can’t even leave it running in the background, is beyond acceptable.
And this is all never mind that you can’t play it on trains, planes, at your gran’s, on the day a workman cuts through your phone line, if you’re in the army, or simply cannot afford a broadband connection.
Blizzard must address this. Yes, their motivations don’t appear to be a misguided and ignorant attempt to prevent piracy. Although I doubt they’re too upset that this is a believed by-product. But no matter how much they have argued that their always-on system is of benefit to players, it absolutely isn’t proving to be the case. And maddeningly, the solution is incredibly simple:
Create the option to create an entirely offline character. A character that can’t then be imported into an online game, one that can’t invite others to join in. That way any of the concerns about those finding ways to artificially improve their characters and then dominate online (something that really doesn’t seem a massive issue in opt-in co-op, but there we are) are removed, and anyone who just wants to solo the game can do so.
Sure, you can’t use the auction house. And sure, that means Blizzard will make a fraction less money from you. But since they already made the money when you paid them for the game, it would seem not unreasonable to let you be able to play it. Right now, in the state it’s currently in, it’s an inherently broken product. A single-player game that won’t pause, and if you leave it running will boot you out and cancel your progress. That’s insane.
And it’s all the more maddening in what’s, so far, an exceptionally good game.
22/09/2011 at 12:58 Teddy Leach says:
Yup, not going to buy it.
22/09/2011 at 13:08 abigbat says:
really though? Everybody says this in comment threads, everyone makes petitions, everyone vocally boycotts the the game.
Then everyone sees everyone else having fun and buys the game.
28/03/2012 at 15:20 Yammo says:
_EVERYONE_? Surely you are trolling…?
The same has been said about players who dislikes the mandatory Spyware, Origin…
…Yet, I have not purchased a single EA title since they moved their stuff to Origin. Thus, your comment is logically complete and utter void. Unless, of course, you would argue that I am so incredibly unique, that I am the only one on the planet who has integrity. But that would surely be folly. Thus there is at least two. Rinse and repeat and voilá, your comment isn’t just logically faulty, but an outright lie. Nobody could possibly be stupid enough to make such a moronic statement, thus, you are trolling.
22/09/2011 at 13:09 ix says:
On a game that sells millions, the couple of thousands (or even tens of thousands) that might not buy it because of DRM are really only a drop in the bucket.
22/09/2011 at 13:13 Ultra Superior says:
I’d love to buy the shit out of this game. I’d buy all the DLC they’d make. I’m addict. But this is too much. Just knowing the game does that makes it too repulsive to even want to get started.
Grim Dawn – Deliver us.
Torchlight – Deliver us.
Anyone else, please make a Diablo clone asap. I’m going to buy it. I’m not paying for Diablo 3 while it’s in this state.
22/09/2011 at 13:15 Tori says:
I’m also going to skip this game – my connection right now is kinda bad, so I won’t be buying a game that I can’t play.
If they add an offline mode like proposed by John, it gets a preorder.
22/09/2011 at 13:15 Teddy Leach says:
No, seriously, I’m not going to buy it. I lost interest in it months ago and this is the final nail in the coffin.
22/09/2011 at 13:18 pakoito says:
How about cracking the shit out of it? I’m guessing day 2 offline patches.
22/09/2011 at 13:21 oatmeal says:
I won’t buy it either. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I would rather give up gaming completely than accept these new DRM schemes. Feels strange to say it, but it wouldn’t be such a great loss. I’ve played my favorites so many times for so many years, and I’m not such a junkie that I have to play these new games. The exceptions to all the titlesI refuse to buy don’t warrant the cost of a new gaming rig.
22/09/2011 at 13:22 GenBanks says:
What if it turns out to be an absolute classic game? Surely game quality should trump it being set up like an MMO…
22/09/2011 at 13:22 Zepp says:
@Teddy
lol
22/09/2011 at 13:24 bglamb says:
Not sure cracking is gonna be easy if the server is providing all the details on mobs & drops.
22/09/2011 at 13:29 westyfield says:
I’m with Teddy. I was vaguely interested in Diablo 3 from the start, but this is too much.
22/09/2011 at 13:29 abigbat says:
Someone will set up custom servers like in WoW (where you can play with just a few people, level to 70 in a single hit etc).
22/09/2011 at 13:29 arccos says:
The thing is, quite a few people actually aren’t going to buy the game because of this. For people like me that find this type of game only moderately interesting, this really is a deal breaker. I’m sure people who love the genre will probably buy it if its good. But Blizzard is losing a portion of people that really are on the fence about it.
22/09/2011 at 13:30 Arkaniani says:
No matter how intrusive the DRM will be. This game will be miles and miles ahead of copy-cats like Grim Dawn and Torchlight. There is simply much more substance to Diablo 3
22/09/2011 at 13:30 Bull0 says:
I’m rapidly becoming less and less interested in Diablo 3. Some of these revelations mark the last straw – no pause? And generally the game behaving like an MMO-lite? Why not just play a sodding MMO, then? Forget this.
22/09/2011 at 13:32 godgoo says:
I have never played a Diablo, s’not really my genre but the more I’ve been reading about this game I have started to get interested. Always online doesn’t bother me as much as it probably should (I do all of my gaming at home on my desktop with a very strong connection) but this is just insane, I fall into the category of people who probably won’t be able to sync my friends into a co-op game, doesn’t like playing with randoms, and has only a passing interest (at best) in things like auction houses.
I like gameplay, I like stories. To have a single player game that behaves like an MMO as if that’s an accepted norm is just plain stupid, and has done them out of a sale, not out of fan boi rage, misplaced self righteousness or internet angst, just because it has become unappealing to me.
22/09/2011 at 13:33 Ultra Superior says:
@ oatmeal
I agree, though I don’t think this is going to be an issue. People who won’t accept this are a market too. There will be studios like paradox, cd projekt and crate etc. who will serve this market. And they’ll get better.
Also, there is not much space for more than one activision. It’s just like appstores – only the giants such as google and apple can afford to run the appstore – only activision blizzard* can run the Auction House.
All the other attempts will inevitably fail, so this won’t be an issue. Shame about Diablo 3 being the bait, I’d love to enjoy it if not for the evil behind it.
*Valve too, if they merge the steam trading shite with enough good titles.
22/09/2011 at 13:38 gallardo1 says:
I would like to have that choice, but I can’t miss it, after all the good moments with D2.
I really appreciate this article in the way it isn’t moved by anger, but the desire to fully like the game when released.
It really has no sense forcing me to play a singleplayer game always online and cheats are only an excuse, because in D2 players couldn’t import singleplayer character online, but only in separated special server (obviously plagued by all kind of cheats).
22/09/2011 at 13:41 The Sombrero Kid says:
There are a lot of much better games than this I’ve deprived myself of because of publisher politics.
22/09/2011 at 13:46 Keymonk says:
Really not, for me. I’ll be getting Torchlight 2 instead.
22/09/2011 at 13:47 nofing says:
This game has been on the top of my wishlist, since it’s been announced (actually even prior to that), but my internet connection isn’t good/reliable enough to let me play online games. And no pause option, seriously? Well, I guess not everybody plays games like I do, but on some games my game time shown in Steam is double the time (or even more), of what I actually played, because I’m doing other stuff in between and don’t want to lose my progress.
22/09/2011 at 13:52 ZeDestructor says:
Shameless piggybacking on first comment :P
IMO offline characters and gameplay is a must, and I even argue that offline characters should be allowed to be imported online/into a LAN. That’s perfect for having fun with friends without any of the online troubles and just for kicks. Yes, it allows cheating, but implement a Valve-like anti cheat option that only allows verified online characters and the balance issue is fixed while allowing cheating for lulz for offline people. Yes, I used to dupe items, but it was offline, with friends, for fun, and that comes down to it, games are supposed to be fun, no matter how, which is why people like me still play Diablo 2, and even the Original Diablo and hilarious gameplay videos like the DXHR Safety Dance turn up.
22/09/2011 at 13:53 Sian says:
“really though? Everybody says this in comment threads, everyone makes petitions, everyone vocally boycotts the the game.
Then everyone sees everyone else having fun and buys the game.”
I always wonder how people saying stuff like this can even presume to know what others are buying. I know I never bought a game with any kind of always-on “feature”.
22/09/2011 at 13:57 abigbat says:
a fairly classic example:
http://i.imgur.com/abXW9.png
22/09/2011 at 14:03 Urthman says:
I never played Diablo 2, but got hooked on the genre by Titan Quest. I was really looking forward to D3, but this just isn’t going to work.
For me, Diablo 3 is in the category, “I don’t have a computer that can play that game.”
22/09/2011 at 14:05 Sian says:
13 of 39 is not “everyone”. Far from it. I don’t know what it looks like further down the page on that screenshot, nor do I know about the situation on the other 30 pages, so these 13 people might be the only ones out of hundreds. Of course, everyone else might also be breaking their boycott, but even so, it’s only one example.
In short: Both you and me can only speak for ourselves. When I boycott, I boycott. So clearly it’s never “everyone” who buys a game they intended to leave on the shelf.
22/09/2011 at 14:09 Dana says:
Well Im always online, so its not the problem. Real money auction house is a dealbreaker for me.
22/09/2011 at 14:12 Screamer says:
Not buying it either….already dealt with their supposed ‘offline’ in SC2. It only works until you actually need to be offline. An their support is atrocious/useless/pathetic…..
So no thanks, it that is how their supposed offline mode works… I can just imagine what a clusterfuck this always-online is going to be…..
22/09/2011 at 14:17 ZillaRacing says:
stop lying because all the cool kids are.
22/09/2011 at 14:24 abigbat says:
@Sian exactly. Personally I’m delighted that you’re going to follow through on your decision; far too many “gamers” (a term I despise) don’t know how to vote with their wallets.
The issue may not overly affect me, but if it affects you then bloody well stick to your guns.
22/09/2011 at 14:53 drewski says:
@ abigbat – please don’t judge the entirety of the globe on the basis of your spineless friends.
22/09/2011 at 14:57 PFlute says:
If the no-pause thing is for real, that might be the last straw unfortunately. Stuff comes up VERY regularly for me, so that would be sort of a deal breaker.
22/09/2011 at 15:04 abigbat says:
Spineless? Is abstaining from buying a product tantamount to heroism now?
Calm down.
22/09/2011 at 15:06 Mattressi says:
Yeah, I’m still definitely not buying (especially so because of this article – didn’t realise how many other problems always-online DRM caused). Since they announced that there’d be no LAN play I decided I wasn’t buying it. Then it just got worse when they announced that there’s no offline SP, and now this article which makes it seem even worse. It’s not necessarily a boycott – I would buy this game so that I could play it on LAN with my wife. If I can’t do that, I really just don’t think I’d enjoy it. ARPGs are just generally not as fun by yourself and they suck balls playing online with some random douchebags (or if you live in Australia, generally everyone to play with won’t speak English). I don’t have time for clans and I just generally don’t like playing online. Much rather play LAN – especially when I can get my friends together for a LAN party.
As has been said though; I don’t care that I can’t play D3. Torchlight 2 and Grim Dawn seem amazing. I preferred Titan Quest to Diablo 2, so hopefully Grim Dawn will be as good or better. I simply have way to many games to play to care much about missing out on D3. I just worry that if D3 sells well, other publishers will decide that always-on DRM isn’t hated so they should use it.
22/09/2011 at 15:08 Kaira- says:
Not going to buy it either. Not only because of the horribad DRM, but also because Diablo 2 wasn’t really good game IMO and as such I’m not expecting Diablo 3 to be any better.
22/09/2011 at 15:24 Groove says:
Originally I had very little interest in Diablo 3, since I’m not a huge fan (any sort of fan really) of hack n’slashing.
Then all the beta coverage came out, and I was suddenly excited by it. It’s a Blizzard game, and it looks SOOOO good. I am quite aroused.
Now…..not pausing? Really? That’s the worst thing they could have added. It’s like I’m being given the choice, would I like to play Diablo 3, or have a functioning life? That’s really how I see it, Diablo or hemit.
I have to answer my phone some times. I enjoy grabbing gasps of gaming while I cook food. I have my fiancee come speak to me while playing games all the freaking time. I often enjoy going to the bathroom WHEN I WANT TO. Do I want to have to clear this entire freaking mob before I go for a dump? No, I wouldn’t, and yes, I’m above wearing a diaper.
Why am I annoyed? Because I was really excited aboit this game five minutes ago =(
22/09/2011 at 15:51 jonfitt says:
Yeah, it’s a pass for me too.
I’ve only ever solo’d ARPGs from Diablo to Borderlands and everything in between. The idea of cash transactions and auction houses already turns me off. But being unable to pause, or having an Internet glitch wipeout progress is just unacceptable to me.
My life has no room for a game I can’t stop and start when I choose. Even a system like Borderlands had without quicksave was almost no good.
22/09/2011 at 16:20 Rhin says:
No pausing is the least concerning niggle ever. Open a town portal, sit in town, problem solved. Seriously.
Now idle timeouts after an hour? that’s a bigger problem. sometimes mom does make you clean your room, or come to dinner, and you’re not ready to leave the game yet. There’s no workaround.
Of course, always-online is an unfortunate requirement in itself. I’m still going to give Blizzard my monies though.
22/09/2011 at 16:35 Nameless1 says:
Me too.
22/09/2011 at 16:43 AMonkey says:
Same. No mods, legitimising gold buying while Blizzard keeps all the profits and online DRM are enough to make no buy. And yes I will fallow through. There is Torchlight 2 to keep me busy in the same genre not to mention all the other great games coming out this year. I’m not so addicted that I will buy whatever pos is released.
22/09/2011 at 16:48 DrGonzo says:
I’m going to play it and enjoy it. Because I have perspective and a life. Also, it is pretty much just a toy, is it really worth getting this angry and grumpy about a play thing?
22/09/2011 at 17:04 Davie says:
Yep, they won’t be getting my money! Path of Exile is free!
22/09/2011 at 17:11 Milky1985 says:
@abigbat
“a fairly classic example:
http://i.imgur.com/abXW9.png”
Is this a new form of godwins law?
“The longer a disucssion about boycotting a game , the likelyhood of someone posting the image showing the MW2 boycott group increases to 1″
And again i will say that with a lot of boycotts not everyone will follow though, the main effect is the idea of hte boycott itself as it makes shareholders of PLC companies very nurvous.
22/09/2011 at 17:13 vodkarn says:
“really though? Everybody says this in comment threads, everyone makes petitions, everyone vocally boycotts the the game.
Then everyone sees everyone else having fun and buys the game.”
I think there are ENOUGH problems that while not everyone will be on exactly the same page, the result is the same.
My friends and I were super-psyched for this game (as kids these days say.) The vast majority of us played a lot of Diablo 2, Titan Quest, etc. We stopped playing WoW because, well, Cataclysm, and are looking for a game we can all play together. There’s between 6-8 of us online at any given time, and we figured Diablo 3 was going to be the way to go.
A couple of us are.. not impressed with Blizzard/Activision at all.
Then we hear about the auction houses – three say “fuck no.”
Then we hear about the “always on” thing – three say “fuck no.” (one guy lives in the boonies, so that’s an instant deal-breaker for him. He was our comically disconnecting DPS in WoW. We did not let him tank.)
So I send them links to Torchlight 2, and bang, everyone is in. We’re counting the days and realyl excited to try it. A good half of us played the first one, and the rest remember seeing those people play it.
Honestly, I can’t think of any actual feature Diablo 3 provides that Torchlight does not. And I mean redeeming features, not ‘We’ll randomly decide it’s not OK for you to do the following..’
22/09/2011 at 17:43 Azru says:
Decided to log in just to say that me and my friends ARE going to buy it. Just like millions of people can’t really be bothered to respond to all those whine-posts. Like the other guy said, you folks are just the vocal minority, if you wan’t to miss out on the best h&s to be released in 10 years that nothing will beat to the #1 spot in the genre for many years to come, be my guest.
I had the opportunity to try out the beta on my friends account yesterday and I must say Torchlight pales in comparison when it comes to “meatiness” of the gameplay and how tight and enjoyable it feels. And don’t kid yourselves, T2 will be just the same thing that T1 was but with co-op and different environments. (see TotalBiscuit’s lengthy hands-on on YT) It’s a great game, I agree, but once you have the chance to compare it to D3, not many people in all honesty can disagree that Blizzard’s game is vastly superior. (same thing goes for the Path of the Exile)
TL;DR: Online-only is shit but not shit enough for millions of people to miss out on the best hack and slash game that will come out in the next couple of years for sure.
22/09/2011 at 17:57 Nogo says:
“I’m going to play it and enjoy it. Because I have perspective and a life. Also, it is pretty much just a toy, is it really worth getting this angry and grumpy about a play thing?”
I think you’ve got it backwards. People with lives need pause buttons and anyone with a decent perspective realizes paying $60 for a broken toy is a silly thing to do.
But thinking like that would get in the way of your condescension, so I can see why you avoid it.
22/09/2011 at 18:27 abigbat says:
As I said before, I’m glad people are sticking to their guns and not buying the game if they don’t agree with the developer’s actions.
The Modern Warfare 2 example may be over used Milky, but it’s pretty much the only effective way of visually demonstrating the drop off on boycotts (which was also seen in the Left 4 Dead 2 boycott where the actual leader of the whole affair dropped it when offered a free copy).
Anyway, if you do stick to it and vote with your wallet that’s great; games like Torchlight need support, and if you find it’s package more appealing then it’s all good.
22/09/2011 at 18:47 Wulf says:
I’m definitely not going to buy it. Torchlight II is more up my alley anyway.
I suppose it’s the story on top of everything else that killed it for me. “Hahahaha, really?!” That was my reaction. A magical meteor falls from the sky, undead, corruption. Hrmn… aside from the magical meteor this all sounds very familiar, where have I heard this bef–oh, Warcraft. That’s right. Every Warcraft ever since Warcraft III, including World of Warcraft, and now Diablo III. Blizzard certainly knows how to get mileage out of their plots!
I suspect that Torchlight II will do something markedly different with its plot, and it already has a more compelling world (I love the engineers) and artistic design, it doesn’t have the always on DRM, and I can play with whomever I want. This brings me to another point: A group of people in my little social gathering, my friends, and my more distant family, were all going to get this. And now? None of them are going to bother. Why? Blizzard sez: People who live in other regions of the world are filthy, dirty foreigners and you should only play with people from your own region.
Yeah, no.
Sorry, Blizzard. None of my friends are xenophobic, and I’m not especially. I’m probably the very damn antithesis to xenophobia. So I have friends from all over, logically, and the conclusion is is that a game that they’d want to play with me? Well, they can’t. I can’t play it with them, they can’t play it with each other, so what’s the bloody point? I might have picked it up to try it if some of my friends had decided to do so. But no. No one is interested. No one likes the ‘filthy foreigners’ attitude that Blizzard has going on.
So we’re just looking forward to Torchlight II instead.
I suppose it’s fine if you only have a couple of local friends, or if you have no friends at all then that’s even better, but if you have friends both from the UK and from a number of other regions? You’re screwed. Too bad, so sad. You can’t co-op with them because they’re quarantined. So are we. There’s just something distinctly unsettling about the whole affair. I dislike it.
Now, I know that some will say that it’s because of ping times and that’s fine and dandy, but in that case they could have just popped up a warning telling you that this may impede your ability to play the game to its fullest potential and then let us do it anyway. I’ve never had ping times affect a game of Diablo II, or any game of the sort. I’ve never had them affect Darkspore. So why then should they be such a massive issue in Diablo III that we’re region-locked?
No, the ping times aren’t the reason, there’s something else going on here. I don’t know what it is, but I do not like it.
And yes, I’ll say this. I’m going to say this because someone has to say this: I’d be a sheep if I went into buying a game knowing that. Because I know what I know I cannot buy Diablo III, as I personally think that it would be unconscionable to do so. It would be supporting Blizzard. It would be telling all big publishers that this region-locking bull is something that they should all do. That all big publishers should be trying to separate me from my other friends whom play games. If I buy this, it’s telling Blizzard and any others watching that this is okay, this is fine. I’m just going to bend over and take this. Everything’s jake. All sunny. No problems here.
I hope at least some of you can understand why that’s an issue for me. I’m not going to do that.
I could have looked past the more meh art direction, and the gods awful story. I could have tolerated both if my friends were getting this. I mean, if nothing else then I could have had fun being snarky over how incredibly bad some of it is. :P Seriously though, it’s something that I might have had fun with. Who knows? As it is, no. Operation: Filthy Foreigners is keeping me away from it.
Torchlight II on the other hand? That requires no always-on connection, it has no encumbering DRM, it doesn’t have a cash-shop, and it allows me to play with people from any region.
As a person with friends. Tell me which is the better choice.
Maybe now some of you will understand why I’m not touching Diablo III with a barge pole. And why no one I know is.
22/09/2011 at 18:50 Deschain says:
Buying it. Beta convinced me, the game is too good to miss, especially with all the memories of D2. Honestly, the always online doesn’t affect me. If my connection is down, chance are I’m going to be spending my time trying to fix it, or playing other games. I thought it might be a problem originally, but after starcraft 2′s always online, and after frankly never touching diablo 2′s single player (was always on bnet, either solo or with friends), I’m fine with it.
22/09/2011 at 18:59 Wulf says:
Just to make sure you people understand…
You do get that this is region-locked, yeah? If you’re in Europe then you can’t play with anyone outside of the European ‘region.’ So if, like me, you happen to have friends from the globe over, being the sort of person whom tends to make friends regardless of their geographical location, then you’re screwed.
The system means that I cannot play with people from any other region, and that, in turn means that I must not include any of my friends that Blizzard perceive as being ‘filthy foreigners.’ We all have to play within our little bubbles. We have to be good little boys and girls and stick to our own kind.
That makes my skin crawl. I hate that sort of thing. If Champions Online pulled that crap? I’d stop playing it and giving them money the same damn moment they did, as I do with any game that tries to do that. I think it’s horrible. It also means that the people that I and my friends would want to play this with? We can’t. If a mostly American group is formed, I’m left out. If a mostly European group is formed, then some of my friends are left out.
It’s just an ugly scenario.
I just want to make sure you all understand that this is the case. My bigger problem with it is less the always-on DRM, less the inability to pause, and more the region lockouts.
—
I mean, really. Let’s not have double standards going on here. There are no oceans on the Internet. And this is an “Oceans” scenario right here. This is saying that because I’m in a different location than a friend, I cannot play with them. Are we going to bend over and cast away our standards every time a game comes along that we like?
Every time?
That’s kind of pathetic.
22/09/2011 at 19:37 alinos says:
@Rhin
i take it you haven’t heard. There are no town portals in D3. because they have terrible combat exploit abilities. Like oh im dying and out of potions and thing’s back to town.
It’s why they have the ability to sell item’s on the go. Which has been a developing trend these days
22/09/2011 at 20:11 Zogtee says:
I was planning on buying it, always on DRM or not, but the recent rash of videos has turned me off completely. It just looks so dull.
22/09/2011 at 20:27 yiqifeifei says:
China-made from high quality low price, to protect the credibility of the online mall, I believe you will not miss it!
http://bit.ly/mKuTNF
22/09/2011 at 20:31 Kittim says:
If Blizzard is so greedy for money and control, why did they not just make it a MMO and have done with it?
Instead they opt for this farcical bastardisation.
Producers, treat your users with a bit of respect FFS. That or just don’t bother, f*ck off and make console games. It would make more room for indy developers who quite possibly care a little more about their users.
In case you’re in any doubt, I won’t be buying it.
22/09/2011 at 21:13 JiminyJickers says:
Me too, no way I will be buying it now.
22/09/2011 at 22:37 tech7 says:
Actually DIII was the first game where I could have imagined that I will not stick to my always-online no buy policies. But all anouncements by Blizzard make me less interested in the game. No skill trees, online region locked, no mods, no attributes, so offline-singleplayer, no lan (I belong to the minority of DII palyers who only played solo or lan).
Currently DIII sounds for me like a dumbed.down auction house centred version of DII. Or more like a simpliefied WoW. Probably I will change my mind after trying the game, but I doubt I will try it as long as it has the always on drm (and of course if they even bother to make a Demo).
Well money saved for Grim Dawn (or Torchlight II, but unlike Titan Quest, Torchlight didn’t convince me completely).
22/09/2011 at 22:53 Neut says:
Sounds exactly like D2′s online ladder – no pausing, always online, disconnect = randomly generated map resets and only thing saved are your character progress/items/waypoints, which are the only things that matter anyway. I was planning on playing this with my friends so the only time I would be playing it would be online with my friends. Definitely buying this and the gameplay vids that’ve come out is making me look forward to it even more. Will probably get Torchlight 2 as well when that comes out. Thoroughly enjoyed the first one but was sadfaced that it didn’t have multiplayer.
23/09/2011 at 04:59 bill says:
a better idea might be to buy it, and then return it to the stare because it doesn’t work correctly.
Assuming the store gives refunds for that sort of thing…
23/09/2011 at 05:18 malkav11 says:
@bill:
To the best of my knowledge, there is no store anywhere in the United States that will accept a return of an opened PC game when purchased new. (I know of a chain that sells used PC games among many other used items that will accept pretty much any return without requiring a reason, but that’s used.) If there exists such a store, it must surely be that rarest of fowl, an independent videogame store that’s somehow not only stayed in business but actually sells PC games. And that would not be an option for the majority of potential Diablo III customers.
23/09/2011 at 07:48 InternetBatman says:
I’m not going to boycott it, but I’m not going to seek it out either. I’m sure it’ll be good enough, but I have better things to play. I’ll pick up the Warchest in five years or such, same with Starcraft II. I think the number of people who are just turned off by this kind of DRM is fairly sizeable (from my view as a professional Internet detective), and their lack of excitement is worse for the game than hatred. Honestly the online auction house is more of a turnoff than the DRM.
I doubt it will seriously affect the game’s prospects, but I’ll just by some Spiderweb games instead and everyone will be happy.
23/09/2011 at 08:04 bill says:
Ah. That’s a shame. AFAIK it would be covered by standard retail rights in the UK so you could return it if it isn’t fit for purpose.
Either way, buying it isn’t an option for me. It’s not a boycott, but an unpausable game + a small child do not mix. And if (as i gathered from skim-reading wulf’s epic poem) i can’t play it with my friends in the UK then that’s out as well.
23/09/2011 at 11:16 thehollowman says:
I was looking forward to d3, but I’m not going to buy it anymore, at least not till a sale (do blizzard even have those?) it’s not because i want to send a message. It’s not because I want to teach them a lesson. It’s because i dont want to play it anymore. I bought ubisoft games with the always on DRM, it didnt bother me. The games worked, didnt break, the game was pretty good. But I can’t pause? auto log out? It’s not a philsophical thing anymore. It’s not about morality or my rights. It effects the only thing I really care about when I play a game. if it’s going to be fun.
23/09/2011 at 13:05 povu says:
All the things that D3 offers that interest me, Torchlight 2 offers as well. And Torchlight 2 gives me additional goodies like mods. At a much lower price, too.
I may buy D3 eventually when I’m bored with Torchlight 2, but I have no reason to get it any time soon.
23/09/2011 at 18:59 Bonedwarf says:
abigbat: Yes, some people who say they’ll boycott won’t.
But then there’s folk like me who WILL. Definitely. Without question. Hell I’ve already dumped pre-orders on 3 other titles coming out this year for a variety of reasons. (Battlefield 3, Skyrim, Arkham City) and now have zero intention of ever buying them.
There’s a massive gaming universe out there. Plenty of devs who are more deserving of my money than Blizzard who are delivering a broken game.
I was really looking forward to Diablo III. Yes I will miss playing it.
But ultimately it’s just a game. I have several hundred others. Sure, the number of people who will actually boycott the game for Blizz’s asinine design decisions (and I don’t believe for a second that anti-piracy wasn’t the absolute number one reason for this always online feature) will be a drop in the ocean. Doesn’t matter. You make a personal choice and stick to it if you have any kind of maturity. If enough people had the cajones to actually show some character and do what they said, then, perhaps, it’d make a difference.
For Blizzard, my wallet is now, and most likely forever, closed. I skipped Starcraft 2 as well due to the “Let’s split the game in three and make three times as much money!” nonsense.
