Diablo III - It's official

I think I played Diablo 2 around 90% online, on bnet, so this was exactly how things worked. And it was ok. Annoying when it happens, yes, but those incidents didn't occur that often. Having to be online when playing Diablo 3 is no problem at all for me.

 

And it won't be for all those who played Diablo 2 with a passion, because they all did so on battle.net.

Losing connection midway through a quest in D3 will be no different if you lose your connection in WoW. You just start over.

Cheers

 

It sucks when it happens, but it's not the end of the world. I remember in LOTRO back in spring of 08 that me and two co-workers who played together had fought our way in through this large camp of giants to get to the boss (very nice quest reward). Literally just as we pulled the boss I lost my connection. Next morning I was at a respawn site. Not sure I ever got that quest completed now that I think about it, but my hobbit burglar made it to the level cap just fine.

 

Meaning you can only utilize 9 out of 44 skills at one time, all of which depending on level, are interchangable? I guess that's not so bad. I was worried players would be spamming the same two abilites at any given time. If I wanted that, I'd stick to Torchlight.

I think I'm getting this mixed up.

 

Isn't the whole point of the online only for Blizzard to control rarity of items to generate more incomes from the in-game shop ?

I would think something like that had a weight in their decision.
Of course you would rather market it as an improvement removing the solo/online character confusion by having a single type...

Or I could just be too suspicious ;p

 

You're thinking of 3D stuff. Eyefinity is the 3 monitors stuff.

 

All that they need to do is what they did with Diablo 2: separate single-player characters from battle.net characters. Nice and simple.

So no, that is complete and utter bullshit. It is pure DRM.

How can removing options possibly be an improvement?

 

Chal, I feel you're perhaps making too big a deal out of this. With Assassin's Creed for example, online-DRM didn't make any real sense from a customer viewpoint, it was just a millstone around the neck, weighing you down. AC is a single player game.

Diablo however is a coop multiplayer (and now, arena PvP) game, inherently. Has always been. It seems Blizzard deemed internet connections to be pervasive enough (shit, you can tether off your 3G smartphone unless your cellular operator sucks if you're out and about) for always-online to make sense. You get your multiplayer support, your character and progress is saved, your shared stash is also saved, and so on.

It seems they feel the small number of people amongst their potential customer base not having reliable internet connections (and the small number of people traveling to places without internet for any extended periods) wasn't enough to offset the increased development effort necessary to implement offline support. After all, code doesn't magically write itself...

Incidentally, Blizzard devs has gone on record saying always-online wasn't intended to be a DRM tool, I guess you're deciding they're all lying now?

 

Probably because they are lying, it's complete nonsense.

 

Either they are morons who don't know their customers (if you aren't looking for online interaction this scheme is a pure nuisance, I very much doubt I'm the only one who's not looking to play this online) or they are lying ... I don't think they're the former.

 

There's a lot of vitriol floating about in this thread, and for reasons I deem rather irrational... This is an online society now. Multiplayer is where it's at now, you people need to deal with that. Recently we had Valve say they probably wouldn't do any more games without multiplayer, so this is definitely the trend moving forwards.

Also, while the company is not perfect (they've done some shitty things to WoW in this latest expansion for example which has forced me to stop playing the game), I think Blizzard knows its customers better than most devs.

 

In regards to the online requirement, I initially thought the same thing, OMG what is Blizz thinking, blah blah. Then I realized that I play a lot of games on Steam, which likewise requires an online connection. Yes, I know you can set up an offline mode, but I never saw the need. I sign into Blizz when I play Starcraft, even if I'm playing the campaign, and I don't really care. So it's really not a big deal to me. That, and I've got RealID friends that will be playing this.

The only time it would become a big deal is if someone DDoS'd the servers like they did to Ubisoft with AC2, but this is Blizzard we're talking about, not exactly short on server power.

I do agree that there are other ways they could have done this, if the reasons they present are true (i.e. don't allow offline characters into online mode), but I don't think it's as big a deal as people are making it out to be. Molehills and mountains.

Personally, I have more of a problem with the auction house than the online requirement.

 

In your opinion
I never played diablo 2 online, my time online with team fortress 2 = less than 25 minutes

there are many games that required the publisher to run a server so people could play multiplayer
guess what in many cases they got screwed
after (in some cases only a year) the servers were closed and now people cant play them online
when the publisher is reuired to run a server for single player as well people will get screwed mark my words

heres e.a's excuse :

The decisions to retire older EA games are never easy.
The development teams and operational staff pour their hearts into these games almost as much as the customers playing them and it is hard to see one retired.
But as games get replaced with newer titles, the number of players still enjoying the older games dwindles below a point -- fewer than 1% of all peak online players across all EA titles -- where it’s feasible to continue the behind-the-scenes work involved with keeping these games up and running.
We would rather our hard-working engineering and IT staff focus on keeping a positive experience for the other 99% of customers playing our more popular games.
We hope you have gotten many hours of enjoyment out of the games and we appreciate your ongoing patronage.

 

Not just my opinion of course... Nor is it really an opinion as much as a (strengthening) fact. The growing importance of online everything today (other than when buying groceries and such), is pretty much indisputable.

Yeah well, as cool a guy as any single one of us are here at B3D, software devs aren't going to look at single individuals when making these kind of decisions, they're watching trends and making their decisions from what they see there. And the trends are moving towards ubiquitous and persistent internet connections "everywhere", so lack of an offline mode for people who happen to don't have a connection at their current location is a diminishing problem/concern.

If it was a major problem, either the devs themselves or the bean counters at the publisher would protest this trend, but that's not happening. So we can either draw the conclusion that they're all either stupid or evil, OR, that this isn't actually a problem for the vast majority of players.

Ubi's always-online DRM is shit because it doesn't give any benefit to players, just drawbacks, while Blizzard has its Battle.net 2.0 functionality with friends lists and achievement crap, cross-game chat, persistent game saves and config settings, lots of stuff like that.

Yeah I know, but Blizzard still runs diablo 2 b.net realms a over a decade and counting after the game's release with no end to that in sight, and even if they were to shut the lot of them down tomorrow...well, I'd say you've received your money's worth out of that game by now.

It's an acceptable excuse. Games publishers are commercial for-profit enterprises, not freewheeling, idealistic crusaders for eternal multiplayer action. You may think that's bad if you want (free society; disagreement is permitted), but it's reality, so again... Deal with it.

 

Not really. It's always been a combination of co-op and single player. I've (almost always) preferred the single player aspect.

Yes. Blatantly. It's a pretty obvious strategic decision to claim it isn't DRM.

 

That's fucking idiotic. Last I checked, for games that offer both single player and multiplayer functionality, even strongly multiplayer-focused games (e.g. UT series), single-player far outweighed multiplayer play.

 

I really don't ... I have a lot of things I can spend my money and free time on.

 

To add to this, Blizzard still runs the servers for the first Battle.net game, Diablo 1, which was from 1996. And even Diablo2 received a bugfix patch with a new feature to change your characters skill setups just a few months ago.

As for myself, the only time I play PC games is when I'm at home with a permanent internet connection, so the online requirement means nothing to me. The only way I played Diablo2 was online anyway.

 

It's not my idea. Like I said, Valve's heading the same way too and they sit on their Steam client that reports all kinds of statistics back to them. It tells you as a player how much time you spend playing particular games for example, you can bet your butt it tells them the exact same thing.

The rise of - free-to-play in particular - MMOs, and so on, it's a dramatic shift in how games are played compared to the past.

People actually PLAY UT single player? And play it MORE than online? That doesn't sound right...

Anyway, this discussion is a total red herring anyway because D3 DOES feature single player. It just doesn't offer it in a way that suits you, but that's more of a problem with you than with the game.

Sorry, I don't want to be rude or insulting, but you do claim to possess the powers of mind reading with regards to the whole lying/DRM bit, so... *shrug*

 

That's what Epic have always said. And it's not because these people don't have net connections, it's because they want to play the game the way they want to, without the competative world of online games, often full of dicks. The bots aren't going to swear at you or complain that you're not being fast enough, not helping with the team objectives, using the wrong weapons, being in the wrong place, etc.

And some of those people will have slow or expensive net connections, giving them a poor experience and disadvantage against those who have fast connections.

Some people just don't like the online experience, and prefer playing a properly structured single player.