The fact is the industry continuously grinds out products and while short term it’ll suck to miss out on Diablo III for the brief time people will be raving over it, in a couple of months we’ll all have moved on to drooling over the next big release.
The gaming world moves on.
25/09/2011 at 07:47 Fiatil says:
@vodkarn
I would think that the thing that should be much more distressing to you would be that the game has a limit of 4 characters per game for your group of 6-8 friends online at once.
25/09/2011 at 22:50 Leandro says:
I *really wanted* to buy the game despite these issues, but I’ll have to evaluate if I’ll actually be able to play it properly at all if I buy it. Not saying I won’t buy, but definitely waiting to see.
I just don’t have a good enough connection, and it looks like the game will transmit quite a bit of data. Any hint of lag in single-player would immediately ruin the game. How can someone not feel ripped-off experiencing lag in single-player? Watching Yogscast playthrough, even they lagged at some point, and I’ll bet they have much better connections than I do.
Also, no LAN is another blow. Did not get L4D because of it.
26/09/2011 at 04:55 Fearzone says:
All I needed to do was play Darkspore to be convinced of the premise of this article. Lag and server downtime in singleplayer? Gimme a break.
08/10/2011 at 15:33 trilith says:
cmon guy. if he didnt’ mean it he wouldn’t say it. i didn’t buy sc2 because of it, and i canceled my battle.net account BECAUSE of their FAILURE to secure their own accounts.
at the end of the day we vote with our wallets. and i’m not buying this crap. are you?
if you are, stay off my friends list. i wont deal with morons with an internet connection who think that allowing big developers such as blizzard to get away with this drm bs that has NEVER worked, WILL never work, because the only ones affected are the consumers; the guys who buy this game are the ones who will be screwed by drm, not he hackers. it’l be bypassed, cracked, and in weeks just like world of warcraft, star wars galaxies, earth and beyond, the maxtrix online, and so, so many others, it will be emulated, cracked, and a new server put up in its place.
i have no wow account, never have, yet i have well over 100 hours logged into world of warcraft.
wonder how i did that? hmmm.
keep it up blizzard, we enjoy hacking and cracking games from developers like you because you’re stupid enough to think you can buck a system that was a failed model from the start
go ahead, screw us. cuz you’re not screwing us, you’re screwing the guys who BUY your games.
22/09/2011 at 12:59 Shadowcat says:
It Won’t affect me, because I shan’t be playing Diablo III.
22/09/2011 at 13:01 Teddy Leach says:
This.
22/09/2011 at 13:14 deanb says:
You should have acted. They’re already here.
22/09/2011 at 13:18 Tretiak says:
“Shan’t”? What is that? “Shall not”? :0?
I should spend more points in my English.
22/09/2011 at 13:23 GenBanks says:
Haha deanb I automatically read that in the voice.
22/09/2011 at 13:23 Zepp says:
I shan’t go to church tomorrow. That will teach them!
22/09/2011 at 14:09 Burning Man says:
But no-one wanted to believe.
Believe they even existed.
22/09/2011 at 14:26 ASBO says:
I couldn’t care less about Diablo 3. The problem is when all the other developers get all misty-eyed about its success and duplicate this ridiculous system.
22/09/2011 at 16:42 Casimir's Blake says:
I don’t normally do this, but I’ll be adding my voice too:
Not interested in Diablo 3 if offline single-player is not possible.
However there is another issue I have: thanks to the horrid mouse-only controls of these types of games, and no WSAD/WXAD option, 1 hour of Diablo leaves me with terrible RSI and that won’t be any different with D3. Looks like this will ruin Torchlight 2 for me also. :(
22/09/2011 at 16:44 utharda says:
Ethernet Cables goes in where?
I’m out too, the wife may still buy it. Which means I’ll have to deal with her screaming like a fishwife when it goes offline. Thanks blizzivision.
22/09/2011 at 17:16 vodkarn says:
“1 hour of Diablo leaves me with terrible RSI and that won’t be any different with D3. Looks like this will ruin Torchlight 2 for me also. :(”
Have you tried trackball mice? I work with someone who does graphic design/concept art and she can only work because she uses one of those. It’s not quite as efficient but it beats a keyboard only.
22/09/2011 at 19:18 Wulf says:
I can vouch for trackball mice. I used to use a normal mouse, then I started getting the pangs of RSI. I switched over to a trackball and haven’t had a single problem since. They’re just very comfortable and I honestly couldn’t imagine playing games with anything else. At this point I see mouse gaming as masochistic.
One bit of advice though from someone who has cured his RSI: Avoid the ones where you have to use your fingers to move the ball, they’ll cause RSI just as bad due to the wrist movements required. Instead grab one which uses thumb movement for the ball. That way you can lay your hand flat down on an unmoving surface, and the only thing that’ll move then is your thumb. That’s my secret for avoiding RSI.
22/09/2011 at 21:15 Sheng-ji says:
I’ve not had a mouse on my computer for 10 years – my colleagues give me strange looks, but I love trackballs – they feel so much more natural, no minging old mousemat collecting crud, no having to move your whole hand, lift, place mouse back down and continue. And they fit in the tiniest of spaces too!
Oh and I completely agree with Wulf about the thumbball variety, so much better!
22/09/2011 at 13:01 Advanced Assault Hippo says:
Aye, non-sale for me. And I’m someone who would have bought it day one.
It’s okay, I’ll play one of the other ARPGs that are coming out instead.
22/09/2011 at 13:17 Ultra Superior says:
+1. Exactly the same feelings.
I’m not sure they can even create a massive hype around this game, while the players and defenders of the game’s qualities will be constantly slapped by the game’s restrictions and mocked by people who protest against these stupid mechanisms.
22/09/2011 at 13:24 malkav11 says:
I not only would have preordered it, I would have preordered the inevitable collector’s edition (unless they went with one of those pointless giant PVC statues that seem in vogue lately). But this is simply unacceptable.
22/09/2011 at 13:29 briktal says:
The thing is, a lot of the “defenders” would, even with an offline mode, only play online, even if they just plan to play solo. The thing about this whole discussion is that there is a decent chunk of players (especially some of the “hardcore” players) who viewed Diablo 2 as an online-only game already.
22/09/2011 at 13:30 aizvara says:
Yeah, my interest in this game has been growing, but, for me, the always-online requirement is not going to work with my rural broadband, and the no-pause issue is not going to work with my 1 year old son waking up at random moments.
22/09/2011 at 13:31 Bull0 says:
Fifth second. I was conned by Starcraft 2, I won’t be fooled again.
22/09/2011 at 13:40 Arkaniani says:
the Diablo series is pretty much online-only, so yeah, a couple of people who want single player only won’t buy it, however the vast amount of people who buy this game, buy it for the online mode.
22/09/2011 at 13:47 Ultra Superior says:
@ Arkaniani – Diablo ‘series’? Lol. You didn’t play Diablo back then, did you?
No doubts it will sell great. Sims sell great too I’ve heard.
22/09/2011 at 13:54 malkav11 says:
I’m sure there are a fair number of people who only played the previous Diablo games online. I don’t think it’s anywhere near as many people as some folks think, but I’m sure some, yes. Would it hurt those people to have an offline mode they could ignore? No.
22/09/2011 at 14:38 Arkaniani says:
@Ultra Superior. I did play the first Diablo online. Even more than the 2nd one. The game was much more satisfying with ramped up difficulty and party members to clear the game with. It was an OK game offline, but far from the same experience.
22/09/2011 at 13:03 Symitri says:
Bertrand Russell once said “the world is suffering from intolerance and bigotry, and from the belief that vigorous action is admirable even when misguided”.
That last bit is what describes Blizzard’s DRM on this game – they may mean well but it’s still a terrible way of enforcing it. What would be so bad about their players making a conscientious decision whether they want to have a single player character they can only play with offline or a multiplayer character that they can do both with?
I thought giving the consumers choice was a good thing, not something to be afraid of.
22/09/2011 at 13:11 Rii says:
They don’t ‘mean well’. The other shoe dropped the moment they announced the RMT system. THAT is what this online-only nonsense is meant to buttress, and that’s why it won’t be going anywhere irrespective of how batshit stupid it is.
22/09/2011 at 13:14 Milky1985 says:
Blizz’s excuse from previous articles was that people would get annoyed and confused because they can’t take there SP character into a MP games.
Its quite simple really, when you create a SP char put up a big messagebox saying “This is a single player ONLY character, you will be able to play offline but WILL NOT be able to play online with this character at all”
Then your done.
Because of stuff like this I think blizz are doing it all for the piracy reason, they are trying to add worth ot it (for them as well i might add with the auction house) but the underlying reason is not the nice fluffy reason lots of people think it is.
22/09/2011 at 13:15 Symitri says:
@ Rii: I included the ‘may’ to provide Blizzard with the benefit of the doubt. I’ve been against the RM aspect of the game since they announced it, but I have a lot of trouble believing that Blizzard is an entirely soulless entity. I believe a lot of the decisions may be made entirely for profiteering reasons but I won’t accuse the whole studio of doing it.
@ Milky1985: Yes, I read Blizzard’s excuses for it and agree with your solution. Are they so afraid that all the terrible WoW players who transfer to playing D3 will get confused? On second thought, don’t answer that: I’ve played WoW long enough to know that there’s no helping some people no matter how clear-cut you make your explanations.
22/09/2011 at 13:26 iainl says:
Blizzard’s hopes for this lie in an active multi-player community, at least some of whom are paying Blizzard real money for virtual consumables.
If they even allow you to invest time in a character that can’t go online, they’ve lost you. And seemingly, they would rather do without my cash at all, than risk that.
Not because I’m fundamentally opposed to online DRM, although I’m obviously not exactly keen. But because a game I can’t pause or save at what I consider a reasonable interval isn’t a game I have time to play. It’s not like the genre is exactly starved of competition.
22/09/2011 at 14:14 Archonsod says:
“Blizz’s excuse from previous articles was that people would get annoyed and confused because they can’t take there SP character into a MP games.”
Which is kinda hilarious. Sacred 2 had two online modes and offline, with a character being blocked from at least one of those modes depending on where you’d created them. I don’t recall a single player asking why they couldn’t use a character in multi/single player.
Also, I dunno about anyone else, but if I’m creating the character in single player it’s a pretty safe bet I have zero interest or desire to take them into multiplayer. If I’d wanted to do that, I’d have created them in multiplayer instead. But that could just be me.
22/09/2011 at 17:21 vodkarn says:
“Blizz’s excuse from previous articles was that people would get annoyed and confused because they can’t take there SP character into a MP games.
Its quite simple really, when you create a SP char put up a big messagebox saying “This is a single player ONLY character, you will be able to play offline but WILL NOT be able to play online with this character at all””
Or you could, you know, use the same character in both.
Honestly, what is the huge problem there? Man, I hate it when I want to play multiplayer with my friends, and some guy across the world took his single player character into multiplayer! It just pisses me off!
22/09/2011 at 13:03 endintears says:
This comments thread is going to be epic
22/09/2011 at 13:36 Sheng-ji says:
And it will all
Wait for it……
End in tears
22/09/2011 at 13:03 Schiraman says:
I absolutely agree, although I’d also like to suggest that ‘offline’ characters should be allowed to engage in co-op normally with one another. And in the game.
22/09/2011 at 13:05 Hentzau says:
Checkpoints? CHECKPOINTS? Isn’t one of the defining features of the Diablo-style hack n’slash RPG that it saves your status whenever you quit the game, for good or ill, so that if you find the purple Sword of Farquad with +5 to Gopher-Smashing you don’t then have to trudge all the way to a save point or a checkpoint or whatever in order to keep it for good? That had better be a temporary beta thing otherwise it’ll end up sabotaging the entire game.
22/09/2011 at 13:16 caddyB says:
It saves your items and stats when you quit/get disconnected.
You lose your progress though, enemies respawn and you start back at the last checkpoint and stuff like that.
22/09/2011 at 13:19 Hentzau says:
Yeah I realised after posting that that I’d probably misunderstood slightly, since it made no sense whatsoever. Didn’t Diablo II work a similar way, with the waypoint system?
22/09/2011 at 13:46 iniudan says:
You guy are seeing the wrong complain, he not complaining about the checkpoint itself, he complaining that he got disconnected for leaving the game running between two checkpoint for too long, because he didn’t want to lose progress, not because he quit by himself.
In all MMO I played, you always restart where you camped after all or at least around where you went link dead, even if everything respawned around you (for better or ill). Which I think would be a better mechanic considering Diablo III been technically a MMO now. Just add the option to also restart at last checkpoint or last town, if the person doesn’t want the risk to be in the middle of a swarm of monster upon entry.
22/09/2011 at 14:08 Avenger says:
Damn consoles and their insufferable savegame limitations that brought upon us that “checkpoint” plague.
THIS IS A PC GAME FOR GODS SAKE
22/09/2011 at 14:25 ASBO says:
The checkpointing system in Magicka drives me mad. A game that crashes regularly, that some of the levels take a long time to beat, and there’s no save at all. Except at the beginning of a chapter.
And yet, maddeningly, it seems considerably more reasonable than the system used in Diablo 3.
22/09/2011 at 16:07 mompkin says:
It sounds like its exactly the same as Diablo II’s system, where getting dropped/quitting saves your experience and items, but every time you reload a map all the monsters are repopulated. It was kind of annoying playing singleplayer, but honestly if you played a lot you usually ended up repeatedly clearing several new map areas an hour.
22/09/2011 at 13:05 KillahMate says:
“I’d been logged out of a single-player game because I was away for an hour. And thus lost all my progress since the last checkpoint, a long, long way back.”
This is *unforgivable*.
No sale. Dammit.
22/09/2011 at 14:04 Kandon Arc says:
Fully agree. I was starting to get interested in this again after that preview, but no pause and auto log off?
Blizzard really need to get out of their ivory tower and find out how normal people play games.
22/09/2011 at 13:06 Gusdor says:
If you weapon stopped firing when the server was dead, that means gameplay logic is being run remotely in exactly the same way as an MMO. The solution presented sounds simple, but the game doesn’t sound like its designed for that. Nor would blizzard want to distribute server code for offline play.
22/09/2011 at 13:07 John Walker says:
Yes, that is a big concern. But I have decided to remain optimistic.
22/09/2011 at 13:13 Chalky says:
Even if that is the case, there is no reason why you shouldn’t be able to pause the game or save at any point. Pausing the game simply needs to send a message to the server saying that you want to pause, then one saying that you want to unpause when you’re done. And if they can save at checkpoints, then allowing you to trigger a save when ever you want should be trivial too.
Also, region locking!!! This is a massive problem for me – I have friends in the US and I want to play with them. Australian players can choose between NA and Oceanic servers, but Euros cannot choose. What are they playing at??
22/09/2011 at 13:14 Mr Pink says:
Diablo 2 behaved the same way when a connection dropped, and that had perfectly functional single player.
22/09/2011 at 13:17 ahluka says:
I was thinking the same thing while reading it. The infrastructure is already in place.
I don’t see them making offline play an option, like at all. But if they announce that they are, I would expect the game to be delayed another 6 months AT LEAST; it sounds like the game would need a massive redesign to make it happen.
Then again, this is Blizzard we’re talking about. They have (in theory) got the luxury of being able to throw money and man-hours at any problem. I doubt they see this as a problem, though =/
22/09/2011 at 13:18 Jams O'Donnell says:
Does this mean that we’re going to get a single-player game where ping times matter? That’s just wrong.
22/09/2011 at 13:29 CoFran says:
It totally is, if you look at the current “cracked beta” all it permits is walking around town, crackers say that all the scripts, stats are server-side, meaning that’s all we’re gonna get for a long while (just like for Assassin Creed’s cracks, people had to network sniff the legit game to include in the emulator, having information missing would freeze the game if the player tried to access it).
Having an offline mode would contradict with B.Net 2.0′s direction, you can’t even consider Starcraft2′s Guest mode a real offline mode.
22/09/2011 at 14:16 athan5 says:
Before pirates emulate blizzard’s server , it will be flooded by thousands if not millions of gold and loot farmers from all over the world.
Blizzard will be fighting an endless war against bots, scams and all sort of nasty evils gunning for the gullible people exposed by the auction system. There will be hackers as well.
22/09/2011 at 14:28 hotcod says:
You guys have to realise something… The game logic is server side so blizzard can control loot drops, they have to insure that it’s not going to be cheated the market flooded. This was always going to happen for online play.
Now think about what they would have to do to give us a segregated offline option..They would have to build all the game logic in to the base product so it can be used off line. That costs time and money and by doing that they would have to give up always online as a DRM tool (a reason they’ve stated they went with this) and they would have to close off the AH to any one who wanted to play solo.
In other words, in their view, it’s a bunch of work that devalues the product for them. Screw the consumer of course, if you can’t get online there are OTHER games you paid a bunch of money for that you can play off line… blizzard don’t need you.
22/09/2011 at 14:44 iainl says:
@hotcod – sure, there’s additional coding to run a client-side ‘loot/mob server’ for single player. But there’s additional server load to do all that on their boxes for us, too. I’m surprised that the cost of all those servers is outweighed by the comfort of knowing nobody out there is playing single player with a bit of cheating that isn’t going to affect anyone else.
22/09/2011 at 20:12 Absolute Zero says:
@Jams O’Donnell:
We already have. It was called Darkspore.
(Disclosure: I’ve only played the demo, and it might’ve been a case of “The longer you play the game, the worse the performance gets,” but I doubt that.)
Also, my first comment here on RPS! Hello everyone!
23/09/2011 at 00:40 The_Candyman says:
This is worrying for people like me in the Oceanic region, as we usually don’t get our own servers in MMOs which means we’re playing with pings of around 300 on the NA servers. If we have to put up with that even in singleplayer then it’s absolutely no purchase for me and I’m sure many other people in my region.
22/09/2011 at 13:06 Kdansky says:
I am not arguing that Blizzard made a choice that results in a better game. Losing progress between checkpoints is stupid, no pause function is crap and not being able to play on the train is also bad. We all know that, and we care, and Blizzard decided against these things to push for something else. I do not even necessarily agree with them, because I find these limitations very annoying too.
The author of this article has not understood why they did it. DRM is just a side-effect of wanting an all-legit AH experience. The “simple solution” proposed is utterly pointless, because it results in single player cheating. Which would defeat the purpose of having imaginary bits with real value due to scarcity. Would people really splurge 100$ on a Windforce if they can get it through cheats? D2 items (which are also stored server-side!) are all but worthless compared to WoW-items, for the simple reason that there are hacks to get them easily. You can’t offer single player and enforce scarcity of items at the same time. It’s provably impossible.
It is a social and economic experiment first and foremost. Blizzard will probably lose money by doing this, compared to offering a real single player, but they stick with it anyway, because they want to try something new.
Cue all the hate from people who just don’t understand it.
22/09/2011 at 13:13 PodX140 says:
But why is this not an issue with WoW (Yes, DIII isn’t an MMO but enough people have made the comparison already.)? Why not do the same thing there and MODERATE IT for cheated items? Because this is a lesser effort solution and easier for blizzard. Simple.
22/09/2011 at 13:13 Symitri says:
You’re right as to the rational about why they’re making this decision, but that really just feels like more of a “yet another argument against the RM AH” rather than a satisfactory reason for the way it runs. If you introduce a new feature and it comes at the detriment of more essential features, you have to stop and ask yourself why you’re doing it in the first place. Surely the most important reason for adding features is to add value, not subtract from it.
Again, I understand the logic you’re following and agree that it’s the most likely reason, it doesn’t make it a good one. Rationality rarely ever ends in happy explanations :P
22/09/2011 at 13:13 John Walker says:
That’s a confusing response, since I do recognise all those things in the piece.
22/09/2011 at 13:19 TNG says:
I agree with your post, aside from one sentence: DRM is a side effect? DRM is about controlling your IP; trying to avoid illegal copies is what you can consider a side effect from using DRM technologies.
But yes, Blizzard is using this DRM to control (read: profit from) the virtual object market… harming the singleplayer-only experience for the consumer is just collateral damage and preventing early illegal copies/ boosting launch day sales a bonus benefit.
22/09/2011 at 13:20 Sian says:
If you read Mr Walker’s text carefully, you’d notice how he mentioned that single-player only characters wouldn’t have access to the auction house. They would be on their own for ever, with no way of interacting with other characters. How this would influence the AH is beyond me.
22/09/2011 at 13:22 Kdansky says:
If you did, you would not have written your simple solution, which completely breaks the AH-system, by introducing an “illegal shadow world” called Single Player where all the items are easily accessible for anyone who can start D3Trainer.exe.
Let me bold that:
The psychological effect of SP’s existence would have a immense impact on the real AH, and Blizzard wants to prevent this at all costs. Restricting SP to “no AH” is not enough. The cheated items still exist!
Will it make the game better? Doubtful.
Will it change the game experience? Definitely.
And honestly, I’ve played enough D2. I’d rather have an experiment than a carbon-copy. What I am really worried about is that this might qualify D3 as “gambling”, and would therefore be illegal in half the world, including where I live.
@TNG: Agreed. I wrote “DRM” and actually meant “piracy prevention”, which are two different things. They put DRM on every item, if you want to be technical. ;)
22/09/2011 at 13:29 DiamondDog says:
Oh well, as long as you’re happy.
22/09/2011 at 13:29 dysphemism says:
Introducing offline play would affect the auction house, as the op states, in that it would allow users to experience content without “buying” it (either with your time or money). It gates content from hacking, thereby increasing the perceived value of AH wares. It makes sense.
22/09/2011 at 13:37 Kdansky says:
@dysphemism: Exactly!
Is the effect big? Nobody knows because nobody tried!
Is this a good change? Hard to say, but it’s at least a very hard sell. You are free to not buy it. I also don’t buy CoD, because I dislike its shooter mechanics.
22/09/2011 at 13:39 Unaco says:
So… I buy a game, to play single player, solo, by myself. In order to experience everything the game has to offer, I have to pay MORE MONEY in an auction house? Despite already paying for the game? No thanks.
22/09/2011 at 13:48 DiamondDog says:
That makes no sense to me. So are there going to be items that you will only ever get by using real money? If it’s just a case of putting in the time to get enough in-game cash for the high level items, how is that different to putting in the same time offline to get the crazy loot?
If they really are stopping you from playing offline because they don’t want you getting high end armour and weapons without paying for it then that’s more than a little vomit inducing.
22/09/2011 at 13:55 bleeters says:
You’ll forgive my lack of concern towards preserving Blizzards latest round of ‘ho boy, this is going to make us money hand over fist’ oddity as opposed to just giving me offline play. Between the two, I know which one I care about more.
22/09/2011 at 14:12 Kdansky says:
@DiamondDog: You misunderstand. One can either get the high-end items by playing a lot and getting lucky, or by buying them. But you can’t get them by cheating. So if you ever see a Windforce, it is The Real Thing, and exceptionally rare. And that makes these items worth a lot, just like legendary WoW items.
Blizzard cannot enforce this scarcity if anyone can cheat their own copies, and if there is SP, everyone will be able to cheat easily, just like in D2. There is a huge difference in owning a Ferrari when everyone around you drives a car which looks and behaves identically, except if you check behind their name-plate, it says “Cheated in single player!” and being the only person in the whole city who can show off with one.
This is the effect Blizzard is shooting for, for good or bad.
22/09/2011 at 14:13 Oozo says:
While I think that your theory is plausible, I’d like to ask: How do you know that it wouldn’t have the exact inverse impact? In the sense of a demo, or an advertisement, with people seeing and experiencing in single player something they enjoy, thus being all the more eager to have the same thing in multiplayer?
I have to admit that I only dabbled in D1, so maybe the underlying psychology escapes me… but can we know for sure that it wouldn’t work that way? (Well, maybe Blizzard focus tested the shit out of it, so they DO know, which in turn, I wouldn’t know…)
Edit: Ah, didn’t see that last reply. I thought it was an economical/psychological problem (sensu: items lose their value when people have gotten their hands on them, be it in single- or multi-player, thus ridding them of their aura of exclusivity). But it seems to be a technological one, with items you cheated yourself to in single-player being easily transported over to multi-player. Then it is, in fact a problem. So I shall remain silent.
22/09/2011 at 14:29 Sheng-ji says:
Just like to point out that according the the guidelines regulating remote gaming, Diablo 3 would require a gambling licence here in the UK.
Guidelines here http://www.gamblingcommission.gov.uk/pdf/Is%20a%20product%20remote%20betting%20or%20remote%20gaming%20-%20October%202009.pdf
Kdanski was spot on with that comment.
22/09/2011 at 14:48 iainl says:
But Kdansky, whatever loot I would or wouldn’t get in the game, irrespective of how I got it, you’re never going to know anyway. Because I wouldn’t be playing multi-player.
22/09/2011 at 14:52 Ovno says:
@There is a huge difference in owning a Ferrari when everyone around you drives a car which looks and behaves identically, except if you check behind their name-plate, it says “Cheated in single player!” and being the only person in the whole city who can show off with one.
True but as you could only use your cheated ferrari in your own little world (singleplayer) then the only people in the whole city (multiplayer) who can show it off are those who got it legitimately, no?
And oh god please get this stuff classed as online gambling that’d soon get them to change there tune, as one who works in that industry in the UK, I can tell you now the last thing any ceo should want is to be involved in is online gambling, people keep getting arrested when they land in america because their company has allowed americans to gamble on there sites…
22/09/2011 at 15:05 Berzee says:
Hey Kdansky, hey,
There’s a cheat in Age of Empires to allow you to automatically win a game or get resources or stuff.
So this means that Age of Empires multiplayer games are slightly ruined forever, right?
Or if there’s an FPS where you can have infinite ammo in singleplayer,
that means that online deathmatches are just no fun anymore, yeah?
Yeah.
Edit: Ok, I admit there’s a different between cheating for quantity (more ammo, more health) and cheating for quality (rare or unique items). So even if you’ve only ever seen The Amazing Device in your single-player ghost town, it might be enough to keep you from being Awestruck when you hit multiplayer.
22/09/2011 at 15:35 DiamondDog says:
I’m still confused, Kdansky. Are you saying that the ability to cheat items in SP devalues the items in the AH, or simply that those items gained from cheating can be transferred from SP to the AH to be sold? If it’s the latter, is there absolutely no way to have an offline character walled off from the online part of the game?
If it’s the former then I’m sorry, I don’t see that as a justifiable reason to damage the playing experience of your own game. What will be the percentage of people that actually cheat? What percentage of people will hand over real cash instead of just grinding out the gold like they do in a dozen other MMOs? Oh I know there will always be people who buy hats, gold, skins, XP boosts. There’s certainly money to be made. But how much money are they expecting to make out of impatient people that the risk of cheats in SP is enough for them to remove it completely?
It’s not like this is a F2P game and the AH is going to be the only source of income for Diablo 3. You’re right, it does seem like an experiment. A stupid one. They risk alienating a lot of players just for the chance that the AH is going to generate them a lot of cash. Obviously, everyone will be screaming “of course, that’s how games are these days!” Well, I don’t have to like it.
22/09/2011 at 17:43 Ergates_Antius says:
“So… I buy a game, to play single player, solo, by myself. In order to experience everything the game has to offer, I have to pay MORE MONEY in an auction house? Despite already paying for the game? No thanks.”
&
“That makes no sense to me. So are there going to be items that you will only ever get by using real money? …..If they really are stopping you from playing offline because they don’t want you getting high end armour and weapons without paying for it then that’s more than a little vomit inducing.”
Oh goodness, not this again….
No. Items in the auction house are there, being sold, by other players. Everything there will have been found about another player in their game. Therefore it is logically impossible for there to be any items that can only be acquired by buying them. They have to have been found in the game for them to be on sale in the first place.
You don’t have to buy anything from the AH, everything can be found in game, if you play long enough. However, if the first 2 games are anything to go by, some items are so incredibly rare, you could play for years without ever seeing them. This is no different to any other game that features random loot drops with rare items.
22/09/2011 at 18:14 DiamondDog says:
You say “again” but not everyone has read all there is to know about how Diablo 3 is going to work. All I was doing was asking for some clarification, there’s no need to be condescending.
What you say just makes me wonder even more why this game can’t have offline characters.
22/09/2011 at 18:53 Unaco says:
@Ergates_Antius
OK… So if I don’t have to buy anything from the Auction House, and don’t want to, and don’t want to sell anything to the auction house, or play co-op… Why can’t we have an Offline Solo mode?
22/09/2011 at 19:32 Wulf says:
I suppose that there’s a reason that I don’t understand about why I can’t play with my foreign friends?
Well, au contraire, I’m a very understanding person, and I understand that my friends may want to play the game in co-op with me. I also understand that they are not permitted to do this for entirely nebulous and ambiguous reasons. What I do not understand is what the real reason is for separating people up into groups, dividing them based upon regions.
I doubt that will ever be understood by me because the answer probably has something to do with ‘MOAR MONEY,’ and unfortunately that is an answer that I find entirely invalid. I bought the game, so I fail to understand why they should impose such restrictions over me in regards to the products purchased. Perhaps I simply understand more about consumer rights.
:P
22/09/2011 at 19:54 PAK says:
@Kdansky: There seems to be a disconnect in your argument. Are you seriously suggesting that Blizz wants to control the psychological value of items in a single player game for that player? God modes and so on have been built into games for ages. In a single-player experience, the only person who knows you “cheated” is you! Yeah, others can look down their noses all they want, but is that really cheating, or is that playing the game you bought the way you want to play it?
Now, in a competitive scenario, this logic makes perfect sense. You want to show your prowess and/or committment to paying extra. But John’s simple solution (the paragraph in italics) specifically SAYS, you bar single players from importing over to MP. That’s part of his proposal. So either you yourself aren’t understanding the argument in play here, or you are advocating for Blizz’s ability to regulate what people do when they play solitaire, which is just fucking absurd.
22/09/2011 at 20:48 Joof says:
“I suppose that there’s a reason that I don’t understand about why I can’t play with my foreign friends?
Well, au contraire, I’m a very understanding person, and I understand that my friends may want to play the game in co-op with me. I also understand that they are not permitted to do this for entirely nebulous and ambiguous reasons. What I do not understand is what the real reason is for separating people up into groups, dividing them based upon regions.
I doubt that will ever be understood by me because the answer probably has something to do with ‘MOAR MONEY,’ and unfortunately that is an answer that I find entirely invalid. I bought the game, so I fail to understand why they should impose such restrictions over me in regards to the products purchased. Perhaps I simply understand more about consumer rights.
:P”
Actually, from what I remember them saying in the past, it’s because each of the Battle.net regions is based on the server technology in WoW, where there was no point when they made it to allow cross region play, because everything was stored on one server. Thus, there is no pathway between the regions for them to talk to eachother. I believe in the past they said they were investigating ways to link them together.
22/09/2011 at 21:18 Starky says:
I don’t know why I’m going to explain this, because it seems to me PC gamers prefer to remain ignorant and angry over something rather than consider the reality… but anyway…
The reason that D3 (and SC2 for that matter) don’t support cross region play – is because they were both built on the WoW server infrastructure, which wasn’t designed for such things.
It isn’t a simple case of one player in America joining one in the EU (because everything is funnelled through local severs first) – and Blizzard no doubt use a cloud like virtualization system for their games to maximize computer resources.
It becomes a massive task to rework that design to allow one instance created in an EU cloud to speak to an instance created in a US server. Old games never had this issue because they didn’t have that kind of massive server infrastructure dependency, online was basically just slightly fancy LAN with a master server to hook up the connections.
Blizzard have stated that they are working on cross region play – and it is no doubt a massive software and hardware engineering problem they’re are trying to solve (they would basically have to redesign large chunks of their massive infrastructure) – and the recent merging of SC2 regions (Eu and russia merged, north and south America and Korea and China I believe) would suggest work is progressing on this and that was a first step.
I’d wager it’s got nothing to do with “moar money” or anything so idiotic, it is that they had this massive server infrastructure from WoW that they wanted to use for SC2 and D3 also – but because it was designed for WoW it has MMO limitations (but also massive advantages in it’s efficiency at handling instances – and any SC2 game or D2 game is just another instance on that server bank) – which are not easy to engineer out.
23/09/2011 at 12:02 jRides says:
@Ergates_Antius – so, you don’t think that blizz will tweak the drop rates seeing as that uber rare can now be bought (at an additional profit for them) if its harder to find – and all games are now linked so what may have been a low chance to drop in your game is now a lower chance to drop across the many thousand linked games playing near your AH?
22/09/2011 at 13:06 abigbat says:
Very well argued article. I’m still not too concerned about most aspects, primarily because I’m lucky enough to have a solid connection and am used being constantly online, however I wasn’t aware of the lack of pause and inconsistent saving.
Hopefully the inevitable wave of complaints from beta users and fellow article readers will prompt Blizzard to reconsider some of these MMO trappings.
22/09/2011 at 13:27 Belsameth says:
This.
I’m also not naive enough to say I won’t buy it. I already know I’ll cave anyway.
Still shitty tho…
22/09/2011 at 13:07 ix says:
I really want this game but this is just so retarded I can’t even… How did this make it past alpha stage? Surely someone in QA must’ve noticed all the same issues and gone “uh, no.”
22/09/2011 at 14:08 Jarenth says:
These people were then promptly fired.
22/09/2011 at 14:36 Sheng-ji says:
Jarenth, you underestimate just how much people are simply ignored in the gaming industry – why fire someone when you can just not listen to them
22/09/2011 at 17:56 vodkarn says:
People seriously over-estimate how much testers are listened to.
I cannot count (literally, it’s in the hundreds) of times I have told producers/engineers/etc about a massive problem that would happen if we did ‘x’, only to watch them do ‘x’ anyway, then later complain that ‘x’ failed.
22/09/2011 at 19:03 Azradesh says:
It wasn’t online earlier development. In fact an earlier Blue post stated that there would be an offline option, but online would be encouraged.
22/09/2011 at 13:07 Mr Pink says:
I have tried to make the exact same argument you do in other comment threads on this subject. Starcraft 2 has this option (offline campaign or games vs AI), why should Diablo 3 exclude it?
22/09/2011 at 13:09 mrjackspade says:
Totally agree. And the funny thing is, there will be fully reliable “play offline” crack available by the second week, bundled together somewhat thoughtfully with a full copy of the game.
22/09/2011 at 13:23 Tori says:
I believe that it won’t be that simple, because everything is calculated on a server, like in a MMO, so you’ll need not only a crack, but also a emulated server!
22/09/2011 at 13:28 Julio Biason says:
I was thinking the same, but now I have my doubts. If enemies stopped moving and no arrows were flying when the servers went down, it means the whole game logic is in the server (as the article pointed). If so, the crack would not only replicate the “save character” part, but the whole map generation, mobs AI and such.
Pretty much, Blizzard turned Diablo into instantiated WoW (like the first Guild Wars did with most zones).
22/09/2011 at 14:29 karry says:
“because everything is calculated on a server, like in a MMO, so you’ll need not only a crack, but also a emulated server!”
So ? Every major MMO ever had emulated servers, starting with Ultima Online and up. You think some of the devs willingly gave their permission to create those servers ? A virtually impossible scenario.
22/09/2011 at 20:27 Starky says:
So. The point is that even if the game is cracked you’ll still need to be ONLINE – unless you emulate a server locally, which is possible, but not probable – you know many people who host their own WoW server to play it single player locally?
22/09/2011 at 13:09 PodX140 says:
I would love to give this article more thumbs up than I can give, but I’m forced to settle with 2.
Great article!
22/09/2011 at 13:09 Cvamped says:
As much as I dislike it, I doubt Blizzard will take the DRM out. A big part of their current push is to connect their games via BattleNet.
Oh yeah.
……Torchwood 2…..
What? Who said that? ‘Looks around in confusion’
22/09/2011 at 13:13 Xocrates says:
Indeed. Mentioning a Doctor Who Spin-off in a Diablo article is indeed quite confusing ;)
22/09/2011 at 14:30 karry says:
It does make sense, though. A reference to a bad spin-off from a bad show, applied to a bad game ? Works for me.
22/09/2011 at 14:54 iainl says:
Oh, I thought it was a reference to Rusty’s bizarre idea to take his new product and tie it into his current one, despite there being neither sense in doing so, nor one being suitable for most of the market of the other.
22/09/2011 at 17:58 vodkarn says:
“It does make sense, though. A reference to a bad spin-off from a bad show, applied to a bad game ? Works for me.”
/eyeroll
22/09/2011 at 13:10 Icarus says:
Lost sale.
22/09/2011 at 13:10 deanb says:
Has there been any official, technical sounding reason on why they don’t have an offline character mode that’s gimped in stuff like the auction house, but with all the usual SP perks like being able to save and pause and play for as long as your PC works?
The concept of having all the downsides of an MMO in a SP game just seems insane.
22/09/2011 at 13:53 diamondmx says:
It’s explained in the other comments. Blizzard haven’t given you the whole game, most game-logic is running server side so there is no way to have an offline mode.
22/09/2011 at 21:27 DigitalSignalX says:
As also stated in comments, D2 had a offline single player -and- a online-only mode with game logic running on Bnet servers.
22/09/2011 at 13:11 Dominic White says:
Once again, an article about Diablo 3′s DRM that doesn’t mention one of the biggest problems with it – they’re using it to region-lock the game. Live in Europe? Have a friend in the US that you play stuff with? Maybe Diablo 2? Well, you can’t play with them now, because it’s apparently too expensive to ship those internet packets across the interweb-ocean now, according to Blizzard.
Fuck that in the ear.
22/09/2011 at 13:19 frenz0rz says:
What? WHAT?! Is this really true?
Numerous people in my clan (which, as clans go, is fairly international) were looking forward to playing this game together. We’d assumed, at the worst, that the system would be something along the lines of Diablo 2′s Europe/US East/ US West realms. But now they’re not even including that? Fuck off.
22/09/2011 at 13:25 ZyloMarkIII says:
Are Blizzard really that stupid to region lock a game like this? They were already pushing for a multiplayer feel instead of a single-player one but they don’t even let you play with your international buds? What are they on?
22/09/2011 at 13:30 malkav11 says:
That’s terrible, but it’s nowhere near the biggest problem. A singleplayer game that I can’t play without a connection to Blizzard’s servers is unacceptable. A singleplayer game that can’t be paused or left idle in a safe area is unacceptable. A singleplayer game with a necessarily finite lifespan is unacceptable. A game that I can’t play with friends I don’t have on other continents in a cooperative play mode I had no intention of spending any time in might someday be an issue for me, but not likely.
22/09/2011 at 13:42 Robin says:
This is totally ridiculous.
Practices like these, the faster are trashed the better. I’m sad for people attached to the franchise.
22/09/2011 at 13:55 bateleur says:
The region locking thing is doubtless due to performance. They’re going to be chucking insane amounts of data along the pipe and don’t want players complaining that it’s laggy because they’re playing with someone halfway round the world.
22/09/2011 at 13:55 diamondmx says:
Please add this to the article – it’s one of the reasons SC2 irritates me. I can only play with one half of my friends because of this stupid region-locking.
22/09/2011 at 14:12 Dominic White says:
@bateleur – Given advances in netcode over the past 11 years, plus the fact that there seem to be fewer enemies around than in Diablo 2, there should be LESS information being thrown around, not more. If Blizzard can’t make a straigtforward hack n’ slash internationally playable now, then they might as well just close up shop.
22/09/2011 at 14:38 Milky1985 says:
“Given advances in netcode over the past 11 years, plus the fact that there seem to be fewer enemies around than in Diablo 2, there should be LESS information being thrown around, not more.”
Except now since ALL of the logic seems to be done on the blizzard servers (except movement, so teleport hacks will be the first ones out) there will likely be a high ammount of data pushed back and forth.
All advances in netcode wouldn’t help when they have decided to add more info into the pipe.
I assume as all of the processing is done server side then the CPU requirements of the game are quite low right?
22/09/2011 at 16:43 Xan says:
They region locked Starcraft 2 which is a god damn e-sport of epic proportions.
You think they wouldn’t region lock Diablo 3?
22/09/2011 at 19:45 Wulf says:
Dominic White sums up my problems with the system eloquently.
I wish I was eloquent. Probably used to be. Bloody degenerative illnesses. Anyway, that’s besides the point and I’m not going to dwell on that. I’m trying not to segue like a madman today because this really is an important issue to me.
See, this puts a barrier between me and my friends. Blizzard wants to tell me that my friends and I should not be playing together, that it is fundamentally wrong to do so, and they want to place an impenetrable barrier between us, to keep us apart for the entire time we’re playing their game.
This makes my skin crawl.
It’s horrible on levels that I can’t describe. And why are we putting up with this again? This is the exact same reason that none of us play WoW. Guild Wars? You can choose your location. Champions Online? Everyone can play! Minecraft? Setup a server and anyone from the world over can join! Magicka? Hey, it’s all good! Darkspore? Bring your friends in! And the answer is going to be the same with Torchlight II.
Give me one good reason as to why any of us would want to buy this over Torchlight II.
For me and my group? Torchlight II all the way. TL II allows local servers, has an offline mode, doesn’t have suffocating DRM, doesn’t have a cash-shop, allows me to co-op with anyone I like, no region locks at all, and it’s the gods damn antithesis of Diablo III. I suspect that it’ll even have a more interesting story. I know that its art direction and style is already more consistent and appealing to me than that of Diablo III anyway.
But yeah, if Diablo III had allowed for people from various regions to play together then surely my friends would have dragged me into it and I might have had some fun with it. Currently? Not touching it. Avoiding it like the plague it is.
If we buy into this then we’re telling Blizzard and every publisher that this sort of thing is okay.
This sort of thing is not okay. Not even remotely.
22/09/2011 at 13:11 FieldOfTheBattle says:
I am not worried about DRM I already preordered my copy from The Pirate Bay.
22/09/2011 at 13:34 Gandhi says:
STOP RIGHT THERE YOU CRIMINAL SCUM!
22/09/2011 at 14:19 AlwaysRight says:
I could have this wrong, but I don’t think there is going to be a Pirate Bay ‘version’ of this game. I think the battlenet servers determine the items and enemies. I understand that this might not make cracking the game impossible but in my mind would make it much much harder.
22/09/2011 at 22:46 Sheng-ji says:
AlwaysRight says: I could have this wrong…
Heheheheheheh
heheheh
hehehe
Ahhhh
22/09/2011 at 13:12 pakoito says:
You could play Diablo 2 multiplayer? wow! I didn’t knew it! I and I wouldn’t have to know in Diablo 3 either.
22/09/2011 at 13:20 Okami says:
Wait! There was a single player mode in Diablo 2? Who would have thought…
22/09/2011 at 14:32 karry says:
Yes, there actually was a multiplayer mode. Apparently it was included after much begging from a fringe group of freaks.
22/09/2011 at 13:13 Alexander Norris says:
Is it really there to prevent people from using cheats in their SP game? Was that officially given as a reason?
Because “preventing” cheating in single-player is so stupid and wrong it’s not even funny. It’s my single-player game, if I want to make myself max level from the start or invulnerable or unlock all the powers, it’s my choice and doesn’t impact other players at all.
22/09/2011 at 13:21 Ergates_Antius says:
No, it’s to prevent people from using cheats to duplicate/create items which they then sell in the online auction house. Possibly for real money.
22/09/2011 at 13:22 pakoito says:
No, no, no, no, no, you’re wrong. Blizzard wants you to experience their game in the way they intended, that meaning you have to buy your stuff in the auction house to get a full game experience, and have to grind for countless online hours to get your character to the point you want to see him. Random drops? not getting that gem you want? TOO BAD, auctionhouse.
22/09/2011 at 13:23 Ergates_Antius says:
Right – so it’s always connected to monitor and save your progress. But only saves your progress at check points. And you can’t pause. Brilliant!
Were they drunk when they made that decision?
Even Dead Island has managed how to pause in a co-op game, and that’s a buggy mess!
22/09/2011 at 17:46 Ergates_Antius says:
Reverse reply fail. That ^^ was meant to be a seperate comment…
22/09/2011 at 13:14 Rii says:
Y’know … if the actual game logic is being run like an MMO… then D3 is going to be about as much fun for Aus/NZ folk to play as … something that’s not very fun.
22/09/2011 at 13:17 VelvetFistIronGlove says:
…as fun as leaping off a tower into a haystack full of needles.
22/09/2011 at 14:04 diamondmx says:
As fun as finding the hay in a needlestack, using only your testicles.
22/09/2011 at 13:14 GenBanks says:
Seems to be the trend, especially among certain companies, that games are becoming services rather tha products even if they’re single player :/
22/09/2011 at 13:14 ZyloMarkIII says:
If I were to purchase Diablo III, I would most likely have no problem with always-online. I usually game from 5 AM – 9 AM PST and my broadband connection is stable enough to go by without a hitch most of the time. However, the fact that you have to be online to play a single-player game baffles me and as such, I will not support this title. Blizzard can do without my money.
22/09/2011 at 13:14 Pod42 says:
Torchlight will steal the Spotlight.
22/09/2011 at 19:07 Azradesh says:
I doubt that.
22/09/2011 at 19:52 Wulf says:
I don’t doubt that at all. I don’t doubt that Torchlight II will be a vastly better ‘game experience’ too, to boot. I’m sure that Diablo III will be popular amongst the WoW crowd, but eh, the WoW crowd will buy anything Blizzard puts out. Anything. So that doesn’t really matter. At least not to me.
Torchlight is already far better in regards to internally consistent art direction, and it’s generally more interesting, charming, and the classes seem more fun. (It has an engineer class!!) Not to mention that the dog makes a return to Torchlight II, so we’ll be able to sell stuff off even in the middle of a grand adventure. We’ll also have our companion, whom we’ll have the mechanic of feeding meats to to have them become gigantic creatures of doom. All of this already sounds better to me than Diablo III.
Diablo III is so much same old tat. I still would have probably played it if my friends had, but Torchlight II would still have been the better game. As it is, Blizzard has made it impossible for my friends or I to give them money! Hooray!! So instead we’re all just looking forward to Torchlight II. Make this one count, Runic. Show them how it’s done.
22/09/2011 at 19:55 psyk says:
Diablo was better than torchlight
torchlight was a dumbed down console version of the genre. A pet to sell your stuff pfffft please.
22/09/2011 at 13:15 Jorum says:
No pause?
That is crap. Do none of the developers have kids or spouses?
I can expect to get interrupted by one thing or another every ten minutes or so.
And what about tea FFS? What happens when I want to make another cup of tea? WHAT HAPPENS WHEN I NEED TEA – ANSWER ME BLIZZARD!
22/09/2011 at 13:15 frenz0rz says:
This is absurd.
Quite possibly a no-sale from me depending on how many of my friends end up buying it; if I’ve got plenty of people to play online with then I’ll likely never touch the singleplayer, but if its just me then I’d rather not play something that has the potential to be so frustrating.
Plus, as Hentzau pointed out above, I’d always considered the ‘Save & Exit’ mechanic to be quite integral to the Diablo experience. There is no Save/Load feature – what happens, happens, and you’ll never end up in situation whereby you save before a bossfight and keep reloading until you get the best loot. It was an elegant nod to the harsher permadeath mechanics of the roguelikes which had preceded it.
22/09/2011 at 13:15 VelvetFistIronGlove says:
I rarely link to VG247, but this is a good piece by Patrick Garratt about how his opinion of always-on DRM for single-player games turned around after being bitten by Ubisoft’s version of it. http://www.vg247.com/2011/09/08/the-day-i-realised-always-on-drm-moaners-have-a-point/
It’s worth a read, especially by those who approve of always-on.
22/09/2011 at 13:37 Sian says:
I read it and was oddly satisfied, maybe even gloating. I’m one of those “always-online moaners” and every time somebody says: “My connection is stable” I hope that they’ll get disconnected due to some guy accidentally cutting a cable. It’s mean to think such things, but it’s also quite selfish to think that something’s okay just because you’re not affected by it.
Strangely enough, one of the top comments on that story was “Who doesn’t have internet nowadays?” I dislike people who read the title of a story and then skip right to the comment box.
22/09/2011 at 13:15 Devenger says:
The solution is incredibly simple: sacrifice your life, shun your friends and family, doom your prospects of being a functioning individual, in order to play games ‘the way they are meant to be played’.
Yes, I am rather worried about this, in a ‘hope the rest of the industry doesn’t get too many ideas’ sort of way.
22/09/2011 at 13:15 zergrush says:
I’m so fucking conflicted over this game.
I don’t mind the lack of pausing, Demon’s Souls didn’t have it either and it only added to the game’s atmosphere and tension. Being online-only is not really an issue, I already crack pretty much every game due to Steam’s offline mode having failed every time I needed it, so I’ll just keep a separate cracked Diablo III install if I ever want to play offline. RMAH is going to actually be pretty awesome if they manage to stop cheating.
But why the fuck can’t me and my friends who are in another continent play together without having to care about buying the same version? Pretty much all of Blizzard’s games have localized servers, and you can simply choose which one you want to connect to, why must Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3 be different?
22/09/2011 at 13:16 iucounu says:
You can’t fucking PAUSE THE GAME?
What?!?!
I’m sorry, but I soloed Diablo 2 all the way. I have never been interested in the multiplayer aspect. I just want to click on the monsters, alone, until they die, please. Why does D3 have to be all MMOized?
22/09/2011 at 13:17 TBTheBritish says:
I was already not buying this game (basically because of everything that occurred in that one big day of announcements), but suddenly I -cannot- play this game. I spent about 75% of the day with a game minimised on my computer whilst I am working or away doing other things. If I can’t do this, I can’t play the game as much as if I didn’t meet the system requirements. Except in this case, Blizzard have decided I do not meet their “human” requirements of being 100% committed to their game for the duration of time I want to play it (and ready to quit within 10 minutes of actually wanting to quit. Were we crazy to complain about how long it took to quit Assassin’s Creed 2 because it took about 12 clicks, when it was still faster than waiting for Diablo 3 to log us out?).
22/09/2011 at 20:07 Wulf says:
Ha, you do that too? That’s how I fit in my single-player time. I just keep stuff open in the background and switch to it for a few moments every now and then. Bastion has been very accommodating in regards to that.
22/09/2011 at 13:17 Dawngreeter says:
Guild Wars would log you out if you were logged in for 24h.
22/09/2011 at 20:08 Wulf says:
Guild Wars was also designed and marketed as a co-operative game. And despite that I don’t ever recall being idle-kicked from it. (If it did have an idle timeout, it was very, very, very generous.)
Oh, and I could change regions to play with whomever I wanted. There’s that, too.
22/09/2011 at 20:32 Starky says:
Erm, Diablo 3 is also designed and has been marketed (from the very first video) as a online cooperative game pretty much exactly like guild wars (up to 8 players instanced co-op). The only thing guild wars had that D3 doesn’t is hub towns (which were just glorified chat rooms with a few vendors anyway).
22/09/2011 at 13:17 Jazz42 says:
I think I’m going to go back and play D2 just to spite them
Yep
Dling now.
22/09/2011 at 13:18 MiniMatt says:
My internet connection is flakier than perhaps most, but as you point out, at least I have one. It’s not like I’m sat on a train, plane, or, god forbid in some hot and sandy hellhole getting shot at and exploded at on a daily basis – it’s this last one that I wonder might resonate more strongly in the flag waving, troop supporting homeland of Blizz. It’s a single player game, albeit one that can subsequently be played multiplayer – but Blizz won’t let US troops play it. I mean, Ubisoft are French, they have an excuse….
Had not considered lack of pause, that indeed makes things much much worse.
22/09/2011 at 13:19 HermitUK says:
The checkpoint issue alone is enough to put me off. I’ve been running into an issue in Dead island where it won’t save progress on quests -so you have to make sure you hand all your partly finished quests in before exiting, otherwise you’ll have to go and fetch quest items out kill quest monsters again when you next start the game. It’s infuriating.
22/09/2011 at 13:20 Fuz says:
They’re obviously doing it just for piracy reasons and to make money through that idiotic ah.
I’m not buying this crap.
22/09/2011 at 13:21 feda says:
I’m going to play a clean, pirated version of Diablo 3 if they don’t decide to offer an offline option. It’s your call, Blizzard. Either you want my money or not. I’ll speak with my wallet.
22/09/2011 at 13:21 angurvaki says:
Wow, things are starting to look bleak : /
I’ve been a loyal blizzard fan since I was a kid, but I missed the whole Diablo run back in the day for some reason. So picking up the series now just sounds like more trouble than it’s worth:
I live in the middle of nowhere with my family; Sharing the low and DSL connection (which is the best they offer here) with 5 other people, 2 teenage boys included, so needless to say the draconian download limit is sometimes finished with 5-6 days left of the month, and when that happens I can’t connect to any online services; Steam can’t log in, no nothing. And that’s the time when you actually get down to gaming – When the game’s attention is not contended by the internet.
And now the news of no-pause!? I’m also a father, so anything with long rounds and without a pause button is a no go.
Boo blizzard, boo.
22/09/2011 at 13:22 Taiphoz says:
This is not a single player game as people keep calling it, its an online game, as such needs you to be online, I see them as being different and distinct types of game, simple player != online.
Its online because you can trade everything you find with thousands of other players via the more mmo type features.
So please stop calling it a single player game or moaning that its kicking you off and single player games shouldnt do that, cos its not, and it should.
22/09/2011 at 13:25 feda says:
Diablo has always been and will be a single player game.
22/09/2011 at 13:28 Zanchito says:
90% of my Diablo 1/2 gaming has been single player in /players 8. I despise online people very much, very annoying and immature people. Don’t tell me how I game nor how should I enjoy my gaming.
22/09/2011 at 13:31 malkav11 says:
You can, yes. But I don’t want to, and the game is not in any way designed to require me to do so. Ergo that part of the game does not qualify it as an online game.
22/09/2011 at 13:44 Unaco says:
I will, as soon as Blizzard come out and say “This game is NOT single player. It’s Multiplayer/Coop only”.
22/09/2011 at 14:30 freeid says:
Diablo 1 was a Single Player Game, Diablo 2 was a single player game, DIABLO 3, is an multiplayer co-op, dont like it?… play one of the other 5 or 6 hack and slash games that are coming out instead.
22/09/2011 at 16:27 Unaco says:
@FreeId…
That’s what a lot of people here are planning to do.
22/09/2011 at 17:19 freeid says:
Which is fair enough, I will play torchlight 2 for the game it is, I will also play D3 for the game it is, one is online only the other is not.
22/09/2011 at 20:12 Wulf says:
Diablo III is the simple player’s game?
No. No… too easy.
Anyway, if the OP actually were correct, then Blizzard should have marketed it as an ‘Online Co-op RPG,’ and even then there would still be the issue of the microtransactions, the horrible auction house thing, and the region lock outs.
So yeah.
22/09/2011 at 20:14 Wulf says:
@freeid
So you’re a proponent of false advertising then, and you consider that one of the ways forward for marketing in general?
So noted.
22/09/2011 at 20:18 Grey_Ghost says:
Right… an online only game that doesn’t require other people to play it’s entire content. Why, it’s pure genius!
22/09/2011 at 20:37 Starky says:
Guild wars was an online only game that didn’t require another human player for 99.9% of the PvM content, so is Diablo 3.
As said above, D3 is an online game, has been marketed as an online game (all the vids focus on it) – clearly if people don’t want an online game they don’t buy it – which is fine, don’t buy it.
I’m unsure if I will buy it or not, but the Day9 vids (and others) coming from the beta is making it look like a really fun ONLINE game.
23/09/2011 at 05:24 Grey_Ghost says:
Oh what horse hockey on the Guild Wars example, 99.9% my tuckus! It certainly has progressed to probably 100% solo-ability, but it sure as gravy wasn’t that way from the start.
22/09/2011 at 13:22 Deano2099 says:
I thought the solution was that simple at first too. It isn’t.
Simple question, how do you balance the game?
Always online means you can always access the auction house (both versions) which means you can always trade in useless loot for stuff that suits your character better. Someone playing through and using the auction house will have significantly better gear that someone not doing that.
So do we balance for the player not using the AH and playing offline, and make it too easy for those that do. Or balance for the player using it, making it too hard for those that play offline.
There are solutions, of course. Two differently balanced versions of the game. Or enemies that scale to your current gear. But the first is a huge undertaking, and the second…. well we’ve seen how PC gamers react when you do that.
That’s not to say those avenues aren’t worth pursuing, but it is to say that it’s not a simple solution that can be knocked out in a few months.
22/09/2011 at 13:25 Zanchito says:
If the game is balanced assuming I’m spending time grinding for gold or paying real money at the auction house, that’s a really BIG fail.
22/09/2011 at 18:03 Deano2099 says:
No, it’s an auction house, the point is you trade.
I do get the impression that some people are just seeing the words “Real money transfer” and immediately assuming Blizzard are selling items. They’re not, they’re just letting you sell to each other. And I really bloody wish they’d have used some of that WoW money to take the hit on this and not taken a cut of auction house trades at all. Because then we’d have an interesting experiment that they visibly wouldn’t profit from. As it is they claim they’ll only break even on it but I’m skeptical.
But the point is: you get a cool drop, you sell that cool drop on either auction house for gold or real money, then you buy something of the same value that suits your character better.
22/09/2011 at 20:19 Wulf says:
You just made a very, very convincing case for the game being designed poorly from the ground up, based on an ill-conceived foundation with everything weaved from there on up. And with the game based upon such poor foundations, a game filled with poor choices overall is to be expected.
I can’t disagree with any of that. To the contrary, I’m convinced.
22/09/2011 at 13:23 kikito says:
Calling it “controversial” implies that “at good amount of people agree with it”.
That group doesn’t exist. There’s blizzard, and there’s the rest. It’s not controversial. It’s pretty much the opposite – unilaterally disliked.
22/09/2011 at 14:34 freeid says:
That’s just not true, I am happy as a pig in shit that it’s in, bots and hack ruined the first 2 for me, making that more difficult is a good thing in my book. I am sorry if you can’t play it in Antarctica or on the bus or at your Grans but there are thousand of other games you can.
22/09/2011 at 14:47 Milky1985 says:
“there are thousand of other games you can”
For now, because of people accepting this sort of thing in all the games more and more games companies are doing it
22/09/2011 at 18:08 vodkarn says:
‘You have a problem I don’t, so it isn’t a problem.”
_I’M_ not being harassed for my race, if you don’t like it, move outta the country.
_I’M_ not denied a job due to my gender – if you don’t like it, move out.
I love ideas like this, that if people are denied a service they should just shut up, cause, you know, the complaints bother people who don’t care.
22/09/2011 at 20:09 Gormongous says:
Well, I’m all right, Jack.
22/09/2011 at 20:18 Wulf says:
Actually freeid, if you poll the comments as I’ve been doing, building a demographic in your head, then according to the posters here you’re part of a 2% minority.
Most of us don’t agree with this and we feel that Diablo III has been designed poorly from the ground up. (Deano2099 makes a great case for this above, whilst trying to make a case for something else.) And thus many of us feel that there are better games out there.
22/09/2011 at 13:23 Zanchito says:
Also there’s the problem that the game is region locked. Want to play with friends around you AND on the other side of the pond? (not strange at all, I’d like to play with real life friends ™ and also forum buddies). Well, you’re screwed, so much for the “great online experience” they claim to be aiming for. Simply unacceptable.
22/09/2011 at 20:21 Wulf says:
And what about family abroad, or friends who’ve moved? What about them? In this world of the Internet there are no oceans, so we can stay in touch, play games, and engage in a wide variety of fun activities.
Blizzard wants to take us back to the dark ages before all of that. :|
22/09/2011 at 13:23 Laurentius says:
I wonder if this always on-line isn’t the reason game isn’t being realeased on consoles right away.
22/09/2011 at 13:24 nowise says:
Speaking as someone who has kids, no pause = tragedy. I can’t buy this unless they fix it.
22/09/2011 at 13:25 Vexing Vision says:
But I don’t want a single player experience.
I want a co-op game with my wife. Who is sitting next to me. I do NOT want to have two battle net accounts. I want the option to connect our computers, if necesssary over fucking Steam, and have a go at it, the same way we played Diablo 1, Diablo 2, Baldur’s Gate 2, Lara Croft, Magicka and a hundred thousand other non-MMO games.
So, Torchlight 2 it is for us, which is a shame.
22/09/2011 at 13:54 Jolly Teaparty says:
Exact same here, I want to be able to play over LAN with my girlfriend completely independent of battle.net. I hope that it’ll at least feel like an isolated LAN game.
22/09/2011 at 18:38 dogsolitude_uk says:
To damned right. It was my g/f’s idea of LANning my two PCs together for Neverwinter Nights that got me into RPGs :(
22/09/2011 at 21:50 DigitalSignalX says:
The debate over removal of LAN play in SC2 and D3 has been unfortunately cast aside for more current injustices toward the gaming community. Please keep up.
22/09/2011 at 13:26 Corrupt_Tiki says:
When the servers go offline and they still insist on online only, i think that is fair reason to pirate or crack the game.
I dislike always on.
I will still be buying this game.
I am a bad person.
:<
22/09/2011 at 14:37 freeid says:
True, my local shop ran out of milk recently, although I have bought my milk from there in the past, I figure thats a good enough reason for me to steal my milk from them from now on.
22/09/2011 at 14:52 Milky1985 says:
Award for worst analogy ever goes to “freeid” for completly missing the point and making wildly stupid comments instead
“”True, my local shop ran out of milk recently, although I have bought my milk from there in the past, I figure thats a good enough reason for me to steal my milk from them from now on.”
This would only be a valid analogy if you had paid for something that lets you get as much milk as you want, but you couldn’t store this thing at your house you had to go to the shop. And then the shop was shut for some reason.
Unfortantly milk does not work like that, you buy the milk you take it with you and you generally drink it or put it on your breakfast.
Or make milkshakes
22/09/2011 at 17:21 freeid says:
That would be true if like you said he had paid for it, but he said he would “pirate it”
22/09/2011 at 17:27 Unaco says:
No he didn’t. He did say “I will still be buying this game”. I think what he is meaning is, he will buy the game, but because of the restrictions placed on legitimate customers, he will then get the cracked version of the game, in order to play his legally purchased game without the restrictions imposed by Blizzard.
Nowhere does he say he will pirate the game, without paying. Your attempt to twist what he has said is laughable freeid.
22/09/2011 at 20:25 Wulf says:
It’s interesting that freeid is a name I’m not familiar with, too. And I’m good with names.
So… freeid, temporarily here as a raving fanboy, or Blizzard mole? You decide!
Sorry, I had to ironically engage in some silly conspiracy shenanigans, because frankly it’s less silly than freeid’s analogy.
22/09/2011 at 13:29 Kraky says:
Or, just wait for the inevitable single player crack and use it to play offline if you like (on ur original legit game).
22/09/2011 at 13:31 Seafort says:
I was going to get Diablo 3 but i hate the way blizzard are designing the game now. Its all about control and profits and nothing about choice and fun gameplay for all types of gamers.
I played diablo 1 and 2 many years ago where the game was fun and addictive now its just alot of hassle for the gamer to just play the game.
I’d rather support Torchlight 2 and Grim Dawn than Diablo 3 now.
The way blizzard and many other dev/publishers are going it just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
It’s not a design choice i want to support.
22/09/2011 at 13:32 Zepp says:
So far according to the comments ~20 people won’t buy the game if they don’t lie or forget about it later. BEWARE Blizzard. Change your evil ways.
22/09/2011 at 13:34 Unaco says:
That’s ~20 out of ~100 comments, so far. That’s 1/5th of the PC Gaming public turned off the game.
22/09/2011 at 13:39 Eddy9000 says:
Beware people taking a stand against Blizzard by not buying the game! A single person has made a comment on a blog saying your effort is useless!
22/09/2011 at 13:32 Unaco says:
I had absolutely no interest in this game until I read the RPS early impressions the other day, and then my interest was piqued, somewhat. It looked quite good, sounded like they’d spent a lot of time and effort on the game and detail etc. Seemed like the sort of game I would pick up and play on my Netbook when on the move, on the train, in hotels, that sort of thing, and I would probably be soloing it as well, so couldn’t give a toss about an auction house or Big Brother making sure I didn’t cheat.
After this, however, no sale. No way, no how (unless they rip the always-online stuff out pretty f*ckin sharpish). It just sounds ridiculous… No pause? That is just silly. In a single player game to not be able to pause is ludicrous. Logging out if you idle too long? Again, just silly… you can’t pause, so you’re going to have to idle, but you can’t because it logs you out and you lose your progress? Really, are Blizzard just trying to kill single player gaming? Did all the Blizzard employees spend their childhoods sitting in empty Quake servers waiting for someone, anyone to join them… and now they’re all growed up they’ve decided no one will ever play a game alone again, whether they want to or not?
And, again, the always online DRM. When will companies learn? Make it optional, make it failsafe, make it worth it to the player to be online when they can be, but don’t prevent them from enjoying the game, on their own, when they are unable to connect.
22/09/2011 at 13:35 Coins says:
Well, I’m very dissapointed in Blizzard. Diablo 2 MP was fun with some friends, but it never really captured me, so I won’t get D3. However, it does nicely ilustrate that this choice has nothing to do with preventing cheating or piracy or whatever, it is in place soley because it will earn (Activision)-Blizzard more money. What a shame.
22/09/2011 at 13:35 Eddy9000 says:
I’m someone who love D2 and was looking forward to this, but probably won’t be buying it if these problems are not addressed. It’s not because I’m anti DRM, or trying to send a message out to Blizzard with my single pizzley lost sale (although the culmination of many individual actions is what often adds up to change, so the ‘yeah sure, like Blizzard care about your one lost sale” rhetoric is just useless snark), it’s baecuase although these factors are not part of the gameplay, they are as much a part of the game experience than the graphics, level design and gameplay.
My BT homehub crashes about once during an evening of use and needs resetting, my game about being a mighty barbarian destroying zombie hoards is now a game about being a frustrated 30 year old with male pattern baldness having to shamble to the home-hub to reset it and then replaying stuff he’s already done. My game about a wizard destroying his enemies with fireballs is turned into a game about making decisions whether to answer the phone at the cost of 15 minutes progress. As an activity my game has gone from something I can do enjoyably to fill an uncertain amount of time, to something I am tied to until a checkpoint, making me feel like I am working for the game rather than the game working for me.
Needless to say a game about being a bald 30-something resetting the home-hub, and feeling annoyed at losing 15 minutes of his life because he’s had to answer the door isn’t one I would want to buy, and isn’t one I’m going to be buying in Diablo 3.
22/09/2011 at 20:37 Wulf says:
Yeah. I’m not unreasonable about DRM either. I’m fine with Steam. Steam’s offline mode works (if you know how to use it, and the instructions are there, and you can ask just about anyone who’s used Steam for a little while how to use it properly), I’ve spent bloody months in offline mode. I recall once that I spent three months in offline mode when I just needed a lot of space. (I was coping with something related to my non-Internet life and I didn’t feel up to socialising at the time.)
Generally though I find Steam useful and non-intrusive. If my Internet connection drops then it doesn’t harm my gaming. If I want to play with someone halfway across the world then Steamworks lets me do that thanks to how its infrastructure is laid out. It’s built well from the ground up because Valve know what they’re doing and they know what people want and don’t want. They even recently built Skype’s voice protocol into the Steam client so that we could have Skype-quality voice chat in Steam, and that’s amazing. Valve aren’t afraid to spend money to make things better for us.
It’s all about quality of life.
This is compared to Blizzard: I can’t pause, I can’t go offline, I can’t have an Internet drop out, and I can’t play with friends in another region. All of these things are imposed upon us by Blizzard. It reduces our quality of life. What does this tell me? That Diablo III is designed poorly from the ground up, and unlike the ever clued-in Valve, Blizzard just don’t have a bloody clue. See, that’s the difference. It’s all about quality of life.
I am willing to be reasonable, I will make concessions regarding DRM so long as the DRM does not affect my quality of life. I bought a product which is supposed to entertain me, not annoy me, stress me out, and frustrate me due to elements which have nothing at all to do with the game. This is what I want publishers to understand. Your DRM is okay so long as it doesn’t impact my quality of life. If I’m playing an Ubisoft game and the connection drops, thus losing me progression, forcing me to wait, and just generally providing me with a bit of extra frustration and stress when I’m trying to unwind? That’s broken by design and it’s impacting my quality of life negatively.
If I can’t take a single-player game offline if I’m playing in an area without Internet, that’s doing the same. If I can’t play with the friends I want to play with and we’re forced to have a barrier dividing us, forever keeping us apart when we’re never apart? That’s also impacting my quality of life. I’ll say it again; I’m not at all unreasonable and I’m more than willing to entertain DRM so long as it doesn’t punish me for being a legitimate customer.
Blizzard’s system is built upon an entirely poor foundation, it’s broken by design, and it punishes people for being legitimate customers. It affects quality of life in a variety of negative ways. This is the sort of thing that we need to rally against in regards to publishers. If we make a lot of noise about hating on DRM which does not negatively impact our quality of life then publishers are going to just think that we’re a whiny, bitchy lot that will never be pleased. But I’ve always had this same set of standards, and this is what I’d like publishers to understand.
And honestly, I think my standards in regards to DRM being okay up until the point where it negatively affects my quality of life regarding a purchase is something logical that all gamers could understand and get behind. This is something that we should have standards in regards to.
22/09/2011 at 13:36 johnnynohat says:
This makes complete sense based on battle.net and the online auction house which people could manipulate without DRM.
I’m fine with it and can’t wait to get my hands on the game.
22/09/2011 at 13:44 Plivesey says:
I’ll also be buying this, day one, because the gameplay will be damned fun! I’ll probably play it entirely online, where pausing wouldn’t be an option. I’ll just TP to town if I wish to go AFK.
22/09/2011 at 13:38 Drake Sigar says:
Is it too much to ask for my video game to respond to me, rather than the other way around? I get back from a hard day at the office and want to unwind with some premium entertainment, when that entertainment suddenly starts making demands of me too. No. No it can’t do that. It doesn’t get to strike me across the knuckles like a Victorian primary school teacher for failing to remain attentive.
22/09/2011 at 13:43 Eddy9000 says:
Absolutely this. And charging you £35 for the privilige. You know if Blizzard are reducing the quality of a games experience so they can make more money through preventing piracy and microtransactions then they should pass this down to their customers and reduce the game price.
22/09/2011 at 13:38 KalChoedan says:
I think it’s actually missing the point to look at this in terms of DRM. To me it seems to be more about an entire philosophy of game design.
There is a certain style of implementing multiplayer that grew, I think, out of the limited sorts of networking people were doing in the early ’90s when things like crossover cables or even null modem cables were the norm when you were getting a game of DOOM going. That’s evolved into what you typically see in many games today where single player and multiplayer are mostly treated as separate, even if they actually share many assets. It’s a good model and it works well for many types of game including the action RPG.
In contrast to that there is the more recent development of the MMO style of multiplayer, where you connect to a “world” to play and hence there is an online requirement. For my money though, the best example with which to compare is Guild Wars. You can play Guild Wars as a single player game too, but exactly as with Diablo III you are heartily encouraged to play with others, and you have to be online regardless.
I think that however much anyone protests their preference for the former model, a big part of Blizzard’s direction with Diablo III is to try exactly this experiment – can they make a game of a type that “traditionally” would use the former style, but make it in the latter style (and tie it all in to the new Battle.net into the bargain.) No amount of uproar is going to sway them on this, it’s core to what they are doing with D3.
22/09/2011 at 13:56 Hentzau says:
This is a fair point, and the way I’d been dealing with the D3 changes so far was to think of it as a peculiarly limited MMO with no subscription fee (yet ¬_¬). However, from the sound of things the nature of Diablo leads to there being some problems that even MMOs don’t have. In an MMO your position in the world is saved when you log out/get disconnected. If someone knocks on the door then unless you’re in a dungeon it’s the work of a few seconds to disengage from whatever you’re doing and fly/hearth to a safe spot to log out because MMO mobs are usually pretty passive.
Not so with D3 though; the Diablo games have always reset your progress on quitting, but to have them do it when you’re forced to disconnect by something outside of your control is inexcusable. And if you’re in the middle of a fight it’s going to take much more than a few seconds to kill everything and get away because of the number of mobs involved and their aggressiveness. It’s a style of gameplay that’s far less compatible with always-online restrictions.
22/09/2011 at 14:18 Kdansky says:
A imaginary cookie to you for being the third person in this crowd who gets it!
22/09/2011 at 14:27 Twitchity says:
I think that’s accurate — the description of attacks vanishing on network drop suggests that at least some of the underlying mechanics are taking place on the servers, presumably to prevent cheating. That makes D3 an MMO that can be soloed, not a single-player game that can be taken online.
In any case, Blizzard needs to deal with the marketing effects of this: their failure to explain how D3 works, and to provide demonstrable benefit to the end-user, at a minimum hurts their reputation, and will hurt (to an admittedly small degree) their sales. Had they originally positioned the game as “world of Diablo” with no ongoing fee structure, then I think the public might have been more receptive.
22/09/2011 at 20:41 Wulf says:
Another argument that’s managed to convince me beyond the shadow of a doubt that Diablo III is broken by design, that it’s based on poor foundations, that Blizzard has no clue about proper infrastructure or quality of life, and that therefore a game based upon these factors can’t have anything else other than poor decisions stemming from that. It’s logical.
I cannot argue with the logic of this. That’s the thing. I agree with the OP, I agree completely, but what I’ll say is that I don’t have to like it. And to be honest, I think that it’s so badly put together that it should be mocked. This isn’t something that publishers should be doing. A game that’s so broken from the very foundations that it’s designed to negatively impact the quality of life of a non-trivial amount of gamers? That doesn’t sound like a professionally designed product to me.
I am convinced.
22/09/2011 at 22:21 DigitalSignalX says:
While I agree completely with the comparison to Guild Wars, I suspect the underlying fuel for most of these arguments is precedent. Guild Wars was a new IP, and and Diablo 3 is a rather serious divergence from it’s two very popular predecessors.
I’m conflicted about this game. I don’t usually buy UBI titles because of the DRM, and in the rare case I do, they get cracked immediately. But I don’t have anything invested in a new UBI game like I do with the Diablo franchise. I played the first two for years. Not just a couple of hundred hours each, but months and months on end. I will 100% buy this game based solely on that history, despite agreeing with almost all of the points raised in these comments regarding loss of LAN, region locking, and the negatives of online-only .
Some may consider it hypocritical in comparison to UBI, I consider it a reward-righteousness ratio. It’s a matter of missing out on the 50-100 hours I might get for a big UBI title to uphold my dislike of the practice versus the many months and continued enjoyment of the franchise I will get from D3. I regret that my money is supporting the practice, and will continue to be vocal against it, but they will get a sale regardless.
23/09/2011 at 02:23 malkav11 says:
The Guild Wars comparison is and was fallacious. Guild Wars is a game built around two axes: cooperative adventuring with a multiple character party (starting at 4 characters and ending at 8), and PVP combat. If you play by yourself in Guild Wars, you are employing bots to fill out your party. These days you can use bots called Heroes which are fairly well designed and over which you have a reasonable (but still finite) amount of control in both building their character and issuing actions, but these weren’t even introduced until the third major Guild Wars release. The previous substitute were single-classed underlevelled completely autonomous bots that were of limited use at best. In any case, it is clearly perceptible throughout the PvE mode that it is designed to be played with other players and the bots are at best a substitute.
Meanwhile, as best I can tell, (and certainly from what Walker says in the article), Diablo III is a game where you run a single player character around hacking down waves of monsters, sometimes supported by friendly NPCs, into which you can, if you so desire, insert other players. There’s a real difference between a game where coop is baked in and even in “singleplayer” you’re just cooping with bots, and a game where you can add coop players but they are not core to the experience. Diablo has always been the latter kind of game. I’ve seen and read nothing to suggest that Diablo III has changed this.
Now, even explicitly cooperative games of the former kind really don’t need to have a permanent online connection built into the design, and mostly they don’t. So yes, I could ding Guild Wars on that account. But there’s more logic to the requirement in their case, especially on the scale Guild Wars uses, and it’s not an accurate comparison with Diablo.
22/09/2011 at 13:39 rolloutroad says:
Here’s the awesome thing – I’m really under no obligation to buy Diablo 3 anymore, what with Torchlight 2 and Grim Dawn coming out. I bought Starcraft 2 because it was never really going to have any worthwhile competitors in the RTS genre, but a game where you can buy power and can’t play offline won’t be anywhere near as fun as SC2 was.
22/09/2011 at 13:40 Zeewolf says:
I’ll buy it when they fix this, or when I can find it for pocket change in the bargain bin somewhere.
The fun thing, though, is that Blizzard _will_ make a console version of it and that console version _will_ be playable offline.
22/09/2011 at 13:42 Mike says:
I was kind of edging towards Torchlight 2 anyway, but I can’t believe that unpausable stuff wasn’t brought up anywhere until now. The idea of a single-player game kicking you out for not playing it constantly is so funny. Any idea what the actual time limit is?
22/09/2011 at 13:42 The V Man says:
Well, I *was* looking forward to D3 until all this online-only and checkpoint business came out. as it stands now, I will absolutely not buy this.
22/09/2011 at 14:43 freeid says:
Umm Diablo 2 used checkpoints, how is this news?
22/09/2011 at 20:39 Starky says:
Hell it was a required feature in Diablo 2 when you wanted to re-run an area without actually finishing the quest (like the act 2 halls, when levelling up) – you’d leave the game and recreate another and all the monsters/bosses would be back.
22/09/2011 at 20:49 Wulf says:
That wasn’t his point. :| You’re creating a new argument that has no relation to what he said and basing your argument based upon that. Such arguments cannot stand because they’re not a valid opposition to the original argument. A strong wind would blow them over.
I’ll explain what his point was.
He was making the argument that if he leaves the game idle for an amount of time then he’ll be forced out of the game, and thus forced to return to a prior checkpoint. This is not a choice he would make, but an action that is forced upon him regardless of whatever choice he’d make.
That’s the difference between what he’s arguing and what you’ve set up to argue.
A well designed single-player game: You can pause the game, and either task-switch away from it and leave the computer. When you return to the game, you can unpause it and continue playing.
An example of a game which is fundamentally broken from the ground up, due to poor design: You cannot pause the game in any way, if you leave the computer or task switch away from the game for a trivial amount of time then you are logged out and forced to return to a prior checkpoint.
And that was his point.
22/09/2011 at 21:27 Starky says:
What is it with you and Blizzard threads? Other topics you can almost be normal, but anything Blizz related you turn into a massive foaming zealot. I know I’m not been very civil here, but I’ve had a pretty long day and I can’t be arsed to raise the energy to enter any meaningful debate with someone who may as well have his fingers in his ears and be shouting “LALALALA!”.
22/09/2011 at 13:42 Gassalasca says:
I can’t wait to buy and play D3.
That said, I must take issue with this bit:
“[... ]to solo the game [is] not what the Diablo series is most famous for”
I think it actually is.
22/09/2011 at 13:42 tungstenHead says:
Clearly, we need to go to the Blizzard headquarters with a rented backhoe and sever their Internet connection.
It feels so impossible to convince Blizzard that online-only for Diablo 3 is a bad decision because it’s so clear that online-only hasn’t hurt World of Warcraft. The only argument that can be made to them is that Diablo 1 and 2 were not always online and changing the series to online-only is a betrayal of expectations. There will be people who buy Diablo 3 and do not know that it is online-only.
My little sister is currently living in an apartment on her own without an Internet connection. She plays The Sims a lot. A few years ago, she played the hell out of Diablo 2. Her fortunes may change soon though, because she’s joining the army! When Diablo 3 appears on a store shelf, she is going to rummage through her purse for spare change and buy it.
Now, I can make sure my little sister knows that Diablo 3 is online-only and she can then make an informed decision. But there are going to be a lot of people who’s expectations are going to be defied and are going to be annoyed and angry that they can not play Diablo 3 under the circumstances that they expected to be able to.
It’s just such a shame that Blizzard will never notice the people that can’t play offline because they’re stuck offline and can’t communicate with them. It’s culling the mute because they can’t protest.
22/09/2011 at 21:14 psyk says:
If they don’t put on the box it’s online only then yes
If they put on the box it’s online only and your sister buys it, it’s on her.
22/09/2011 at 13:43 archy_bold says:
You should defo have gone with the headline: “Blizzard Doesn’t Want Afghanistan HEROES Playing Its Games”.
22/09/2011 at 15:54 karry says:
“Afghanistan HEROES”
Whoa ! Taliban fighter playing Diablo…what a photoshoot idea !
Oh wait, you meant NATO death squads, didnt you…
22/09/2011 at 16:52 dysphemism says:
@archy_bold: Haha, kudos for creating the best tagline yet for the counter argument. Can’t you imagine Fox News picking this one up? In between stories about games turning children into monsters, they can criticize the devs for lack of patriotism.
@karry: Kudos for redirecting us into a whole different level of controversy. Masterfully done.
22/09/2011 at 13:44 Gizoku says:
I really don’t know why they don’t just add a “Solo” mode, and make the game as it stands into “Online” mode. In solo mode, you can only ever play alone, can’t transfer items to online etc. Would please a lot of people and still keep cheaters/exploiters out of the servers.
22/09/2011 at 13:45 Bishop99999999 says:
Every big release always has its naysayers that, for one reason or another, refuse to buy the game because of some perceived outrage. I generally consider these individuals to be spoiled children complaining because of some trifle in game designed they deemed to be vital to the “soul” of the game, or because they failed to understand that game companies are out there to make money.
Until now.
I can’t PAUSE? Really Blizzard? Are your micro-transactions so friggen important that I can’t stop playing your precious game the next time I need to take a leak, or bring my pregnant wife to the hospital, or to get arrested? I mean, there are a lot of game mechanics out there that could always use improvement or experimentation, but I think the industry has the goddam PAUSE function down pat! I mean, I’m already going to be connected to the internet the whole time that I’m playing your precious little wealth-generation device, but even ater paying you assholes $60, that doesn’t even buy me the right to take a little time for myself in the middle of your latest CG-ridden click fest? Who the hell do you think you are? World of Warcraft doesn’t make you enough money? You feel the need to take our time as well as our moolah? Well fuck you Blizzard! Your shit stinks too, and I think that this is the perfect time to send a message to the game industry that you jackasses really need to cut this crap the fuck out!
Blizzard, you just went full retard.
22/09/2011 at 14:29 yougotnick says:
Preach on, brother. I feel the same way. While I’m not happy about the whole “always online” thing, I would have dealt with it, I mean, it’s Diablo 3! The lack of a pause function is a deal-breaker for me though.
22/09/2011 at 13:47 pkt-zer0 says:
“I want to strongly argue that Blizzard reconsider their decision”
The game is built with a server-client architecture in mind. An offline mode would mean releasing the server code to the public. Including hackers. That wouldn’t just not hinder cheating attempts, but bolster them. They’d be shooting themselves in the foot. I suppose you could argue that they’re merely shooting themselves in the other foot, but this wouldn’t be an automatic improvement, anyway.
22/09/2011 at 14:00 Post-Internet Syndrome says:
Well that was very smart of them was it, to design the game that way.
22/09/2011 at 20:54 Wulf says:
Yep. Numerous people in this thread have gone out of their way to convince me that Blizzard has built a game which is broken by design, from the very foundations up, and that Blizzard don’t have a clue.
They’ve done this with such infallible logic that it would be impossible for anyone to disagree with them.
That’s the problem with Diablo III: It’s broken by design. It’s based on poor choices from the outset, and to fix the game they’d have to rebuild it from the ground up, with an entirely new design philosophy, because Diablo III is just that broken.
I’m convinced. Torchlight II it is, then.
Really, they’ve design a game where you can’t pause a single-player game, where you get forcibly logged out of a single-player game, and where, if you do decide to take part of the multi-player aspect then you can’t actually play with the people you want to play with.
Blizzard has designed a game in which I’m forced to play with complete strangers.
That’s so not broken by design, is it? I mean, really.
Good grief.
22/09/2011 at 21:30 Joof says:
“Blizzard has designed a game in which I’m forced to play with complete strangers.
That’s so not broken by design, is it? I mean, really.”
Are you so xenophobic that you can’t deal with playing with people you don’t know? That’s kind of sad.
23/09/2011 at 01:15 The Velour Fog says:
accidental reply
23/09/2011 at 02:28 malkav11 says:
My experience has been that Battle.net is one of the most toxic, unpleasant player communities I’ve ever encountered (you know how famously WoW general chat was full of assholes? Well, they were inherited from B.net.). So no, if that’s the pool I’m drawing from, I definitely would not want to play with random strangers. I wouldn’t really anyway, for a coop game, since the whole point for me is to play it with my friends.
23/09/2011 at 06:59 pkt-zer0 says:
“Numerous people in this thread have gone out of their way to convince me that Blizzard has built a game which is broken by design, from the very foundations up, and that Blizzard don’t have a clue.”
Yeah, of course. Only clueless people would think that having the game logic run on the server contributes anything to the game’s security.
So, what sort of architecture did you have in mind, then? That’s a serious question, by the way. It’s easy to say that adding LAN and offline would be simple, if you completely ignore its implications.
22/09/2011 at 13:50 CaLe says:
I never lose connection and never play games away from home.. doesn’t affect me at all really.
22/09/2011 at 13:56 Sian says:
That’s funny. You do realise, though, that “your” connection to Blizzard’s servers is going to run through various ISPs, likely taking kilometers upon kilometers to reach its destination, don’t you? There just needs to be some kind of failure in the wrong spot and you WILL be affected. And then there’s maintenance time. And then there’s the possibility that something goes wrong with the server.
It’s highly unlikely for somebody to never lose their connection to the internet, let alone a specific server.
22/09/2011 at 14:12 CaLe says:
I played WoW for about 2 years and only remember disconnecting maybe twice, the other downtime was maintenance, which is always expected anyway. I’m not saying because it doesn’t affect me it’s fine, and I do think they should implement single player only for those with bad connections. I’m just saying they will still get my money and most likely I’ll enjoy the game without any major issues, like I’ve done with every other always online game.
22/09/2011 at 20:58 Wulf says:
First world, middle- or upper-class. (I’d also guess straight, white, and male to boot.)
Got you pinned.
The thing is is that you can always tell a person like you because you’ve never actually had to deal with a single inconvenience, let alone a hardship. But that’s a discussion for another time. The point is this: In developing countries the economy might be developed enough to the point where people have pretty sweet computers, but the Internet infrastructure isn’t there yet.
So what happens is that people have very unstable Internet connections. What you’ve just said is that all of those people are completely irrelevant because your Internet never fails. You couldn’t give a damn about anyone else at all.
This is another example of something that falls into the ‘dirty foreigners’ mentality for me. That’s just what I read your post as. Anyone whom isn’t you isn’t important or worthy of any form of consideration and/or compassion. Way to go.
Do you work at Blizzard?
Maybe you should.
22/09/2011 at 21:20 psyk says:
First world, middle- or upper-class. (likes to think his working) has started using the sympathy card
22/09/2011 at 13:54 Vinraith says:
No sale here either. I enjoy a good ARPG, but between the cash shop, this nonsense, and a generally declining view of Blizzard in general I’ll find my fun elsewhere, thanks. Torchlight 2 and Grim Dawn should be more than sufficient to scratch any ARPG itch I may have, and look to be better games on some of the fundamentals anyway (character development, for example).
22/09/2011 at 14:10 Ultra Superior says:
I so agree.
Grim Dawn’s crate studios should really make an appearance here, release a video and they’d immediately get a solid hundreds of preorders. I love how Grim Dawn is looking btw.
Grim Dawn ftw.
22/09/2011 at 15:13 Khemm says:
I have high hopes for Grim Dawn too.
I’ll probably get Diablo 3 anyway, I love the series and hope Blizz won’t fook it up like they did Starcraft 2 – worst single player campaign they’ve ever made, Metzen can’t write good stories for sh!t anymore.
22/09/2011 at 13:56 Post-Internet Syndrome says:
My thought exactly. Just have a small tick box at character creation: “Offline character”. So simple.
SO SIMPLE.
22/09/2011 at 14:04 lunarplasma says:
Game architecture doesn’t support it at all. All the relevant assets are stored server-side, which is done to prevent duping/copying/cheating.
It’s sort of like driving a yacht down the M2.
That’s what they say, anyway.
22/09/2011 at 14:09 Gothnak says:
Exactly, it’s not about simplicity, it’s about stopping Piracy.
22/09/2011 at 14:20 Kdansky says:
It’s not about either.
22/09/2011 at 14:21 Unaco says:
I’m all for preventing Piracy. BUT… Not when the measures to prevent Piracy hurt legitimate purchasers. Like this.
22/09/2011 at 15:14 lunarplasma says:
@Unaco: I agree.
22/09/2011 at 15:29 Gothnak says:
That’s all well and good in a friendly world not populated by people who have grown up thinking that Piracy is fine… But we aren’t in that world… So like my comment below if as a publisher you need to prevent piracy because it costs you millions of $ or £ a year, how do you do it without pissing off your customers?
Blizzard have chosen to take the solution from WoW and make it a Multiplayer only online game that can be played single player if you like.
23/09/2011 at 02:33 malkav11 says:
How do you prevent piracy without pissing off your customers? You don’t. And given that, you don’t try. Piracy isn’t important. Customers are.
22/09/2011 at 13:59 anduz says:
I won’t affect me, I havn’t used my computer offline for almost 10 years. In fact I’ve gotten so used to being connected that I’ll usually turn it off and go do social stuff instead if the connection dies for whatever reason.
But I don’t care either way. They say it’ll limit cheating and perhaps it will, but the whole “always online” concept didn’t stop one of my friends from joining us in starcraft 2 even though he had a pirated version of the game. Maybe it was only possible because we did a few friendly co-op games against the AI but I have to admit that I was pretty surprised that it worked for him at all.
22/09/2011 at 14:01 Freud says:
Considering I only played Diablo II on battle.net with a crappy ISDN connection it won’t bother me. If the service goes down I’ll just play something else. It’s not like I ever was going to have an off-line character that I will start playing if the servers go down if I had the option to. I always viewed Diablo II and Diablo III as online multi player games.
That said, I do realize that it makes me a hypocrite when I complain about Ubisoft. Diablo III could probably be a single player game that some would enjoy playing off-line. And not providing it screws those people over.
But I still feel Diablo III is more of a semi-MMO than a single player game when you look at it as a whole and I never viewed it as anything else.
22/09/2011 at 14:02 lunarplasma says:
It’s a shame about all this DRM crap. The game itself sounds to be ludicrously good.
22/09/2011 at 14:02 Gothnak says:
In a world where PC piracy is pretty rampant, how would ‘YOU’ stop people playing your game for free?
I totally agree with the annoyance of not being able to play it on the move, and ‘no pause’ that just sounds stupid…
But when i’m at home with my decent internet connection, i don’t really care about being online.
You have to be online to play the game to stop people being able to play the game for free offline.
If that’s not the solution, what is?
22/09/2011 at 14:05 lunarplasma says:
I would make the game a freemium game.
22/09/2011 at 14:10 Sian says:
But it ISN’T the solution. Always-on games get cracked just like the rest of them.
22/09/2011 at 15:15 Khemm says:
@Sian
Really? How many of them and after how many years?
22/09/2011 at 15:58 karry says:
“Really? How many of them and after how many years?”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima_Online_shard_emulation
“Shard emulation for Ultima Online got its start during the beta-stage of the game’s development “
22/09/2011 at 14:06 Bluris says:
When I started playing Diablo II, I had the choice: singleplayer or multiplayer.
You may think I am trying to say that we had it in D2, so we should have it in D3. Not so. In D2 I started out playing a single player character, internet was scary so playing on your own seemed a good way to start. I had lots and lots of fun, and after playing though hell a few times I thought: hmm, maybe I should try online. And found that you had no way to play my beloved character in multiplayer games.
Yes, possibly they could make warnings, but that doesn’t change the fact that people are people, and they change their mind. Just because they started offline, doesn’t mean they will all want to stay offline. Sure, you can make a new character, but people put effort into their character, progressed it, got attached to it – it isn’t always easy to just leave your “first-born” behind.
No matter how many of you would say you are 100% sure that you’ll play offline only, there are 2, 5, 10 times more players who would want to take their character online after wards, and would have been told no because they didn’t understand the consequences. They’ll end up having a bad experience.
Then consider the RMAH, you hear someone had a drop of this amazing weapon and he sold it for 150-200 €/$. Then you end up having a similar drop or even better on your offline character and suddenly you feel you are robbed of money. Bitter experience.
Allowing offline play means that a lot of the game “server” needs to be in the client – I believe that Blizzard will have it easier to avoid cheating just because they now can keep some things on the servers, out of the hands of those who could cheat. And I don’t mean cheat in off line play, but cheat on online play. Sure, we’ll still have it, but it will be harder to do, and possibly easier for Blizzard to punish. Look at D2; cheat, hacks, dupes were seen often… and that often led to a horrible experience.
The maddening simple solution is flawed and sickeningly selfish. The majority of players would end up having a worse experience of the game, just because of some “I don’t want to be forced to be online, even if I am online all the time anyhow” ethics.
Yes, some people have poor connections, in this age it should not be a lot of people.
Yes, we’ll end up having some disconnections early on as they work on the server infrastructure. But Blizzard have already learned a lot from WoW and SC2, and is learning from the beta now. We should have a rather stable experience in from the beginning.
I know the most of replies I would get would be people calling me fanboi! or people trying to rationalize why their view is better. Oh, there is a vocal community here that is quite clear on what they think, and from reading these comments it would seem like the whole world must think the same. Wrong, the vocal population in the game community is a harshly critic minority who are unable to see beyond their own experience or opinion.
22/09/2011 at 14:15 Sian says:
“Yes, some people have poor connections, in this age it should not be a lot of people.
[...]
Wrong, the vocal population in the game community is a harshly critic minority who are unable to see beyond their own experience or opinion.”
Sorry, but here it’s you who isn’t seeing beyond your experience or opinion. Plenty of people have unstable or connections, or a limited data rate per month. We haven’t yet arrived in that glorified age where the internet is everpresent.
I also hope that you don’t intend to play with people outside of the arbitrary region Blizzard will put you in. Because you won’t be able to, and it won’t even be your decision to make.
22/09/2011 at 14:15 Fox89 says:
Right. And not being able to pause a single player game is all fine is it?
22/09/2011 at 14:16 Ultra Superior says:
That is the beauty of being vocal.
A harsh minority can deteriorate the company’s goodwill just fine.
Shame on you Kotick Blizzard.
22/09/2011 at 14:41 Kandon Arc says:
“Wrong, the vocal population in the game community is a harshly critic minority who are unable to see beyond their own experience or opinion.”
Says the person who thinks that people with a stable broadband connection are a majority rather than a tiny, tiny minority of the world’s population.
And your initial argument is crap too. If people want to make sure that they can use their character in multiplayer, but want to play by themselves to start, they can select online singleplayer. Some people would just like the option to play singleplayer without an internet connection. Is that really so selfish?
22/09/2011 at 14:45 Jolly Teaparty says:
This is the best argument in favour of the system I can recall, but there’s not enough pros there to outweigh the cons for me.
22/09/2011 at 15:06 pkt-zer0 says:
“Some people would just like the option to play singleplayer without an internet connection. Is that really so selfish?”
…If that means making the online multiplayer insecure for everyone else as a result? Yeah, possibly (depending on who are more numerous, the SP or MP guys).
22/09/2011 at 18:08 dysphemism says:
This is apologist nonsense. You could play D2 multiplayer with your single-player character, you just couldn’t do it over BNet. You see, LAN play and TCP/IP were supported, and your locally-stored character was welcome to use both of those technologies (which, as well all know, have been lost to the ravishes of time).
Besides which, protecting the user from him/herself is not a compelling justification for this approach. Blizz could just as easily allow you to create a local character but display a big warning in scary orange letters saying, “WARNING: CHARACTER WON’T WORK ONLINE AND WILL BE RIDICULED BEHIND ITS BACK”. Problem solved.
22/09/2011 at 21:04 Wulf says:
Wot I heard: “I’m making excuses for a game that’s obviously broken by design. My excuses are so flawed and transparent that I’m probably doing more to convince you that the game is inherently flawed than if I hadn’t said anything at all. So I’ll instead move onto how I’m a middle- or upper-class citizen in the first world, and that only us ‘better people’ deserve good games.”
Yeah. I’m not even going to dignify that with anything other than that.
22/09/2011 at 14:11 MadTinkerer says:
Dear Blizzard,
Until you make Diablo 3 at least as competent as Starcraft 2 at offline play, I will not buy Diablo 3. Starcraft 2 is adequate, because I played through most of the single player campaign when I was without internet for a few weeks.
This is not adequate.
Sincerely,
The Mad Tinkerer
22/09/2011 at 14:13 Fox89 says:
Blizzard also aren’t taking people like me into account. I’ve never played the previous Diablo games and seeing as they are so popular, I was planning on making Diablo III my first foray into the franchise. But I certainly shan’t be whilst this ridiculous DRM is in place.
22/09/2011 at 14:14 Disciple says:
While I can understand some people think this is an issue and I’ve nothing against Blizzard catering for those who desire for an Offline mode, I still think a majority of these comments are an over-reaction.
Yeah you may lose connection but considering Blizzard’s other 2 major titles are completely dependant on a connection (WoW being an MMO and SC2 being primarely about competative online gaming). Its not like the service is going be anything less than the best.
Ok you may lose connection for a second and find yourself needing to redo a part of that game but – This is Diablo – you will replay the same area 100Xs because that is the nature of the game and your items/progression is being constantly saved.
You could easily argue that your PC might crash, files corrupted, HDD needed to be formated etc etc where your local files are lost atleast with online play your character is constantly backed up.
For those crying out for a purely single player experience – fair enough if thats what you want, I feel like that some times too. But this game is designed about being Co-op, now like John said there are a lot of features implemented for Single Player but lets say you spend 50hrs making a character on offline and now you want that character in PVP or you want to Inferno run with mates to get the best item…well sorry you can’t you need to start again and your time was pointless. But with online play being 100% about item drops/progression either playing for PvM or PvP it is a needed from of anti-cheating – Same reason FPS progression is rarely done in single player modes.
Again I’m in no way against the idea of Offline mode, hell if it pleases some of you then thats awesome. But I think this ‘omg I’m not buying because I can’t pause’ and ‘well blizzard ruined it’ is sounding silly. Looking at they model for the last 6yrs this shouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone following Blizzard and steps against it should be more contrustive and not sounding like Blizzard Forum QQs.
22/09/2011 at 14:28 LordBilisknir says:
I disagree – SC2 is not primarily about competative online gaming. I would doubt if 5% of people who bought it have played a competative game online. I certainly haven’t – it doesn’t interest me in the slightest.
22/09/2011 at 14:28 Jolly Teaparty says:
You should see the rage on the WoW forums every maintenance day (if they still have them, haven’t played in a couple of years), and the fury generated by SC2 not having a LAN mode was pretty massive. Particularly when battle.net conked out during a tournament final, though the tone on the forum wasn’t so much total hatred as an acrid cynicism over battle.net.
Whilst Blizzard are capable of providing an acceptable standard of service to those who know what to expect, the people who’re angry about always having to be online are likely to have all their anger justified and be left feeling that Blizzard are not at all up to the task. They certainly won’t feel like the service is anything like the best. After all, they’re after a single player Diablo game, so having the always-online stuff interfere with their play just once is too much.
22/09/2011 at 20:45 Starky says:
@LordBil – wish I could find the source, but I remember an interview with a guy from Bliz saying that their stat tracking suggests that something like 50% of buyers played at least 1 online match (possibly in the practice league) and something like 10% play regularly (what regularly is I don’t recall if he specified).
22/09/2011 at 14:22 c-Row says:
I am so looking forward to their servers getting ddosed and the resulting backlash from those who can not start a single player game. Yes, I am a bad person.
22/09/2011 at 15:49 ankh says:
Bad person #2 reporting in. I cannot wait for this to happen.
22/09/2011 at 16:57 Shooop says:
Sometimes you need a disaster to wake people up.
I personally look forward to someone sneaking into EA and stealing everything Origin scans – which is everything on any computer it’s installed on.
22/09/2011 at 20:48 Starky says:
Blizzard have one of the largest most powerful server infrastructures of any company on the planet (topped by probably google and amazon and a few of the other massive tech companies) – every patch day for them is basically a 5 million computer strong DDOS attack.
No amount of angry nerds attacking them will even dint their servers.
22/09/2011 at 21:08 Wulf says:
@Starky
Oh my. You’d be so wrong about that. I’m sorry.
See, it depends on the sort of attack used. It’s easy to assume that it would be a simple DDoS, but there are people out there whom are far, far more clever than that. And there’s actual money in this. They could do damage, profit from it, and then scapegoat the aforementioned angry nerds.
See: Sony.
22/09/2011 at 22:02 Starky says:
Erm no I wasn’t wrong, I was responding to the OPs wish to see them DDOSed. Which I believe is all my post addresses.
Hacking into accounts, stealing secure information, and other such illegal activity is a WHOLE different issue to DDOSing.
Angry nerds can’t download a program that hacks blizzard secure servers for login and password information (like they can to launch a DDOS) – it takes malicious intent in from computer security savvy nerds, time, luck and patience.
Something most frothing videogame nerds lack.
22/09/2011 at 22:07 TillEulenspiegel says:
You don’t understand how this whole DDoS thing works, do you? Five million zombies could take out just about anyone. Maybe not the largest CDNs. A few hundred will take out any single target.
God help them if there’s the slightest flaw, the smallest resource leakage in their login code.
22/09/2011 at 22:32 Starky says:
I have a pretty reasonable grasp (not an expert granted) but most dumb nerd DDOS attacks using distributed utilities generally just spam server with junk packets. In order to max out a servers CPU/bandwidth resource.
Again Blizzard run on some fairly beefy server farms, with massive bandwidth – and can survive millions of people gaming at the same time – massive DDOS to take those down, and chances are it wouldn’t happen fast or synchronized enough (not fast enough for Blizzard to have the attacking IP’s filtered at the ISP level).
A DDOS might take down one of blizzards less critical systems (such as the website, or forums) – a really organized effort might take down the login servers (which would be the likely target and would do some harm), but I doubt even that would/could happen, and if it did it wouldn’t last very long before Blizzard sorted it.
23/09/2011 at 07:26 c-Row says:
That sounds like a challenge they will be willing to accept.
22/09/2011 at 14:24 jti says:
Still haven’t bought Settlers VII because of the DRM and certainly won’t buy this as long as this madness is on it. And yes, I would’ve had played it in single player mode and am not interested in playing it in co-op or any other multiplayer form.
22/09/2011 at 14:26 LordBilisknir says:
I totally agree that requiring an always on internet connection for what is, at the core, a single player game is ridiculous. I personally won’t be affected – I haven’t got a laptop that will play this and I rarely game away from home anyway plus my net connection is generally pretty good. I may or may not buy the game, but the more crap they pull the less likely I am to buy.
I disagree with some of the reasoning. I used to “cheat” a character to play Diablo II in co-op with a mate of mine, he would play with his normal toon and I would hack a toon to be the same level as him with appropriate items etc. That way we could play together without us having to have toons that were only used for co-op (something I now have to do for Borderlands – 5 toons, 2 single player, 3 for playing with all combinations of 2 other people) So the “cheating” actually made the game more fun.
My worries are twofold.
Firstly, are they going to fiddle drop rates in single player so I have to use the RMAH/AH. i.e. Will certain items never drop in my game that will in other’s games (something I would definitely consider if I were the evil bastard running this), I’m playing a Wizard so game drops cool set/gold/unique Witch Doctor kit I can’t use but not Wizard kit I can use. Even if that isn’t the case, the idea of going to an auction house to get items kinda ruins some of the fun of Diablo in my opinion. I rather enjoyed some of the faffing that went with deciding which dropped set items I should keep hoping to make the set and which I’d dump.
Secondly, if I do play online what’s to stop the players with me having spent $$$ to make him/herself uber powerful with all the shiny kit? It’s one thing to allow real money to make progress faster (like premium accounts in World of Tanks) or, up to a point allow you to replace time with money (like buying isk with PLEX in EVE), it is another completely to have game breaking RM transactions (like premium ammo in World of Tanks). I worry that the RM auction house will have stuff in it that is potentially game breakign.
22/09/2011 at 15:04 Milky1985 says:
“Firstly, are they going to fiddle drop rates in single player so I have to use the RMAH/AH.”
They have SAID that its completly random drops, but we only have there word on that.
I mean casino owners say there stuff is all fair and random as well.
23/09/2011 at 02:46 malkav11 says:
Casino games really are random (the degree of randomness depending on the game). They’re just designed such that the odds over time favor the casino slightly, so in aggregate they will consistently make money.
22/09/2011 at 14:26 stillwater says:
I’m willing to bet that, like almost all DRM, this won’t actually affect me in any significant way at all, apart from having to listen to people with nothing better to do whine about how it’s the worst thing since the Holocaust.
22/09/2011 at 15:08 bsplines says:
Maybe, but that does affect anyone else who wants to play off line and is not interested in playing an MMO
22/09/2011 at 21:11 Wulf says:
Oh, it must be so hard for you to listen to all those people whom aren’t as well off complaining about a lack of fairness.
You know, this is… this is really making huge dents in my faith in humanity again. It really is. MASSIVE ones, holes even. Holes you could drive starships through. I’m genuinely depressed by this.
22/09/2011 at 22:56 DigitalSignalX says:
Damn Wulf, that’s like the 6th time you have played the class card and we’re barely past the half way point of the comments. Give it a rest? If you own a PC, pay for an internet connection, and buy a title from Blizzard at $40+ and have the time to play it – you are not a repressed 3rd world troglodyte with 2 jobs who also has to wait in line for bread to feed their 4 children and Blizzard is not a jackbooted regime.
22/09/2011 at 14:29 Martin says:
All of the claimed annoyances can be avoided at very little effort from the player. You are spoiled John, and longing for a time long gone.
22/09/2011 at 14:35 Unaco says:
Please, do tell us how the player can avoid all of the annoyances with very little effort? How can the player pause for a minute or two to answer the phone or the door? How can someone play the game if their internet connection is being a little funny, or they’re staying in a hotel and the wireless access point is 3 floors below them and their connection to it keeps crapping out?
22/09/2011 at 14:38 reticulate says:
‘A time long gone’?
You mean like how the other day I could pause Deus Ex HR when I got a phone call?
22/09/2011 at 16:54 Sarkhan Lol says:
“You are spoiled,” says the guy who thinks a 24 hour 7 day a week unbroken internet connection is as much a given as running water and looks down his nose at people who don’t.
22/09/2011 at 21:14 Wulf says:
Oh my. Pot, kettle black…
Another hole. Wow. You people are actually managing to depress me. You really are. I’m not joking about this, I’m realising how many people there are out there like you and it’s depressing.
So people in less developed areas of the world need to just ‘try harder?’
I’m sorry. I can’t like you. We can never be friends. I can never like anyone who has views like that.
22/09/2011 at 14:35 pupsikaso says:
The whole game has had a very questionable direction since the very beginning. First the cartoony look and colours, then the focus on loot horeing, then some kind of pvp arena or something, then real-money auction houses, and now no singleplayer.
Are there actually people that are gonna buy this?
22/09/2011 at 14:35 reticulate says:
Surely you’ll be able to pause the single player in the finished version. Surely. Right?
I mean, we can argue all day that “most people have decent internet” or “it’ll let you drop in and drop out of multiplayer with one character”, but I’d love to see someone justify not being able to pause a single player game because of the DRM.
22/09/2011 at 21:18 Wulf says:
Us: We can’t pause Diablo III. Diablo III is broken by design.
Blizz Hive: But the assets are server side. That is why you cannot pause the game.
Us: If you joined a multiplayer game of Neverwinter Nights (or 2), you could actually still pause the game. So if anyone needed to leave to grab a drink or see to their newborn, they could pause and inform their friends that they’d be right back. That was in multiplayer.
Blizz Hive: Yeah? …well, you’re stupid! You’re living in the past! You don’t deserve good games!
Sigh.
22/09/2011 at 14:38 Hoaxfish says:
Ignoring the actual machine you’re playing on, this game (since the DRM dictates 100% access) depends on:
1. stable modem/router hardware
2. stable cabling to your ISP
3. stable ISP hardware
4. stable Blizzard* servers
5. Blizzard* not taking servers offline for maintenance
6. Blizzard* not closing the servers
*. In the case of other companies, like EA, these may be more likely to cause problems (didn’t one of them shut some servers a year after the game was released). Diablo 2 battlenet is still around as far as I understand it.
From what I’ve heard, there is “rejoin” if your connection only drops for a few seconds. Though I haven’t seen anything concrete.
What I didn’t expect was stuff like being booted from a “single player” game for idling too long. That’s way beyond basic user authentication.
Also… Diablo 3 has waypoints? Can’t you quicksave?
After watching some streams of the beta, I can’t really say it’s particularly attractive as a game, even with the additional barriers
22/09/2011 at 14:42 undead dolphin hacker says:
What’s hilarious is how few of these “boycotts” will hold up. I’ll happily bet that the most vocal detractors will also be the very first in line to log in.
Also, Torchlight and Grim whatever look a bit rubbish, as you gents say.
22/09/2011 at 18:34 dogsolitude_uk says:
I don’t think I’ve ever weakened on a boycott of anything. What evidence do you have that those who say they’ll boycott something eventually go out and buy it?
22/09/2011 at 18:56 Zepp says:
Life is a fucking evidence! Look around yourself, it’s everywhere! ;)
22/09/2011 at 21:20 Wulf says:
Yes, I’m going to play a game which I’d have to play with complete strangers, at the expense of my friends. I’m one of those rare people who values their friends and family more than their gaming.
So, despite this not being a game we can all play together, I’m going to buy it?
You’re a clever one, aren’t you? Yes you are.
Sigh.
22/09/2011 at 14:44 Matt says:
I don’t think Blizzard see this as a single-player experience anymore – i think they see it as an always-on mulitplayer one that a big chunk of their playerbase will play once, on their own. The money will be in retention and for that they need to pull people online. or in this case, force them online whether they want to be there or not.
Is it “anti-player”? Sure it is, especially if you want to just play on our own, or your habits don’t match what they’re presenting to you. I hope they do something about it, too. But as many people have pointed out; an offline mode means releaseing all the server code out client side and I’ll bet they simply aren’t prepared to.
This’ll sell buckets anyway; Blizzard has always been a company that has it’s own, slightly removed community, which already play their “always on” WoW and SC2….
22/09/2011 at 15:02 Durkonkell says:
WoW is an MMORPG without a singleplayer component. SC2 has an offline mode.
22/09/2011 at 15:06 Matt says:
yes i know – but SC2 was heavily linked to Battlenet (right down to the needing to login just to see the menus) and it heavily implied that playing it offline was “doing it wrong”. But it was clearly a big step in the direction of what they are doing here, and if their SC” metrics indicate a high enough percentage of players just stayed logged in all the time, then they may not see any harm if going all the way with D3.
22/09/2011 at 14:44 Adekan says:
While I will still buy this on day one, Thank you for providing a well thought out and first hand experience argument. It’s rare to actually see one, it is mostly just people screaming bloody murder about how they’ll NEVER buy this game because of the HORRIBLE EVIL of ActiBlizzard for requiring you to be online.
As for your map resetting, D2 always did that online as the map is re-generated every time you log out of a game. Offline was the only mode where this didn’t happen, unless you took your character into an open b.net game.
22/09/2011 at 14:46 Foosnark says:
One of the things that kept me playing Diablo II for years and years and years and years was the mod scene and so-called “cheats” like Jamella’s (though I suppose that’s not as necessary with a shared character vault, which is what I used it for). Phrozen Keep was a must-have as far as I was concerned, after a while.
Sounds like that isn’t going to be happening with this setup. Still, I won’t pretend I’m not going to buy this… unless of course one of my friends at Blizzard slips me a complimentary copy. :)
22/09/2011 at 14:47 Bull0 says:
COMMENT STORRRRRM
22/09/2011 at 21:22 Wulf says:
You might even say it’s a comment blizzard.
22/09/2011 at 14:50 Njordsk says:
You made my choice easy blizzard thank you. I was wondering how I could free some time for D3 while playing BF3.
Now I know I will simply not buy it. Thanks
22/09/2011 at 14:53 ChromeBallz says:
I was going to buy it. I was willing to look past the always-on. But now they’ve ruined it with the no-pause thing and kicking you out of a singleplayer game for idling. That’s utterly ridiculous.
The last straw was that my ISP crapped out yesterday. There, i can’t play a singleplayer game anymore.
Always-on has so many possible flaws. Your network cables. Your router. Your ISP. Blizzard’s ISP (Telia is awful at times with WoW). Blizzard’s oiwn hardware. Maintenance on the servers or the ISP’s.
For an actual MMO, i can forgive these things. I knew that before i got into them. But singleplayer games? No thanks. Singleplayer games are what i turn to when the internet doesn’t allow me to play multiplayer. It’s utterly ridiculous that i can’t play anything at all as soon as anything along my connection craps up – Or people start ddos’ing the servers.
Never thought i’d actually skip on this game. They had it down perfectly with Starcraft 2 – Singleplayer allowed while offline, just no achievements. Mods allowed, even online, just not in ranked matches. What’s wrong with that?
22/09/2011 at 14:57 studenteternal says:
hear hear.
My experience in the early Beta, play for about an hour, not honestly long enough to form a full opinion of the game, get booted out of my single player game because there was a hiccup somewhere between my computer in Austin and the Server in Irvine, not care enough to re-launch the program and mess with trying to sign back in to battle.net
22/09/2011 at 15:02 CaLe says:
At least you got into the beta T-T
22/09/2011 at 14:57 freeid says:
Stop the presses; you have to be online to play this online game!!!! Next you will be telling me I have to be online to play Guild wars 2 or browse the internet!!
Fascist!
22/09/2011 at 15:48 Shooop says:
You didn’t read anything other than the headline did you?
Idiot.
22/09/2011 at 16:37 Unaco says:
No freeid, that is not why people are complaining. People are complaining because you have to be online to play the SINGLEPLAYER component of the game. There isn’t an OPTION to create and play with a character that would be singleplayer, not online, no legit stats, no auction house, if you desire.
A better analogy would be “Oh noes, I have to be online to use this word processor”.
22/09/2011 at 16:41 freeid says:
@shoop
Read the entire thing, load of bollocks.
Prick
@Unaco
No they are complaining about a single player that does not exist in this game, there is not even an option for “single player” in Game, its “Invite only, Friends, or open”
not sure why people cant seem to get that.
22/09/2011 at 16:57 Unaco says:
If there’s no singleplayer in Diablo 3, then Blizzard should remove it from their FAQ… http://eu.blizzard.com/diablo3/faq/#1_9
They should stop mentioning it in press releases and marketing material. All reviews of the game should make mention that there is NO SINGLEPLAYER IN DIABLO 3. Blizzard should pay up if they get sued for false advertising if they don’t remove every reference to SINGLEPLAYER from all Diablo 3 material.
22/09/2011 at 17:26 freeid says:
Maybe they should, or at least make it clear single player is actually “invite only” withought you actually inviting anyone.
22/09/2011 at 20:03 Shooop says:
Obviously you haven’t.
Because if you had in fact read the article you’d have realized this is problematic to the single-player mode. Which is included in the game. On the game disk. Which comes off the disk and appears on your computer when you install it. Not an extra you can download later, but something Blizzard itself took the time to develop and therefore you were supposed to be able to play.
Therefore if it has a single-player mode you should be able to play it as a proper single player mode. I’m terribly sorry logic is such an alien and horrifying concept to your poor, poor brain.
Idiot.
22/09/2011 at 23:08 DigitalSignalX says:
@Unaco – I read through that FAQ you linked, and do not see ‘single player’ mentioned ever, can you point it out? Also their press release site
http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/press/pressreleases.html?id=3542798
also do not mention single player that I can see. They mention “the player can” and “players will” quite often, is that causing confusion perhaps?
23/09/2011 at 02:50 malkav11 says:
“and go head-to-skull against the Skeleton King, taking him on alone” (continuing to say “or playing cooperatively with other adventurers”). Five seconds of reading. Alone = singleplayer.
22/09/2011 at 14:59 Mac says:
Storm in a teacup .. Diablo 2 was effectively the same. The only difference there was that if you chose to play offline then you couldn’t use your characters online … I doubt that many used this option as Diablo series is predominantly about the MP element, so it got dropped.
Also, Diablo was never about getting to the next checkpoint, its always been about grinding and beating the next boss. The fact you get dropped back to the last checkpoint isnt a biggie as you get to grind through those mobs again – that’s the game!
22/09/2011 at 15:04 iucounu says:
Yeah, well: all I want this time is the same option!
I don’t want Diablo 3 to be a MMORPG because I don’t like MMORPGs. Give me the option to play it solo offline, like I did with the first two games.
22/09/2011 at 15:08 CaLe says:
I didn’t have a PC when Diablo 2 came out but have a general idea of how it worked. Why was it considered a MP game? Do you need to play it in MP to beat the highest difficulty and get the best loot? I hope that’s not the case with Diablo 3.. I’m a bit of a loner.
22/09/2011 at 15:22 Khemm says:
Diablo 2 could be played in an entirely internet-free environment. Such a simple, beautiful thing that Valve ruined the moment they introduced forced Steam activation. Yes, I blame THEM for starting this crap.
22/09/2011 at 15:24 feda says:
What? Are you living in the same universe, kiddo? Diablo has never been about multiplayer and 90% of D2 players played it in SP mode.
22/09/2011 at 16:39 Unaco says:
“Storm in a teacup .. Diablo 2 was effectively the same. The only difference there was that if you chose to play offline then you couldn’t use your characters online”
And this is why people are complaining. Because they have removed this option. Lots of people would want to play offline, and would be happy with not using that character online.
22/09/2011 at 18:16 dysphemism says:
I’m going to reiterate what I said in another thread: Yes, you could play multiplayer with a single-player character. You could play LAN or TCP/IP, which I and many others did do. You just couldn’t mix ‘n match local saves with BNet saves. That was fine. It would still be fine today.
22/09/2011 at 23:26 ChromeBallz says:
That is a big assumption.
I would bet that in reality, at least 90% of the people who bought Diablo 2 played singleplayer more than multiplayer. Sadly we cannot check this since those stats werent tracked at the time, only online was. Still, you could check the number of keys sold and the number of keys that were registered online, and the number of keys that spent more than ~5 hours online. I would bet you that that number is very small.
Even UT2004, a game that was pretty much based around online play – Epic revealed that over half the keys never even went online in the first place, and that was late 2004. A game with a “proper” SP mode like Diablo 2 that was released 4 years earlier when broadband saturation was… almost non-existant, i cannot imagine that “most people only played online anyway”, especially in the US where people were stuck on 56k (at best) in 90% of the country.
22/09/2011 at 15:02 Khemm says:
I appreciate that RPS writes about the implications of always-online DRMs, I really do. Someone has to come up with a protection method that allows offline play, but somewhat remains uncrackable. Is that even possible? I don’t know, honestly, but no SP game should require you to ask anyone for permission to play.
With that said, why is it always Ubisoft getting the treatment and now Blizzard, but when a Steamworks game – Dead Island – gets released and cannot be played in offline mode, suddenly that wasn’t a story worth anyone’s attention?
Maybe it’s me not loving Valve like some people here, but it reeks of double standards to me.
22/09/2011 at 15:30 Kaira- says:
Wait, you need to be online to play Dead Island? Really? What a shitty fuck, lucky I haven’t bought it yet.
22/09/2011 at 15:31 Kaira- says:
Edit: glorious double posting
22/09/2011 at 15:50 TheMoo says:
Pretty sure Dead Island has a “Single Player” option under the online visibility thing when you start a new game, and if not a new game then in the options menu.
EDIT: Well I was dead wrong there, my bad.
22/09/2011 at 15:57 Kaira- says:
Quick googling would reveal that you can’t play Dead Island with Steam in offline-mode.
22/09/2011 at 15:58 ankh says:
I blame Valve for this whole thing too. I also hate them. You are not alone!
22/09/2011 at 16:08 Ace McAwesome says:
You cannot, in fact, play Dead Island without Steam connected to the Internet. I found this out yesterday when I was playing Dead Island and Steam went down for maintenance and it _kicked me out of the game_. The best part? I was playing a single-player mode.
What did I learn from this? That Internet requirements on games that can ostensibly be played single player as a viable option is a heinously bad idea. If we’re going to say that a particular game is “always on” because it’s a game meant to be played in multiplayer, than force the damn multiplayer on people. Don’t give them a single-player option at all. Giving the option leads to us wanting the option to not suck, which is fair. If it’s single player, it should be goddamn single player.
22/09/2011 at 20:06 Shooop says:
Damn. I was considering buying it on sale.
22/09/2011 at 20:35 Absolute Zero says:
@TheMoo:
You might be able to play DI as Single Player, but the game still notifies you when other players that you can connect to are nearby. Because of that, and while I was browsing my inventory no less, I accidentally connected to another player’s game and lost a good chunk of progress. :(
22/09/2011 at 15:03 Prolepsis says:
Thank you for pointing these things out. While I’m not overly comfortable with the always online stuff (if finances ever get so bad that I must drop having internet, then I’m robbed of playing something I could previously afford because I can no longer afford a totally different service), if a game is great enough, I will overlook it. What I cannot overlook is the MMO vibe for pausing, etc. Yup, Torchlight 2 and Grim Dawn it is!
22/09/2011 at 15:04 MrMud says:
I will play hardcore.
In hardcore mode if you die your character is gone forever.
Despite this I am very happy about the always online requirement despite the risk of loosing my character to an internet outage.
Why is this you ask?
As briefly mentioned in the article the DRM will reduce cheating, something that utterly destroyed both Diablo 1 and Diablo 2 multiplayer. Having a cheat free environment overshadows any other consideration.
22/09/2011 at 15:20 feda says:
That does not in any way justify punishing innocent solo players.
Having a cheat free environment is not more important than respecting honest customers.
22/09/2011 at 15:52 Bhazor says:
“By their own admission, Diablo isn’t not really focused around a PVP experience; if you’re playing with someone who has duped items or whatever, all it means is that you will be more likely to defeat Satan. Without a means to gain advantage over another, “cheating” as a concept becomes substantially more opaque. Who is the cheated party, precisely? Satan the Devil? Fuck him, who cares.”
http://www.penny-arcade.com/2011/8/8/
How does cheating ruin a co-op game? You don’t like cheaters? Fine. Play co-op with friends who don’t cheat.
22/09/2011 at 15:54 MrMud says:
Because it ruins the economy, and Diablo is about the economy and loot as much as anything else.
22/09/2011 at 16:02 Bhazor says:
It really wasn’t. The only reason the economy is important now is because of this ridiculous “feature”.
Seriously, fuck satan get epic loot.
22/09/2011 at 16:33 MrMud says:
Guess we play the game differently, for myself I didnt like getting TKed in town by hackers, maybe you did.
22/09/2011 at 17:09 Bhazor says:
Well I’m glad you liked the spam bots and gold miners. Because that is going to be a hundred times worse now that the IRL shop is being treated as a core part of the game rather than the reserve of the biggest, dumbest nerds.
Seriously. The game is co-op based not competitive, cheating was never an issue.
“Who is being cheated? This is the part of the movie where, in a series of retrospective realizations cut with you looking at your own face in the rearview mirror, you come bit by bit to the heart of it. The person you are cheating is Blizzard, Blizzard in the aggregate, with your attempts to interfere with their digital marketplace. You mustn’t play offline or goof around with your files or any other naughty business because they are endeavoring to transform your putative ownership into a revenue stream.”
22/09/2011 at 18:48 Deltadisco says:
Nobody likes being TK’ed by hackers. Which is why the rest of us figured out that private/password protected games were the way to go. A simple solution that has nothing to do with handicapping single player/offline play.
Playing with random people on the internet == playing the asshole lottery. This remains true even in games with less hacking.
22/09/2011 at 18:54 Zepp says:
@feda “That does not in any way justify punishing innocent solo players.”
There is no such thing as innocence, only degrees of guilt.
23/09/2011 at 02:57 malkav11 says:
Solution to cheating in cooperative multiplayer: play with people who aren’t dicks.
Solution to playing singleplayer offline when no offline mode exists: ???
22/09/2011 at 15:08 Rao Dao Zao says:
Let’s all play Nox instead.
22/09/2011 at 15:19 Khemm says:
Diablo 1 FTW.
But I’ve never played Nox, so I’m biased or uninformed. Is it that good?
22/09/2011 at 15:24 Rao Dao Zao says:
I’ve never played any Diablo games, but word on the street is it’s like Diablo II. But either way, yes, it is excellent.
22/09/2011 at 16:03 Khemm says:
Really? Huh. Will definitely have to get it, then. It’s on gog.com and pretty cheap, so why not?
22/09/2011 at 15:17 cjlr says:
Region locked pay to win.
I LOVE THE FUTURE.
23/09/2011 at 01:36 Azradesh says:
It really isn’t pay to win. Sigh. Region locking is beyond pointless and stupid though.
22/09/2011 at 15:18 lunarplasma says:
I think all those who find this always-on DRM thing annoying should make their feelings known, as much as possible. Blizzard might actually listen and make some sort of concession.
Failing that, we should just sigh and accept that this isn’t Diablo-3-the-sequel-to-Diablo-2, but Diablo-3-the-MMO.
22/09/2011 at 15:19 nihlus says:
Prevent piracy ?
There is already made a server emulator for d3, sup blizz?
22/09/2011 at 15:20 Gunuku says:
Still going to buy and love this game because I view it as a pseudo MMORPG which is exactly how Blizzard thinks of it. You can play World of WarCraft by yourself from start to max level too but it’s definitely not a single player game. For better or worse, Diablo 3 has become that.
22/09/2011 at 15:20 lunarplasma says:
Blizzard: Call it an MMO already!
22/09/2011 at 15:23 whodatninja says:
Mmmm I can’t wait for Diablo 3!! Honestly these things aren’t that big of a deal for me. Someone knocks on the door? I town portal to safety. I got logged out from being away for hours? Who cares, I’m going to reclear zones dozens of times for leveling/item hunting. Always online ?!?!!?! That’s fine I was going to play on Battle.net with my friends anyways. I know not everyone feels this way, and I’m not opposing your feelings, but I’m just here to say not everyone feels the sky is falling.
22/09/2011 at 16:43 Joshua says:
But they removed hte bloody PAUSE button…
22/09/2011 at 23:03 Kleppy says:
You are absolutely correct. Most people can manage to deal with these extremely small annoyances in order to enjoy a game which, lets face it, is going to be in an entirely different league compared to it’s competition.
Also, people who are complaining about not having stable internet connections: that’s too bad, but:
A. I’m sure a patch or fix to allow you to play without being online will be forthcoming
B. Blizzard has somewhere in the vicinity of 12 million subscribers for WoW. Online only gaming works, that’s a fact and theres no going around that. I’m sure Blizzard is willing to lose a couple thousand of consumers, for the price of having a very secure, relatively cheat-free experiences for those of us who do have a stable connection. Really, I feel your pain, and I hope a solution will be made avaliable, but even if it won’t, well then I guess Torchlight is a Diablo 3-lite for ya folks.
22/09/2011 at 15:28 Syra says:
Lets face it the super fast rate this is getting comments says it all.
We are all enamoured with diablo and deeply hurt that we can’t have it singleplayer properly.
Blizzard won’t change it. Buy it or don’t; its up to you. I will.
22/09/2011 at 23:26 DigitalSignalX says:
^ ^ This.
22/09/2011 at 15:32 hello_mr.Trout says:
what i think is kinda insidious about this whole thing is the gradual and insidious shift towards “single-player” games being about ways to further exploit the customer for more money – if these kinda practises get fully entrenched, in another 5 – 10 years, DRM & always-online will become industry standard for all big games!
22/09/2011 at 16:28 Ace McAwesome says:
Yes. It’s sort of terrifying but it’s true. This is the direction the gaming industry is heading: microtransactions, always-on internet, no true single player.
22/09/2011 at 15:32 kud13 says:
i’ve been an ardent Blizzard fan ever since I was first introduced to Warcraft II, back in ’98.
I’ve also been a single-player gamer all my life.
Once i’ve moved to Canada, and was introduced to the Internet, I became a rabid pirate throughout my teenage years.
Of the many games I played back then, there was only one game I legitimately owned–it was the Star Craft Battle Chest. I never played a single MP game.
I’ve purchased Wings of Liberty on Day 1. I played through the single player.
Then I went to law school, and I’ve had no time for the game for over 3 months.
When I wanted to pick it up again in November later that year, I was told that I can longer play offline.
I was eagerly awaiting Diablo III. I was genuinely excited about the game, ever since i’ve heard that they had one of the guys from Troika (Leonid Boyarsky) working on the story–teh same guy who worked on the story for Vampire: the Masquerade: Bloodlines, which is one of my all-time favourite games.
All this time, i’ve never envisioned myself playing Diablo any other way than single-player.
Now, blizzard makes that impossible.
So long, Blizz, it’s been fun while it lasted.
22/09/2011 at 18:26 Alphabet says:
I presume you stopped pirating once you decided to pursue the law as a vocation?
23/09/2011 at 01:38 Azradesh says:
You can play offline with Starcraft 2, but you have to connect at least once every 30 days.
22/09/2011 at 15:33 Jake says:
What I don’t understand about this is that Blizzard had the option for a totally off line character in D2…why have they changed that in D3? Makes no sense.
22/09/2011 at 23:05 Zenicetus says:
I’m guessing it’s all about the auction house, and encouraging people to use it. There’s no way they’re going to block anyone from accessing that additional income stream for Blizzard.
I still don’t see why there should be a problem allowing a Pause key for singleplayer, even if you have to stay online all the time for auction house item compatibility. That just seems stupid. WoW didn’t have a pause, but there were usually plenty of safe areas to go AFK for a while, and it didn’t remove any of your loot if you were booted from the server. Mobs would regenerate, but there were no “checkpoints” as such.
22/09/2011 at 15:33 scum says:
I, on the other hand, am quite fond of pirating video games and playing them for free, and I will be playing Diablo 3 without paying for it.
Keep up the good work, Blizzard!
22/09/2011 at 15:38 bonjovi says:
I think it’s a great feature and definitely a move forward. However blizzard should encourage players to use it, not force it.
22/09/2011 at 15:41 Dominic White says:
A question: If all the game logic (right down to player projectiles) is handled server-side, then why are there checkpoints at all? If you log out, the server knows exactly where you were and in what state, so why can’t you just resume the game there and then? Wouldn’t that at least be a cursory attempt to use the MMO-esque framework they’re pushing to help players, rather than hinder?
Of course it would. Which is why they’re not doing it, because none of this is in the customers best interest.
22/09/2011 at 20:19 Joof says:
Because I’m guessing it’s working exactly like Diablo 2 did, with randomly generated maps?
22/09/2011 at 21:25 Wulf says:
@Joof
Yes, but the randomisation would be handled server side, the AI pathing would be setup server side, and the map info would also be held server side. So none of what you’ve said actually matters.
Going by Dominic’s infallible logic (no irony there, the man knows what he’s talking about), you should be able to pause it too, despite being online. Just as you can with Neverwinter Nights (and 2).
That you can’t pause it or quicksave is just down to the game being broken by design. Typical NuBlizz.
22/09/2011 at 21:36 Joof says:
How would it save your location in the world if everytime you join the server, you get a new, randomized world? Saving your characters position and placing you there when you enter a server, and randomizing the world every time you join a new server aren’t programmatically compatible.
22/09/2011 at 15:45 archimandrite says:
For the most part, this is how Battle.net play worked in Diablo 1 and Diablo 2. No pausing. No map-saving. And in Diablo 2, no offline mode for Battle.net characters. There were town portals though, which allowed you to pause the game if you needed to. Did those get removed? I know Blizzard was talking about removing them at one point.
The big difference is that there’s no offline mode. For me, that’s not a concern, because I played the first 2 games online. I can see it being a deal-breaker for others, though.
22/09/2011 at 20:20 Joof says:
I believe they were replaced with a Hearth Stone type of thing for going back to town, where you have a couple second cast and getting hit by a monster resets the cast.
22/09/2011 at 15:53 MrMud says:
“Blizzard must address this.”
No they dont, the game will sell gangbusters anway.
For all your attempts to state the other, this IS a multiplayer game that you also happen to be able to play solo.
You claim it is designed as a singleplayer game but that is just blatantly not true. In fact the singleplayer companions have been explicitly stated by blizzard to be something to get you familiar with playing the game together with someone else (even if that someone is an AI).
22/09/2011 at 17:40 CaLe says:
I will bet you Earth Dollars that most people who buy this game will experience it as a singleplayer game, not a multiplayer one.
22/09/2011 at 18:47 vodkarn says:
“No they dont, the game will sell gangbusters anway.”
They thought that about Starcraft 2, and, well…
22/09/2011 at 20:24 Joof says:
Starcraft 2 sold 4.5 million as of February this year. That’s about as many copies sold as the original Halo, and it’s had another 7 months to sell.
22/09/2011 at 20:58 Starky says:
And SC2 has 2 expansions on the way that will no doubt also sell upwards of 3 million each.
SC2 was a fairly massive success for a single platform title – and is still selling MASSIVELY in many countries (China and Taiwan spring to mind the SC2 scene is exploding there).
22/09/2011 at 22:31 The_Great_Skratsby says:
Right, despite the singleplayer focus being specifically pointed out in the article?
No I’m right thanks Blizzard, I don’t dungeon crawl with friends often, and have no intention to play solo with an online leash around the experience the game intends to deliver for solo play.
22/09/2011 at 15:55 TheMoo says:
I keep seeing all these comments about how Diablo 1 and 2 were primarily online games, and that just confuses the hell out of me. Who are all these mainly online people, did they play the same game?
Everyone I know (including myself) played them as single player only, with MP being a cute little feature that we mostly ignored. Why would I want people intruding on my gaming experience, on a game that was obviously designed for single player?
This online only thing is really a load of BS, now I wasn’t planning on buying the game anyway ($60 is too rich for my blood, not when I can get quality games for $20) but this really cements it.
22/09/2011 at 21:02 Starky says:
Does it matter what D1 and D2 were though? Blizzard have decided that D3 will NOT be a single player game and will be online co-op only.
I can understand some anger about that, but It’s getting a bit bloody overboard, I know this is the internet and nerds like angry hyperbole but shit…
It’s not designed for single player (half the game runs server side) will never support single player – and if people want a single player game, that is fine, they don’t need to buy D3.
People are getting angry because D3 isn’t what they think it should be, or what they want it to be – but blizzard have the right to make the game they want – just as gamers have the right to choose not to buy it.
22/09/2011 at 21:31 Wulf says:
So what about the region lock outs?
22/09/2011 at 21:42 Starky says:
As explained in another post in this thread (go find it if you wish) region lockouts are nothing of the sort. It isn’t some evil plan to con people out of more money, no matter how much you’d wish it to be in your frothing anti-blizzard raving.
It is a technical limitation caused by the fact Blizzards massive server infrastructure was designed to run WoW, and isn’t actually capable of cross region play. Having just one virtualized instance in a cloud, communicate with another virtualized instance in a cloud on another continent when the system wasn’t designed from the ground up for it isn’t fucking easy you know.
Now imagine that becoming MILLIONS of virtualized instances, it would massively (if by several factors) increase both bandwidth and CPU usage on Blizz servers.
Blizzard decided to use that massive server network to run SC2 and D3 because it makes more sense to have all their games under one architecture, and it has massive advantages (really powerful parallel instance running – games of SC2 or diablo are basically the same as WoW instances, and their servers are brilliantly coded to handle that kind of load.
It is a massive technological challenge (one blizzard are working at solving if the recent mergers of SC2 regions are any indication), not something that can be fixed with the flick of a switch.
It’s not just internet IP based LAN with a master server like it was back in the 90s – modern servers are really complicated.
22/09/2011 at 21:51 TheMoo says:
@Starky
Well after reading a bit more and considering things I think I can actually understand the massive outrage, the problem is that people expected
(based only on the previous Diablo games, nothing stated by Blizz here)that the game would be the same as the previous games, Blizzard however seem determined to make D3 an MMO in all but name. The majority of game code seems to run server side, characters tied to your BNet account, the works.The major outrage comes then not due to any statement made by Blizzard but the opposite, from statements people thought implied
and in fact completely baseless. Things like “The game will be single player, because that’s how I played D1 and D2″ or “The game will run on my computer”.People were expecting one thing and despite all the evidence to the contrary, kept hoping that this is the game Blizzard were making. As this article clearly shows though, D3 is most obviously an MMO in it’s workings and design philosophy, so the outrage is about the game that isn’t and will never be not about the game that is.
EDIT: Removed a “not” that slipped in somewhere.
EDIT 2: Even though I was wrong about no statements by Blizz on offline the point still stands, Blizzard were not making a single player game (note the post below: Single player will be discourged) when people were expecting one.
P.S.: Just to be clear, I am completely not in favor of the moves done by Blizzard but this is a path they’ve been walking down since Starcraft II and I’ve lost faith in them for a while now. The whole point of this post is to try and… explain the massive outrage.
22/09/2011 at 21:55 TillEulenspiegel says:
“There is offline single player, but it’s something we’re going to attempt to discourage as best as possible.”
Emphasis mine. The date is 24 October 2010, the source is the official Blizzard PR guy for Diablo, posting on the official forums.
http://diablo.incgamers.com/blog/comments/blue-on-online-single-player-diablo-iii/
http://forums.battle.net/thread.html?sid=3000&topicId=27387874231&forumId=12007&postId=273977393113#16
22/09/2011 at 22:14 Starky says:
Eh, I can understand disappointment and even a bit of anger, but not this frothing idiotic rage that is infecting this thread – and lets face it here at RPS it is bloody mild compared to other parts of the net.
Blizzard is hardly the first company to make a change in design after talking about cwertain features, and the word of one guy on their forum from a year ago isn’t a bloody contract signed in blood, things change. Blizzard have been honest about those changes from the moment they made them before the game was released.
If they promised single player offline and then the game shipped without it I would understand massive anger from people who had paid for it and felt cheated, or even if they removed offline mode a month or 2 before release – but the game is only just into closed beta and is a long way from release (6-8 months at least) and the rage over it is just stupid.
Then again I never understood the modern warfare 2 rage, or left 4 dead 2 rage. I really Liked MW1, but simply didn’t buy MW2 (it would have been a day 1 for me had it kept servers and such) – and still haven’t – much like I am sure many people will not buy D3 because of these changes. And I simply waited 4 months and got L4D2 in a sale for under what would be “expansion” price – and didn’t feel ripped off at all, in fact it was a bargain.
I just see no need to get so bloody worked up about it all though.
22/09/2011 at 23:44 DigitalSignalX says:
@TillEulenspiegel read the last page of the bliz forum post you linked,
“That was a post from october 10th of 2010. Since then [community manager] Jay Wilson has stated that this article is not the case anymore.”
23/09/2011 at 01:58 Azradesh says:
@ Starkly
What you’ve said is correct, but that doesn’t change the fact that Blizzard could just let you choose which region to join. Just like Diablo 2, Warcraft 2, Warcraft 2 and even Starcraft 2 if you buy a copy for every region that you wish to play in.
23/09/2011 at 03:00 malkav11 says:
Blizzard specifically said you would be able to complete the game solo. Not in a community forum post from one guy from 2010, but in their official statements regarding this whole fuss. That is pretty well by definition singleplayer.
22/09/2011 at 15:55 rocketman71 says:
There’s absolutely no reason the B.Net thing can’t coexist with LAN and solo characters, other than Blizzard controlling everything we do. Until they show us some respect, they’re not getting a single cent from me. And that goes for StarCraft too.
Their loss.
22/09/2011 at 15:55 Shooop says:
This is exactly what I was afraid of.
Why even have a single player campagin if you obviously aren’t supposed to even play it?
22/09/2011 at 15:59 Skie says:
And of course 1 ddos will make playing impossible for everyone until its dealt with or they get bored hammering the bnet servers.
22/09/2011 at 17:28 freeid says:
wow seems to manage ok.
23/09/2011 at 05:13 Nim says:
Wow is not a single monolithic service. There are for example a couple of hundreds of realms each hosting several thousand players. One realm’s downtime does not necessarily affect the rest of the servers. Attack the log-in and authentication server however…
22/09/2011 at 16:02 nootron says:
I am happy its online. I see this as the inevitable progression of all digital media, to require and make use of an internet connection.
I’m sure there are a group of D&Ders out there lamenting the PC as having destroyed their game forever. Likewise there will always be a group of PC gamers lamenting how the internet has destroyed their game.
The internet is here to stay. Deal with it.
22/09/2011 at 17:29 Dominic White says:
My all-singing, all-dancing 20meg line has futzed out three times today alone.
Always-on internet is the future, yes. So games can use always-on DRM in the future when it’s actually a reality, rather than something I’d quite like now.
22/09/2011 at 17:49 Kandon Arc says:
I tell you what, I’ll deal with it when the internet is actually here to stay, i.e. everyone has access to a stable broadband connection, not just a privileged elite.
22/09/2011 at 20:22 Shooop says:
Do you never play a single player game? Ever?
Does your internet connection never have an issue, even momentarily?
Your short-sightedness is disturbing.
22/09/2011 at 21:34 Wulf says:
Oh yay, you’re another person with those sorts of views.
People in less developed parts of the world without proper Internet connections aren’t real people at all, but sub-people, like some race of mole people. Obviously they’re not deserving of games in the way that I am.
My response? “Oh, eff off.”
I mean, really. That attitude is horrible. Just because it doesn’t affect you doesn’t mean you have to be so completely smug and dispassionate.
22/09/2011 at 22:36 The_Great_Skratsby says:
Nice to see your use of ‘deal with it’ has invalidated whatever point you had. Oh internet people you.
23/09/2011 at 07:08 Azradesh says:
@ nootron
I loath, despise and detest self centred scum like you.
22/09/2011 at 16:03 Wang Tang says:
With all the fuss over always-online and the auction house, I sure am glad Hack’n'Slays are not my cup of tea :D
22/09/2011 at 21:36 Wulf says:
They are mine, but I was never sold on Diablo III.
This just means that the people I’m closest to will be playing other games instead, games that I’m much more excited about, games like Grim Dawn and Torchlight II.
I’d say “All’s well that ends well.” because that works out for me, but I feel kind of sad for the people who’ll be conned by not knowing about the region lock outs. If I could, I’d hand every prospective buyer of Diablo III a pamphlet about just that.
22/09/2011 at 16:13 aircool says:
I’m in the category of person that would have bought the game at some point, if it wasn’t for the silly, always online business. Of course, I play a lot of MMO’s, and they’re always online aren’t they, so why do I have an issue with Diablo 3?
Because there are times when I can’t play games online, so I fire up a single player game instead.
For a start, server maintainence times are always an inconvenience for everyone outside of the US, unless they work odd shifts. Then there’s the fact that the internet isn’t reliable. Around here, it only takes a puff of wind to blow over a telegraph pole; yes, I live in Cumbria where it’s windy all year round and our internet signals are still carried on crappy bits of copper wire hanging of rotting tree stumps. Finally though, losing progress because I’ve paid a visit to the Oval Office? Not to mention important phone calls, walking the dog, listening to the gf let off steam after a hard day at work? Bugger off! At least in an MMO, it’s very easy and quick to find a safe spot. Games are my hobby, but RL has to come first.
22/09/2011 at 16:17 bmood says:
So basicaly D3 is GW now with legalised microtransactions and more agresive mobs , shorter idle disconnect time and no henchmen?
And should we care why ?
It’s their marketing decision, dont like it dont buy it.
22/09/2011 at 21:39 Wulf says:
Guild Wars didn’t force you to reset to a prior checkpoint if you got disconnected.
Guild Wars was marketed as an online multiplayer game.
Guild Wars doesn’t lock people into specific regions (you can change regions freely at any time).
Guild Wars doesn’t force you to use an auction house to be competitive.
Guild Wars is not a valid simile.
23/09/2011 at 01:02 Azradesh says:
1 )Diablo isn’t competitive, it’s co-operative.
2) You aren’t forced to use either auction house any more then you were forced to trade or buy items in Diablo 2. Some people did it, others did not.
I can understand the no offline hate, but the RMAH will no effect you any more then you want it to. All items have to be found by a player to be sold. Hell you could even make some money selling your old and unwanted gear when you get an upgrade.
If some joins you game and has awesome gear you will have no way of knowing if he got it from a drop on that character or another character, traded for it, was gifted it, bought from the gamble vendor guy, crafted it, bought it from the Gold AH or bought it for money. All you will know is if this is someone who plays well and you want to keep playing with, or plays badly and you kick them or leave. This is the only thing that matters. PvP has match making so gear will be fairly meaningless there as well.
And if you play solo then just don’t look at the AH. In fact if you hate it just never look at it. I know I’m going to be playing this the same way I played Diablo 2, by myself (at least the first play through as I want to get the most of the story) with no buying. I may sell items with my free listings though. (Why not?)
22/09/2011 at 16:23 Nameless1 says:
I totally agree.
I won’t buy it for sure, not with this always-on DRM shit.
I was already doubtful after seeing the horrible starcraft 2 single player, but after this that’s a certainty.
22/09/2011 at 16:24 kyrieee says:
I don’t know anyone who didn’t play D2 online and I know a lot of people who played it. To me it’s just as much an online game as Guild Wars.
22/09/2011 at 21:40 Wulf says:
Guild Wars didn’t force you to remain locked into a region, so it’s not a valid simile.
22/09/2011 at 23:34 Reinhardt says:
Doesn’t a simile have to be figurative in some way?
23/09/2011 at 01:51 Shooop says:
To you maybe, but there were people who did play it as a single player game.
I’m sure there were people who play MW2 happily because all their friends live in close proximity and P2P only works fine for them. Did that make it perfectly OK for them to do that to everyone else?
It’s this kind of attitude that allows crappy design decisions to be made over and over again.
22/09/2011 at 16:25 Joshua says:
They removed the pause button.
I mean.
The fuck.
22/09/2011 at 16:27 Ace McAwesome says:
Truth is, it comes down to money. At the time I wrote this comment there were 316 comments on this thread. If all 316 of those were unique people who were going to boycott the game (they aren’t) that’s such a miniscule drop in the bucket. Even if you said 10x that, 3k people, were to boycott because of the always-on ‘Net requirement that’s still a tiny, tiny drop in the bucket that will be more than paid for by Blizzard’s ridiculous real money Auction House shenanigans.
One of the other posters got it right. Single player, in Blizzard’s view, harms the real money Auction House, which ultimately is what D3 is all about. You might as well rename it Diablo: The Real Money Experiment because that’s what it is. If it’s successful (it will be) they will make an inordinate amount of stupid warm cash to roll around in. 3k, or even 10k fewer purchases from people who wanted single player (read: wouldn’t be using the real money AH anyway) is absolutely a non-issue from a fiscal standpoint.
23/09/2011 at 00:52 Wildcard says:
It seems like 2012 will be the end of the world!
That aside, what really strikes me about this DRM and the fact that everything involving item drops is blizzard server side is the possibility that this coupled with the profiteering of the real money auction hall could lead to some serious abuse. Say I’m a lvl 50 monk, is it coded that I get more high lvl drops for other classes to ensure that I use their RMAH? I’m not saying they will do this, just speculative paranoia. But if this becomes a big thing, what’s to stop other games from sniffing out and using their own real money auction hall it being a guaranteed revenue stream. As far as I know, this is the only game with this feature currently. Again, just my paranoid 2 cents.
P.S. this is the first time I’ve ever commented on any forum. I read RPS everyday and the comments section is usually the highlight. Highly entertaining / informative all around.
Sorry if posted already, can’t see my comments. Is it supposed to be like that?
22/09/2011 at 16:30 Emeraude says:
People always argue that this DRM/always-online scheme is about piracy or AH control, but I’ve come to think those are tangential to the problem at hands. What this is about is tightened control of Blizzard over their products.
They don’t want another occurrence of what happened in Korea with professional gaming, they don’t want third parties software – however legal – to be made and make money around their products by providing a better service (even if Blizzard themselves did use those services when they lacked proper infrastructure). Piracy and the AH *are* concerns, but I fear they’re secondary to those issues, and only get invoked because they can be spun positively by marketing.
I can’t recommend enough reading this article, one of the best take on the subject I’ve managed to find: http://www.the-ghetto.org/content/the-creation-of-battle-net-2-0-part-one
As for how this DRM will affect me ? Well, same as many here. I did not buy SC2, I won’t buy D3 either, though it kills me after waiting for those games all these years.
Really I can’t but wonder how many sales were lost because of all those new DRM schemes and overall bad business decisions. My friends and me all used to play a lot. We’d buy up to 4-5 games per month each. Now we barely buy 4-5 games a year. We are willing to play, have the money, the time – but the publishers are locking us out of the audience.
Which is a weird strategy, given one of the major struggle for publisher if they want to succeed, I would think, would be to expand their market.
23/09/2011 at 00:33 ReV_VAdAUL says:
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22/09/2011 at 16:38 Turin Turambar says:
Where Ubisoft implemented the grotesque system purely as a claimed measure to fight piracy, Blizzard’s logic at least has some elements that offer benefits to the player. Battle.net, online ranking, drop-in-drop-out co-op, the auction house, and constant live monitoring of your progress, and monitoring to prevent cheating…
No, the only logic in all that is the monitoring against cheating, the rest can be done without this DRM. In fact, previous Blizzard games have show it, so it’s bizarre how some people are gullible enough to believe Blizzard’s arguments in this. It’s just PR to look not like the evil Ubisoft guys, but it’s the same.
22/09/2011 at 16:41 Sidorovich says:
Grim Dawn diablo-killer can’t come soon enough. Ain’t no way I’m going to be a lemming jumpin’ off that DRM cliff. Fuck you Blizzard. Fuck you right in the eye.
22/09/2011 at 22:23 D says:
Get outta here, Blizzard.
22/09/2011 at 16:47 Fatalis says:
For all you guys hating on the online-only, i understand. If single player was the way i enjoyed games id be pissed also.
But the people who are talking about the no pause function, what the hell? Have you played diablo 2? Online play didnt even have a pause function, as for offline yes it did, but its does not work how i believe yall think it does. In both offline and online when u exit a game and rejoin, never are you put back where u left off, you spawn in town. In online everything was reset, map and monsters and you could only go as far as your latest way-point. In offline the map saved, because it was the same map the whole time. Monsters re-spawned every time though, and again you could only jump to where your latest WP was.
As for interruptions during gameplay, there are these things called town portals, you could spam them in D2 whenever u wanted to take a break from the action. However Im pretty sure TP’s wont be available in D3 but there will be a recall option with a cooldown along the lines of the Hearthstone in WoW. Gotta answer the phone? hearth. Get the door? hearth. i realize more than one thing can pop up during the cooldown period but for the most part you should be fine. This feature is not working in beta if you were wondering why you havent seen it.
and for the getting logged off for being AFK, not sure if this works as I’m not in beta but usually setting a game to window mode, hold down the run button and move the mouse off the screen while running into a corner works for me.
22/09/2011 at 16:57 Sassenach says:
But you can pause multiplayer matches in Starcraft 2. Albeit at the sufference of your opponent. Why wouldn’t they let you do the same here?
22/09/2011 at 17:02 Stevostin says:
Honestly, if Off line mod mean : “restart from 0 if you mean to play multi”, I’d happily deal with many connection issue rather than have to refinish the game by myself a second time. Hated that in DII, thought it was retarded, although an obligation against cheaters.
22/09/2011 at 17:03 rocketman71 says:
Some people here justifying the lack of offline play on the anti-cheat. WTF?. Why is the anti-cheat online affected at all by someone playing offline?. And just because someone can get some weapon cheating offline and PERHAPS then NOT buy it in the Auction House, that justifies removing single player, LAN play, cross-region play, modding, pause, etc, etc for the rest of us?. Sorry, but if you think that, FUCK YOU.
Probably you also think that marriage between gays destroys “normal” marriage.
Goddamned DRMphiles..
22/09/2011 at 23:46 TillEulenspiegel says:
That’s how Blizzard explained it. “Nooo, it’s nothing to do with DRM, it’s all about cheating! And those poor confused players!” It’s completely logically incoherent, an explanation that could only be manufactured by PR rather than justified by someone with a bit of technical knowledge, but there you go.
It’s not just people making shit up. Well it is, but they’re Blizzard people.
22/09/2011 at 17:17 Gaussian Lemur says:
Man, I’ve eagerly awaited Diablo III since I finished Lord of Destruction, and it’s gimped like this. I’ve always played the Diablo games solo, and I’ve had a flaky internet connection since they started offering broadband here.
Why don’t they even offer some option for us?
22/09/2011 at 17:18 Pheasant Plucker says:
A warning to the wise, i.e. those who are blasé about always being able to connect.
A couple of months ago steam suddenly stopped working for me and I couldn’t get to my games. After several days of scratting around I found that my Antivirus program had updated itself and made itself incompatible with Steam. Both parties blamed the other.
Just an example of how random screwage outside of your control can break ‘always on’ gaming. Who’s to say that an antivirus update may not suddenly decide that it doesn’t like Blizzard’s ‘always on’ software either…
22/09/2011 at 17:20 buzzmong says:
Can’t pause a single player game and risk dropping to menu if my internet goes down?
Sod that. Not touching it with a barge pole, same as I haven’t touched any of Ubisoft’s game that have draconian DRM.
22/09/2011 at 17:25 SoggySilicon says:
Games like this (loot grinds) I buy multiple copies of for the home network… this always on thing pretty much soils that, so… not buying it… didn’t buy Silent Hunter 5 for the same reason… the game just does not suit my needs. Which is a shame, the game looks great, but sorry, no… there must be a pause button and other bits.
22/09/2011 at 18:07 DiamondDog says:
You say “again” but not everyone has read all there is to know about how Diablo 3 is going to work. Just because I’m asking a question doesn’t mean you have to be condescending.
What you say just makes me wonder even more why this game can’t have offline characters.
22/09/2011 at 18:08 hachi says:
And here I thought Rock Paper Shotgun was a more enlightened blog. It’s disappointing to find out that not only the commenters but the journalists too suffer a severe mental deficiency.
Anyone who played any of D2 online or D1 would understand at least to some degree how necessary this is. But I guess playing those old games is something you can’t expect even from the gaming media.
22/09/2011 at 18:27 Shooop says:
The only deficiency here appears to be your reading ability because John said he understood for the most part why they’re doing it, but hates that they are for other reasons.
Shall we start you off with See Spot Run or is that a bit too much?
22/09/2011 at 20:01 Unaco says:
Hachi, you are the one with the mental deficiency, if you can’t grasp that, yes, the always online requirement and all the server side stuff will go towards preventing duping/cheating and will keep the Real Money Auction House sacrosanct… But, that shouldn’t stop them giving us the option, the choice, the freedom to create an Offline, Solo only character. And to pause in Singleplayer. And not get logged out if we idle.
As John even says in the article…
“Create the option to create an entirely offline character. A character that can’t then be imported into an online game, one that can’t invite others to join in. That way any of the concerns about those finding ways to artificially improve their characters and then dominate online (something that really doesn’t seem a massive issue in opt-in co-op, but there we are) are removed, and anyone who just wants to solo the game can do so.”
But I guess reading all of the article is something we can’t expect from a cretinous moronic imbecile such as yourself.
22/09/2011 at 20:10 buzzmong says:
@hachi
How is removing the ability to pause my SP game going to stop multiplayer haxxors?
Same goes for shoving me to menu if my SP game loses connection with the game servers.
NB: I did play D2, both SP and MP. You’re right that cheating was rife on MP and something needed to be done. Sacrificing core SP functionality isn’t it.
23/09/2011 at 03:05 malkav11 says:
I played both Diablo and Diablo II. I don’t see any need for this. Sure, there was cheating in Diablo 1 (and apparently in Diablo II closed Battle.net, also? Leastways I’m assuming there was if people think more action is needed), but it didn’t affect my enjoyment of the game even slightly. I didn’t play it online much, and if I had, I would have played it with friends. Problem solved.
22/09/2011 at 18:10 squareking says:
It’s a shame I have so much nostalgia attached to this series. The lore, atmosphere and aesthetic just worked so beautifully. But now, no pausing? Constant connection required for SP? No, thank you. The general casualization in several areas — especially that Massacre bonus thing — makes this essentially DOA for me.
22/09/2011 at 18:11 alilsneaky says:
Nice article.
22/09/2011 at 18:20 Hanban says:
When I play Diablo the first time, I really don’t even want to play with another person. I want to experience it at my own pace, as I like it.
Playing games co-op to experience the story of a game always feels rushed and ultimately disappointing.
So all of this is, disappointing. I am fortunate enough to live in a country where most smaller cities/towns have 100mbit, but I don’t have my head so far shoved up my own ass that I would assume this is the way in the rest of the world. It is, no matter how you look at it, a dick move by Blizzard.
22/09/2011 at 18:23 dogsolitude_uk says:
My ISP had a bit of a ‘situation’ the night before last, leaving me with no internet connection for the evening.
When I phoned them there was a recorded message telling me they had a ‘known issue’, so I obviously wasn’t the only one affected.
Luckily I have a stack of good books to read (no connection required) and games to play on both laptop and desktop (again, no connection required for them).
What I most certainly do *not* want to do is encourage or reward publishers who insist on this ‘always on’ nonsense, and so they’ll be getting none of my money, and a polite email explaining why a potential customer has stayed away.
This really is utterly silly, when as you say they could have had provision for ‘Offline only’ characters for us solo types.
I’m also rather fond of being able to buy games second-hand too, which is another issue I have with a lot of current games licenses.
Shame about all this really, I loved Diablo 2! Ah well. Plenty of other things out there to do.
22/09/2011 at 18:56 Lemming says:
For me, Diablo was always a single player game with additional online features. When I hear anyone talking about how everyone played it online anyway and it predominately being an online co-op/competitive game I truly have no idea what the fuck is anyone talking about.
So this is an easy no-purchase for me. Torchlight 2 all the way, really.
22/09/2011 at 19:01 Lemming says:
In addition, I’d just like to say that this kind of thing probably wouldn’t be as big an issue with many other companies. Blizzard have changed what they do over the years. Warcraft, Diablo, Starcraft…they were predominantly single player games and now have been mutated into these online multiplayer experiences above all else.
It’s about time I think some of us, me included realised that this isn’t the same Blizzard we grew up on and that they aren’t making these games for us any more. It’s all about esports and social-gaming now.
Screw that, tbh.
22/09/2011 at 19:12 Wulf says:
I’ll mention this again in a new post.
I don’t have double standards and I stand by what I say. Blizzard has initiated “Operation: Filthy Foreigners” and in doing so they’ve created oceans on the Internet.
What I’m saying is that you can only play with people in your own region.
To keep this simple, this means that if you’re in Europe, you can only play with your friends whom are in the European region. Do you, like me, have friends from across the globe? Too bad! Blizzard doesn’t think you should be gaming with those sorts, and that you should stick to your own kind.
I may very well have picked up Diablo III if my friends had, because I’m a social sort, and most of the gaming I do is multiplayer. I do fit in some singleplayer gaming, and I try to speak up about those games when I can, but I still have to admit that I spend a lot of time in the likes of Magicka, TF2, Champions Online, and Minecraft. I don’t mention three of those a lot because everyone knows about them and how good they are. But those four still take up the vast majority of my play time.
I allot a few hours a day purely to multiplayer gaming. I get together with friends on voice via Steam and I have fun. It’s a blast. I have friends from all over, Europe is just one of the regions where I have friends from.
So for anyone like me, the Diablo III situation sucks.
When my friends heard about this we pretty much all made a concerted decision to not buy Diablo III. If we can’t continue our normal gaming shenanigans in Diablo III, then Diablo III is simply not a game that’s on our radar. Simple as. And I imagine that that must be the case for a number of International guilds, groups, and for people with friends outside their particular corner of the world.
To say it again: Torchlight II won’t have an always-on connection, it won’t have suffocating levels of DRM, it won’t have a cash-shop, it won’t require you to always be there for single-player, but most importantly Torchlight II will allow you to enjoy the game alongside whomever the hell you like.
This is an important consideration for me.
I don’t like leaving any of my friends out, or dividing us, or engaging in anything that separates us. For me, this is a serious concern. If you don’t know about this yet… well, now you do. Give it some thought.
23/09/2011 at 01:11 Azradesh says:
Yeah, I don’t know why they don’t let you choose your region like Diablo 2. It’s even more odd because it seems they’ve done some nifty things with the client server architecture, at least that’s what Aussy gamers in the beta are saying. As you may or may not know, all beta clients are connecting to the US servers right now and people have said it’s very smooth. (They are stress testing servers at the moment, this is the beta’s primary purpose, not bug testing. So they add a few testers to increase the number of concurrent users, test stability, is it ok? If yes increase again. If not, tweak things. Repet.)
23/09/2011 at 16:01 mwoody says:
It’s not hard to figure out why they did it: the real money auction house. If you could buy items in one territory and sell them in another, Blizz has just become a money exchanger. That opens up a whole new speculative market, with all the myriad international legal repercussions that entails.
Meanwhile, it would enforce real-world social barriers inside the game (moreso than it already will). Imagine a poorer country, for example, where players can never buy items because no one can afford them – but meanwhile, the game becomes a way to make more money than you could make at a normal job, so farmers flood the market. And D3 becomes a silly clusterfuck where rich countries can get any item for pennies while poor countries never “play” the game at all, just farm it.
Just another reason why selling items – and, worse, letting your players sell items – is a poor idea that degrades the game for everyone.
23/09/2011 at 17:37 Azradesh says:
The AH could be regional without the game being regional.
23/09/2011 at 19:34 mwoody says:
No, it couldn’t. Not without making it so you couldn’t trade items in-game, which would be a tremendous annoyance. It also introduces other relative rarity issues, with people trading items in different localities but playing in the same one.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not pro-RMAH. I’m just pointing out that this is one of the many negative repercussions of that decision.
23/09/2011 at 20:37 Azradesh says:
Hmm, maybe you’re right.
22/09/2011 at 19:19 MacGuffin says:
I still hold that the reason for the always online requirement isn’t to prevent piracy, but rather to monetize the RMT Auction House with people playing single player. If you can play offline, you can modify the game files and then who needs to buy spiffy gear from the RMT? Sure, Blizzard isn’t selling (though since the transactions are anonymous, we’re just taking their word for it), but they are admittedly taking a cut. It is not in their financial interests to allow people to play offline no matter how inconvenient this makes it for some gamers.
22/09/2011 at 19:19 HeavyStorm says:
I have a better solution: get a pirate copy.
22/09/2011 at 19:19 elnalter says:
i want this drm to go through and i want tons of people to buy it
they all deserve it
22/09/2011 at 19:35 mmalove says:
If I buy diablo 3, it will be purely on it’s multiplayer merits at this point, because as far as I’m concerned offline play is a mandatory requirement for a single player game. And on mutliplayer, I’m not quite sold. TBH I’d prefer to play me some DDO or LOL if I’m online with friends, then run through a giant hack and slash. But I’ll wait to see some gameplay footage live, looking specifically for multiplayer videos, and see if there’s anything meriting this as a genuinely new, fun multiplayer experience.
22/09/2011 at 19:38 fotog says:
Well, I actually registered to comment because this goes beyond anti-piracy BS.
If I can’t play a game I buy on my terms, I’m not buying the game.
BF3, sure, I’ll pay, because I want to play multiplayer online versus dozens of other players.
D3? I want to be able to run this on my gaming PC and pause at will while I go do some actual work on my Mac.
I’m out unless this online-only is remedied. Having thoroughly enjoyed D2 and LoD, I’ve been looking forward to this game for years. Way to lose a customer, Blizzard.
22/09/2011 at 19:39 Vandelay says:
This post is sarcasm right?
If not, the esc key has worked fine for me in every other game ever (except strategy games that want to be different and make it F10.) Why change that?
I really can’t see how anyone can justify not being able to pause a fucking single player game. Even not letting you pause a co-op game is pretty stupid, when you can pause the ultra competitive SC2.
22/09/2011 at 19:46 psyk says:
Reading this comment section makes me think of facebook users talking to there “friends”
22/09/2011 at 20:14 thebigJ_A says:
You… you can’t pause? You can’t pause the game. You’re playing a single player campaign and you can’t pause it if you have to take a poo, or your pizza comes, or your ma calls. What the ever-loving fuck.
And it boots you if you’re idle too long. Kicks you out of your own game, that you’re playing by yourself, not affecting anyone else.
That’s just asinine. It’s my damn game, I’m playing by my damn self! If I want to stop and build a model train for an hour, I should be able to. When a game decides when I get to play it, that’s just too far.
I never played any earlier Diablos, and I was interested in seeing what the fuss was about, but not any more. I don’t care enough to put up with that silly, silly crap.
23/09/2011 at 01:27 mmalove says:
I never thought about it that way. Again, supporting my ” I will only buy this if I feel the multiplayer warrants the full purchase price”. I’m convinced there is no “single player” mode to this game, it fills none of the niches of single player for me.
Now granted, I said the same thing about starcraft II, and in the end I bought Starcraft II, because enough of my friends were playing to warrent the purchase purely for the multiplayer. Oddly enough, you could still pause the Starcraft II single player campaign.
22/09/2011 at 20:35 Jimmeh says:
I think this is a valid issue for a very small minority of people that has been taken as far as it is likely to go amidst the From Dust shitstorm.
I would be more inclined to support this perspective if issues like region locking and staggered release dates were a thing of the past. Unfortunately they persist, and many people will not be able to play co-op with their friends overseas, anywhere from a few days to a few weeks after other regions, for what are seemingly arbitrary reasons.
Surely those are issues which affect significantly more users, and are much more deserving of your fervour?
23/09/2011 at 01:04 Azradesh says:
Oddly Blizzard seem to always have global release dates.
22/09/2011 at 21:07 kud13 says:
Alphabet says:09/22/2011 at 18:26
I presume you stopped pirating once you decided to pursue the law as a vocation?
actually, I stopped pirating gradually, in my undergrad years, once I started working, and had money to spend on games.
since then i’ve bought a large portion of the games I used to pirate.
22/09/2011 at 21:08 TheLostSkeleton says:
You know what else is going to be fun? Having to queue up like World of Warcraft because too many people are trying to access the server.
Even when all the stars are aligned, you still won’t be able to play Diablo 3!
22/09/2011 at 21:24 Aquamarine Jesus says:
Blizzard is a corporation with a responsibility to make money. If they didn’t put in the single player mode, they still would lose the business of most of the people crying about the always online requirement, sensationalized as “DRM” by RPS and other gaming media sites. With single player mode in the game and the always online requirement, they will still lose the business of the people crying DRM, but they will get more sales to single-player users who don’t give a crap about the requirement.
The experience of playing the past Diablo’s has always been better multiplayer. In my opinion it is, and always has been, a multiplayer game. Sure you could slog through it solo and it was fun for awhile, but the experience was much better with others. Blizzard recognizes this and this version is designed even more with multiplayer in mind. I believe they didn’t want to cut their ties entirely with the solo-player, but I’m equally certain they aren’t losing any sleep over people boycotting the game due the online only requirement.
22/09/2011 at 21:29 Wulf says:
Okay, just going to add this.
John? Yes, you. John Walker. Oi!
Right, might have gotten your attention. If you really care about this, do an article posing the question as to why a multiplayer game (not an MMO, but a multiplayer game) stops you from playing with the people you’re actually familiar with, and forces you to play with strangers, if you don’t all live in the same geographical location.
The lack of saving and the always on connection aren’t the only concerns, and this question is big enough as to deserve its own article. Why can you not switch regions on the fly like in Guild Wars? Why are we not allowed the choice?
22/09/2011 at 23:39 Joof says:
Blah blah blah, Battle.net server infrastructure can’t do that because it’s based on the WoW servers, which can’t do that. Blah Blah Blah.
22/09/2011 at 23:52 Zenicetus says:
Wulf, I sympathize, and agree that in an ideal world there shouldn’t be barriers like that. However, playing Devil’s Advocate, I think there might be two reasons for it:
1) AFAIK, they’re building on the current server infrastructure used for WoW and Starcraft 2, both of which are region-locked. That could be for performance optimization (lag?), or tech support across different languages, or other reasons I’m not aware of. I know there are other MMO’s operating worldwide on single servers like EVE, but Blizzard’s scale and reach is much larger. They might not be able to turn on a dime and come up with a new infrastructure just for this one game.
2) I remember reading somewhere that with the auction house now using real money, there was a potential for people to exploit differences in exchange rates through buying and selling across different regions. In other words, turning the auction house into a currency speculation and trading market, instead of being focused solely on game items.
Blizzard would still make money from that, but it could cause additional load on the servers, or maybe cause hassles with government regulators. It’s a big enough experiment just going with a real cash auction house at this scale, without the complications of speculative trading across different currency markets.
I don’t know how valid either of those points are, but if RPS takes up the issue of region locking, it’s something they might look at.
22/09/2011 at 23:57 TillEulenspiegel says:
This is an absolutely hilarious excuse. “Infrastructure” my ass. Pick a game server, transfer control of both player accounts to that server for the duration, and off you go.
This isn’t the fucking space shuttle. It’s not even EVE, where it’s quite tricky to deal with many players in a small area. It’s a pretty simple, basic feature which they’ve already implemented in WoW for instanced dungeons.
23/09/2011 at 00:12 Joof says:
“It’s a pretty simple, basic feature which they’ve already implemented in WoW for instanced dungeons.”
Except you can’t do that cross region, because the regions can’t talk to each other in the current implementation, since there was no reason for regions to need to in a WoW type model when they started WoW. And when they built Battle.Net on this infrastructure, that shortcoming was still there. Hell, it took them a bunch of engineering to have cross Realm battlegrounds, and then even cross battlegroup matchups. It’s not as easy as you’re making it seem.
22/09/2011 at 21:39 Rinimand says:
/signed no-Diablo-3-for-me
Regarding the no-save: in Diablo1 and 2 you could only save while in town – ie. when you clicked “Save and Close” and then reopened the game, you restarted in town again. I wish they *hadn’t* done that in the first place, but since they did, the save / checkpoints design doesn’t matter as much to me as a decision point..
No pause and no offline single-player = no go for me. I loved Diablo 1 and 2 – I’m a real fan. But I played 50% of my gaming time offline. Now that I have a family and other real-world responsibilities, any game without a Pause is a no-go for me. And a timeout while I am inactive while answering the door or eating dinner or something – WTF?
22/09/2011 at 22:09 D says:
I just wanted to say to the people that still don’t quite follow Kdansky’s explanations:
It’s like supply and demand from basic economics. If there’s an infinite supply of cheated items, in SP mode, and you see something cool on the Auction House (or read about it on a forum), you’re just that much less likely to buy it, because it’s just worth less. You could go into your SP mode character and get it for free. Hence, it would have to be cheaper in order to sell. That’s a direct link to less money for Blizzard. I hope this helps understanding. Thanks for bringing this point Kdansky, it’s an interesting angle.
22/09/2011 at 22:18 Rudboi says:
I’ll see your solution and raise you a simpler one- allow disconnected players to reconnect to their game within a predetermined amount of time, in the exact state from which they were disconnected.
Also, I really hope the DRM stays. Whatever Blizzard needs to do to curb cheating/hacking/bots/duping short of slaying babies is OK with me. Cheats ruined the multiplayer component of Diablo 2. Not necessarily because cheating players gained in-game advantages over legitimate players, but because the most compelling part of the D2 multiplayer- the trading game, was completely destroyed by illegitimate items. The rarest high end items ended up in the hands of the duping elite and the people who bought those items from them with real money. Say what you want about the multiplayer co-op, its not nearly as interesting as finding that super rare item and negotiating (negotiation being a part of the Diablo series that very few, if any, games have replicated) with other players “face to face” and finding the best deal.
22/09/2011 at 22:19 Hmm-Hmm. says:
Yeah, they can make pretty nice games, but this is not making a game as good as it could be just so they can keep it online. Which is an attitude I wish people would recognise and not tolerate.
Now I’ve been tempted by Diablo III since the beta’s out, but no, not for me.
22/09/2011 at 22:37 Shortwave says:
This is a joke.
It was an an insult enough when Starcraft 2 had no LAN.
Forcing small-time LAN groups to have to pay extra money just to play it.
Sucks man.
I can’t support these guys respectfully.
Not a cent from me.
22/09/2011 at 22:51 Synesthesia says:
“I’d been logged out of a single-player game because I was away for an hour.”
Is it that hard to vote with your wallet people?
There is such a thing as standards, even for videogames. Some guy in the first thread said it was region locked. God. Do you really want to give you money to that kind of people?
24/09/2011 at 13:17 unsane says:
6 months ago I was pretty stoked for DIII. Since then the news coming from Blizzard has made it clear I won’t be supporting them. I’m not that much of an ARPG player that I can’t have that itch scratched somewhere else. TL1/2 is nice, PoE looks good, and Grim Dawn looks good too from what I’ve seen so far. I will vote with my wallet and support Runic, Grinding Gear and Crate and it will probably not cost me much more than it will to support Blizzard. And I’ll feel better about it too.
The origins of this sentence escapes me at the moment but the meaning is clear: Don’t suck corporate dick.
Blizzard apologists can do that for all I care.
22/09/2011 at 23:11 Catalept says:
It’s simply incorrect to think of DiabloIII as having ‘always on DRM’… that implies that D3 is some kind of single player game with some sort of noxious DRM bolted on. It seems abundantly clear to me that D3 is an MMOARPG, built from the ground up with a client-server architecture (which just happens to do double-duty as DRM), no easier to ‘crack’ that WoW’s. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if D3 was using some of WoW’s backend software (and indeed hardware) assets. It seems like a classic case of a very sound business decision that just happens to be something of a dick move.
I except all of Blizzard’s games from this point onward (well, from WoW onward, really) to be client-server… it has, after all, been ridiculously successful for them (as well as highly pirate-resistant, let’s not forget that), which sets a very strong precedent. History may well record Blizzard as being the people who killed offline gaming in the AAA market.
23/09/2011 at 06:18 cephalopoid@gmail.com says:
Riiiiight.
And the REST of us are saying that we do not want our SINGLE PLAYER GAMES that we buy to be server based.
Sure, there is a multiplayer side to this, but what we want is a choice. We want to choose whether or not we can play this, say, on a laptop on an airplane. Or in a hotel that charges a ridiculous fee for wifi.
We want a choice not to be tethered. Sure, Blizzard has WoW. For WoW players, they expect to be tethered to the internet, but because Diablo is a single player game that can be played cooperatively, many of us don’t like the idea of being chained to a server, or having our characters chained to a server.
We kinda want to be treated like adults, and not like children, whose mom puts the cookie jar on the top shelf.
I will not support Blizzard until they give us that choice.
22/09/2011 at 23:29 RegisteredUser says:
+1 for please provide a completely offline solution
YOU FRICKIN’ “ONLINE ALWAYS IS KEWL LULZ” IDIOTS.
22/09/2011 at 23:50 MythArcana says:
Diablo ]|[‘s DRM and ActiBlizzards horrible direction and policies will actually save me $60 this year.
22/09/2011 at 23:57 DigitalSignalX says:
Wow page 11 of the comments thread on always on DRM. Have we run out of Steam yet? Get it. Steam. Oh BTW, did you know you can’t play Dead Island on Steam offline anymore? shhh.
23/09/2011 at 20:05 Shooop says:
I just found that out yesterday and I’m glad I haven’t bought it. Was considering it, but it’s a definite no-go now.
23/09/2011 at 00:02 TreeBeard says:
For the record, you couldn’t truly pause in D2 either. Even when playing single player. I’m so excited for this game.
23/09/2011 at 06:40 mda says:
IIRC yes you could – so long as you were playing single player offline, not just by yourself while on bnet.
23/09/2011 at 00:13 abigbat says:
^ this.
23/09/2011 at 00:21 Wildcard says:
My god, It looks like 2012 will be the end of days after all!
That aside, after reading the comments on here, and there are quite a few, one thing bugs me the most. The fact that every item drop is calculated server side coupled with the fact of the real money auction house. It seems to me there is a strong possibility of drop abuse that could happen due to this. Say I’m a level 50 monk, is it coded that I get more high level drops for other classes in order that their auction house gets more use and money? I’m not saying that they will do this (not the “could” and “say”) but if something like this takes off, what’s to stop other companies from sniffing out a guaranteed revenue service and not implementing something like this. From my knowledge not many, if any, games currently have a feature like that. Just my paranoid 2 cents.
P.S. – This is my first time commenting on any forum whatsoever. I read RPS everyday and I love the comments you people leave. Extremely entertaining / informed all around.
23/09/2011 at 00:21 raptormesh says:
It’s essentially a purchased MMO with a pay to win structure, except that you can now choose to be on the other side of the payment. Guess it is inevitable till we see a “Dozens of youth makes living playing D3″ news piece.
Is that a good thing? It’s been mentioned that it’s something akin to gambling. Indeed, though the lottery tickets can be purchased with time, and you’ll need to sell it to cash in on it.
D3 is a time based casino-market, and they’ve got “security guys” everywhere…
23/09/2011 at 00:33 Wildcard says:
It seems like 2012 will be the end of the world!
That aside, what really strikes me about this DRM and the fact that everything involving item drops is blizzard server side is the possibility that this coupled with the profiteering of the real money auction hall could lead to some serious abuse. Say I’m a lvl 50 monk, is it coded that I get more high lvl drops for other classes to ensure that I use their RMAH? I’m not saying they will do this, just speculative paranoia. But if this becomes a big thing, what’s to stop other games from sniffing out and using their own real money auction hall it being a guaranteed revenue stream. As far as I know, this is the only game with this feature currently. Again, just my paranoid 2 cents.
P.S. this is the first time I’ve ever commented on any forum. I read RPS everyday and the comments section is usually the highlight. Highly entertaining / informative all around.
23/09/2011 at 00:38 Wildcard says:
It seems like 2012 will be the end of the world!
That aside, what really strikes me about this DRM and the fact that everything involving item drops is blizzard server side is the possibility that this coupled with the profiteering of the real money auction hall could lead to some serious abuse. Say I’m a lvl 50 monk, is it coded that I get more high lvl drops for other classes to ensure that I use their RMAH? I’m not saying they will do this, just speculative paranoia. But if this becomes a big thing, what’s to stop other games from sniffing out and using their own real money auction hall it being a guaranteed revenue stream. As far as I know, this is the only game with this feature currently. Again, just my paranoid 2 cents.
P.S. this is the first time I’ve ever commented on any forum. I read RPS everyday and the comments section is usually the highlight. Highly entertaining / informative all around.
PPS – I apologize if this is reposted, I cant find my comment.
23/09/2011 at 00:46 jaheira says:
Imagine a scenario where these two conditions are true:
a) D3 sells untold millions
b) It is not significantly pirated.
If this happens the implications are going to be huge no? At the cost of alienating what I am assuming is a vocal minority that care about things like ownership and flaky internet connections they’ve basically solved the problems that free information flow pose to the monetisation of gaming. If this works it is unquestionably the future. Very interesting to see if someone with the vast resources of Blizzard can pull this off.
23/09/2011 at 01:17 The Velour Fog says:
oh Mr Wulf
The poor and downtrodden of the world have a new champion! Let me get the tissues.
There is enough merit in the argument against all this Blizzard nonsense without you replying to every single comment with your hand-wringing sob-stories. How many different ways can you say “I won’t be buying it” ? Maybe in your mind you have a unique take on this that everyone else seems to be missing, but come down from your pulpit because we get it already.
As someone who generally shies away from multiplayer, I’m not happy with the situation either, but I’m torn whether anyone is entitled to impose their will on game developers when the purchase of their product is entirely optional. Unless I’ve missed it, the only counter to the “if you don’t like it don’t buy it” argument is “but I really want to” which just begs the question
23/09/2011 at 01:58 Shooop says:
I’m going to throw this out there, since I know some people are thinking it.
To those who wonder why anyone who’s not really interested in this game are posting here calling the DRM a horrible thing since it’s not really effecting them, these things have a funny way of creeping into other games we do happen to be interested in.
When a company as well-known, profitable, and (possibly until recently?) renowned as Blizzard does this and no one really cares, others will do it too. It sets a precedent that we really don’t want anyone else to follow.
23/09/2011 at 02:27 DrSlek says:
Another article on Diablo 3 beta. Not to do with the always online DRM though, but with how the editor in chief of gamespy wishes it were “re-imagined” as an FPS.
http://au.pc.gamespy.com/pc/diablo-iii/1195932p1.html
23/09/2011 at 03:10 malkav11 says:
One other thing that hasn’t been brought up:
Online cheaters would never have affected my singleplayer game, or my playing with friends. But forcibly tying all access to Diablo III to my Battle.net account gives it a huge new security problem. Because, you see, Battle.net accounts are already enormously tempting targets for hackers because they so often have WoW accounts attached, and WoW accounts are fairly safe targets (unlikely to get them in big legal trouble) worth significant amounts of money. I have already had one WoW account hacked, and have no faith in either Blizzard’s security measures or their willingness to fix matters as a result.
23/09/2011 at 04:35 mda says:
“Create the option to create an entirely offline character. A character that can’t then be imported into an online game, one that can’t invite others to join in.”
They did this exact thing for D2, can’t see why not for D3 :(
Also region locking and no pause FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
23/09/2011 at 06:03 moondog548 says:
Boo!
23/09/2011 at 06:10 disenter says:
I registered, just to post to this thread, after seeing it posted on the D3 forums…
I’m not happy about their being no single play, or LAN play either. I’ve played through D2 many times, and had done it always offline or in LAN environments because I live in Australia. Our connections to battle.net servers, or really any server over seas have never been great, and its just tiresome and frustrating dealing with ‘lag’.
My partner and I played all the way though to hell in D2:LoD and she loved it! It’s probably the only PC game I’ve ever got her to play, that she really enjoyed!. We were both looking forward to D3 for years, and if D3 had single player / LAN, I probably would not even bother with online at all. I’d be happy to continue on just playing single or LAN with my partner, or friends etc.
However, I can to some degree understand blizzard wanting to do it the way they have or are. RMAH gets rid of third party sites proffiting from their hard work, and stops dupes etc that basically make an item worthless, in the online sense at least. If everyone had a stone of jordan, it wouldn’t be of value to anyone etc.
I have read enough (PR bs or not) info, and have enough technical experience of my own, to understand that keeping the vast majority of the code for the game on the server side, will also prevent most of the hacks, since hackers will not have direct access to the games code, and this is a big part of their reasoning.. or at least thats what they tell us, “it’s all about the gaming experience”, and “it’s all for the end user” etc etc.
Now, I can agree with that to some extent… Having a ‘online’ and ‘offline/single’ player mode, means that the client has all of the code, and can therefore exploit it much more easily, given enough time. However, I still fail to see why there can’t be two seperate codes, for online and offline modes to negate this issue with the ‘online economy’ being at risk. Their argument is that if that was done, the basic formula’s would be the same, even if the variables were not. One could figure out which variables were different and go from there…
But if this is true, then why are they even considering a console port, that they’ve claimed will only ever be done, if it is D3 exactly, for console, and not some spin off. Could the same not be achieved from decompiling a console ‘port’???
Sure it would be a little harder, but if the basic formula’s were the same, and only the variables different, it would in effect do the same thing in a hackers hands, as offline mode would (with different variables).
I’m not saying it wouldn’t take a lot of work to ‘recode’ D3 for offline play, so that you can play online or offline with different, and somewhat more fixed variables for offline play, but Blizzard, if you’re going to consider a console ‘port’, then why not code for offline as well and give everyone what they want?
Also, the whole region lock thing is a joke. There is no good reason for this whatsoever. If you do not wish to allow character A on server B, to play on Server C, fine. Don’t allow them to move a character from one server to another, as with D2, but at least allow them to be able to create a character in another region. They may have better server performance / latency from said region outside of their own, or they may simply have more friends in that region that they’d like to play with. Why should they not be allowed to??? It is really NOT fair to make a world anticipated game ‘online only’ but then tell people they can only play in their own locale.
Blizzard, you did at least concede the point with SC2 that Australians do indeed have better connections to the USA based servers compared to the SEA based servers that you shunted us to, and gave us the ability to choose to play on USA or SEA servers. What is the issue with doing this across all servers, for all clients? Let them find what works best for them!
Lastly, I read recently that Blizzard has made a ‘magic fix’ to the whole latency issue, by making it so that rather than as with any ‘normal’ TCP environment, the server will wait for confirmation of a packet sent, thereby increasing latency, it will not any longer wait. This means it effectively halves the latency, and people say its the best thing since sliced bread so far for online gaming. However, in the same article I read, it mentioned that another part of the new battle.net 2.0, will be an active monitor for hacks etc, that will boot/ban connections if there is found to be a discrepency from what the server side ‘expects’ compared to what the client side has sent etc..
If the server is no longer going to check with the client to ‘confirm’ said data, are you aware that this could be a very easily abused service to enable some smart fuckers to get your account banned?
It is possible after all to recode transmitted packets so they appear to have come from a different IP address. So, if you knew the IP of X user, recorded the transactions between your own client and bnet server, and recoded it to be Y user, provided you knew their ip address, it would cause the server to detect an anomaly and kick/ban Y user. Yer, I agree its not quite as simple as that, especially in this day and age, but the point is, it’s not impossible.
When are you guys going to learn that the more you try to strangle software with DRM, the more you make hackers better at what they do? It’s like sticking a piece of cheese in front of a mouse and expecting him not to eat it!
I will probably try the game anyway, because my partner and I loved D2 so much (i still play it even now), but if there are a lot of issues, especially with running 2 connections from the same IP address etc, it will likely end up returned, which is a real shame because I’ve been waiting for this ever since D2, and my partner, she’s been waiting a good 4-5 years too…
Solution A) recode a version, bundled with the retail version or not a single + lan only version of D3 – everyone is happy.
Solution B) put more servers in, in different locales to eliminate latency entirely, and remove region locks to allow people to play with anyone they like. again, almost everyone will be happy (unless they have no internet at all of course!)
/rant
23/09/2011 at 06:11 cephalopoid@gmail.com says:
I know that there is 500+ comments to this story.
But this is just to say:
I registered for an account
just so I
could pledge that I, too, will NOT be buying this game because of the DRM.
Blizzard, treat your customers like adults. Give us a choice.
That is all.
23/09/2011 at 06:13 disenter says:
omg.. i wrote…………… click opinion away…… errr where is it? lol
23/09/2011 at 07:42 Zarunil says:
I still say the main reasons they enforce always-online is:
1. Cash shop. Microtransactions will make them a fortune. Many who now can’t use a character editor to get a Wailing Warhammer of the Whale +51341 will spend money in their cash shop. Even just having access to the cash shop while playing by yourself is going to make them truckloads of cash, because the threshold for buying something gets lowered. This is a huge incentive for enforcing a connection.
2. Anti-piracy. It worked to a degree with Starcraft II, messing up already cracked releases out there, surely making some people cave in and buy the game instead.
23/09/2011 at 09:32 Yammo says:
To the people who go “Stop whining”, “Millions are going to buy”, “Some who boycott are bigots”:
Since “always-on” does not add anything to the experience, but actually only subtracts from the product, what you are saying in fact only boils down to you pretty much accepting anything authorities shove up your behind, without question, objection or moaning.
I have not purchased a single UBI Soft product since… uhm… a looooong time.
…and why is this?
I hate always ON.
…I did purchase Bad Company 2 however, and it has a “must maintain connection to master server at all times” *cough* *cough* “feature”. Which frequently throws me out of an ongoing game, into the front end “log in to your account” page. I’ve just about quit playing BC2 because of it… (I sometimes forget how mindblowingly annoyed I get when it happens and start the game up again… Within an hour or so, I’m usually reminded though…)
For me the concept of “always on” is as dead as Television…
23/09/2011 at 09:48 Ergates_Antius says:
@DiamondDog: OK, fair point – appologies. It’s just something that keeps coming up.
@Unaco: No idea – maybe someone at Blizzard drinks a lot. I don’t like the always on aspect*, I’m not a particular fan of the cash AH, and I’m not defending either of them. I’d just prefer it if people criticise them for the right reasons.
*and the not being able to pause is just down right stupid.
23/09/2011 at 09:49 TheMoo says:
Exactly, Diablo 3 simply isn’t a single player game by design.
Blizzard are not building it as such and it’s quite obvious that they intend for it to be a MMOARPG and that’s final from them. They quite simply no longer want to make single player focused games, Blizzard have been moving down a path of complete content control for a while no, they don’t want you to have their precious game data on your computer and they don’t want you to play single player offline.
The obvious choice for any of us completely against this move is to just. stop. buying. It’s that simple, don’t buy their games, there’s plenty of other ARPGs coming out soon like Torchlight 2 or Path of Exile (which is a f2p MMO actually but being free sort of excuses it from being an MMO).
23/09/2011 at 10:13 CollinPage says:
No worries i’ll just download a hacked version and give blizz the finger.. Because that’s what’s going to happen if DRM goes live.. All it does is say uck you to the paying customers that don’t have a stable connection.
23/09/2011 at 12:34 sonofsanta says:
Even though this comments thread is already approaching Horace-like proportions – as much as anything can ever truly approach his Divine Ursine Majesty – I still want to chip in in the vague, slim, possible hope that Blizzard might realise there’s some truth to what you’re saying.
Because when D2 came out, I was 16. I had just done my GCSEs and therefore had a three month long summer, which was spent either in the beer garden, or on Battle.net. I had the time, and the friend with similar time, to play D2 online for all that time. It was marvellous.
Now we are ten years on, and I am married, own a house, work full time, and have a child and many pets. And they make a game that has no pause function. And now I cannot play it, because any game I can’t pause when a cat comes in carrying a pigeon, or when goodnights need to be said, or when Sky phone me at half eight to try and sell me TV I don’t want to watch… any game I can’t pause is a game I can’t play. This one fact alone – that until now, I’d overlooked, so tah muchly – really, genuinely is a dealbreaker.
More than that – it’s a heartbreaker. I loved D2 and LoD. Lost months to it. But I can’t live with this.
23/09/2011 at 18:35 kisonay says:
I may be totally wrong but I was under the assumption that this beta was for battle.net to make sure all of the bugs in the server addressed. In this case, it would make sense that they release a beta client that only supported the multilayer aspect of the game.
Has Blizzard made a statement that this is indeed the case, that even if playing in “solo” mode, you will require a constant connection?
If they have not, I think there is a chance that there will be an “offline” mode. We can’t make assumptions in this regard just because the beta requires a connection.
23/09/2011 at 20:47 stupid_mcgee says:
And that’s the crux. This would be great for WoW and their upcoming MMO. But it doesn’t belong in Diablo. I’m not that invested in the series, so Torchlight 2 has my time and money.
24/09/2011 at 01:42 SquareWheel says:
I’ll gladly buy it if I can play offline, it looks awesome.
I probably won’t buy it.
25/09/2011 at 06:50 hilllbilllyjoe says:
DRM is going to kill modding for this game. I loved diablo and diablo 2 because I could mod the crap out of them, but the DRM will likely have a spaz-attack if I change anything in the exe.
25/09/2011 at 08:58 Sabre_Justice says:
Yeah, I was looking forward to this game, but it doesn’t look to be worth the trouble now. If I wanted to solo a MMO, I’d solo a MMO.
25/09/2011 at 22:25 Leandro says:
Hear, hear!
I live in an isolated area and my internet connection sucks. I don’t need anything better because I can get great speed at work. Also, I never play online games, I never played WoW, but I’ve played tons of Diablo 2 both single-player and LAN and I’d like to be considered a target audience for Diablo 3, but looks like I’m not.
And what’s the point of making the game run smoothly on notebooks if you can’t play it on the go? That’s very dumb.
03/10/2011 at 22:03 Gvaz says:
I didn’t complete Diablo 1 or 2, though I beat and loved Torchlight and others.
>requires internet to play single player
>not interested in things like auction houses and coop for single play, other than “would you like to invite your friend? You must be online to do so” and the internet magically turns on and you can go on and play with your friend.
>game logs you out….as if you’re playing a hack and slash WoW.
Nope. No buy. A pirate maybe, but not paying a single cent.
08/10/2011 at 15:28 trilith says:
well its simple
i didn’t buy starcraft 2 because of the drm, and no lan play.
i dont plan on buying d3 because of the same thing.
i registered an account to say this.
dont ever assume this is what we want blizzard, we dont. we’re sick of the drm bs.
there are ways around everything, and just like starcraft 2 if i really want to take a look at this game i will simple download a cracked copy and play it without ever purchasing it. if thats what you want blizzard, fine. i’m sick of you and ubisoft, as well as activision. if you didn’t have a billion wow fanboys, such a action as a smaller developer this would kill the game; because its you its ok? BS.
12/10/2011 at 13:14 Ganni87 says:
Been a fan of blizzard’s games since the warcraft 2 days however that’s changing for now. SC2 and diablo 3 happen to be the first 2 games with this kind of crap, I dont mind the activation for online but NOT for OFFLINE.
I look at it this way, I spend 42 euros on a game I want to play and I intend to buy it only for the single player story. Why the hell do I have to register with the cdkey to play offline?
I am against piracy however I still thank those sceners for making a crack. The crack makes me feel like I own the game and not like I’m renting it.
And now Diablo 3 is approaching, a game I really was planning to buy, As much as I’d love to buy and play it, I won’t because just by reading this article, doesn’t promise anything good, It’s gonna be a SINGLE PLAYER GAME THAT I CAN’T PLAY WHEN AND HOW I WANT.
IF I WANT MULTIPLAYER IN THAT GAME I’LL BE HAPPY TO STICK THAT CDKEY AND PLAY ONLINE BUT I’LL NEVER ACCEPT ALWAYS ONLINE CRAP FOR SP.
Blizzard doesn’t care about this because they’ll know that many idiots will buy the game nevertheless of online drm crap. You’re pushing away your customers and forcing them to pirate games. You’re not better than ubisoft in the end, hand in hand on the yellow road of online drm crap.
Game crackers will always be around every time, this is something game companies have to face and ACCEPT. If companies actually use their brain, they would realise that not everyone knows how to download games from torrents and not everyone knows how to download cracks.
Besides if Blizzard is whining about Starcraft 2 being pirated so much, now they’re gonna pirate it EVEN MORE, wanna know how? simple…
Recently Blizzard released the SC2 “starter edition” while this is good it has a side effect. The client they offer for download is identical (in both size and file amount) to the original cd. Pirates can download the full game and latest patch LEGALLY and the crack via some website and voila! A fully working Singleplayer SC2.
Now that’s what I call dropping the stone on your own foot increasing piracy altogether.
Thank you Blizzard for releasing such wonderful games however with these actions you’re only hurting your own customers and it’s not right for them to be frustrated like this in singleplayer mode. Face the fact that game piracy will always exist otherwise stop developing games for pc.
/end
14/12/2011 at 18:04 trollollolloll says:
you people are pathetic, fortunately blizzard doesn’t give 2 $#^$s about whether or not you buy their products, in other words, your whining and crying is as significant as a fly taking a crap in the middle of nowhere on a blade of grass nobody will step on in the next 500 years
29/03/2012 at 10:24 jrodman says:
At least you used an accurate name.
29/03/2012 at 12:17 sophof says:
Even if I’m still going to buy it, it can never be good for a company when they temper enthusiasm this much. I am on the fence, since I used to be a big fan. I might still get it, probably dependent on if my friends get it. But they’ve lost something valuable, which I guess you could call my ‘devotion’.
Dangerous business for something not very essential.
In the end, I don’t like being treated like a sucker, even if I turn out to be one!
30/03/2012 at 05:35 dellphukof says:
Shouldn’t have purchased the game in the first place. The only time they will remove the DRM is when a vast majority of the people stop buying it in the first place but the vast majority of you all will still buy it! Thus, you get what you deserve…Blizzard is intergrating battle.net for things, people who saw SC2 released shoud have realised then where they were going with everything.
Having said that, i’m having a blast in the game, more than I thought it would. It’s not exactly revolutionary, but it is fun. seo service