Diablo III: Rise of the Necromancer - 27/6/17

$ilva $hadow wrote:Great, so if I want to play this properly I'm going to have to pirate it.

strawberry float you blizzard.

$ilva $hadow wrote:Great, so if I want to play this properly I'm going to have to pirate it.

strawberry float you blizzard.

$ilva $hadow wrote:I've got it preordered as well, but if it's online all the time then strawberry float it, I'll just play the pirate version for offline.

I'm sure paying for the game and still pirating it will give certain posters severe bumpain.

Mafro wrote:Who honestly doesn't have a computer that's always connected to the internet in this day and age.

Get a strawberry floating grip, people.

At an event in Irvine on Tuesday, Blizzard told us that Diablo 3 will be online only. Without an internet connection, you can’t play the game at all.

Senior producer Alex Mayberry says there were many reasons for the decision, including the prevention of cheating. Since players can buy and sell items for real money, any way of cheating to make or acquire better ones would be very lucrative – and unfair.

“It’s the trend that we’ve been moving towards,” Alex says. “Obviously StarCraft 2 did it, WoW authenticates also. It’s kind of the way things are, these days. The world of gaming is not the same as it was when Diablo 2 came out.”

I check with him to be absolutely sure: there’s no way to play without being online? “There’s no offline play, you have to be connected to the internet.”

The anti-cheat reason makes sense, but why not permit an offline mode and keep it separate from the online game?

“We thought about this quite a bit,” says executive producer Rob Pardo. “One of the things that we felt was really import was that if you did play offline, if we allowed for that experience, you’d start a character, you’d get him all the way to level 20 or level 30 or level 40 or what have you, and then at that point you might decide to want to venture onto Battle.net. But you’d have to start a character from scratch, because there’d be no way for us to guarantee no cheats were involved, if we let you play on the client and then take that character online.”

“Now, that doesn’t mean you can’t play a game by yourself – of course you can. You can go into and start any game that you want, you’ll just be connected to the Battle.net servers, and we can authenticate your character.”

If you’re finding this reasoning weak, you’re not alone. The more believable reason to deny players any kind of offline mode would be to prevent piracy. I asked Alex if that was the reason.

“One of them, yes.”

Mafro wrote:Who honestly doesn't have a computer that's always connected to the internet in this day and age.

Get a strawberry floating grip, people.

Born Stellar wrote:

Mafro wrote:Who honestly doesn't have a computer that's always connected to the internet in this day and age.

Get a strawberry floating grip, people.

LOL

Rogue Tomato wrote:Definitely a misstep by Blizzard, I feel a much better way to do this would be to have 1 CD-key which could be tied to an account, If you didn't have a key you couldn't play online or have any of the BNET features, locking off a entire game unless you are connected to the internet is really disrespectful to the customer, if you've paid for a game you should be able to play it wherever you want, not when the publisher deems fit.

To be honest though I'm not surprised this happened Bobby Kotick is the CEO after all.

Tycho, from Penny Arcade wrote:What is true, absolutely true, is that Blizzard does not allow people to play Diablo III while they are not connected live to their servers. It is at this point that interpretation, reason, and cynicism create a drifting mobile of warring, caustic realities.

To put things diplomatically, this is a matter about which Gabriel and I do not agree. The growing ubiquity of Internet access keeps him from feeling any tremendous sympathy for the increasingly thin band of edge cases. Plus, and this may be applied as a generality, he is unfond of hippies and this type of complaint is situated in the continuum of Hippie-Type gooseberry fool, like how James tipped your bong after a monster rip and the whole strawberry floating thing is seriously like whatever.

For my part, and I’m not, like, The Lord or anything, but the gulf between able to install a Spawn copy of the game and not being able to play offline at all seems pretty deep. Don’t really know what else to tell you. I saw that Blizzard came out with a response response, expressing their surprise at the consumer reaction, when this is more or less how consumers react every single time they learn the precise circumference of their golden leash.

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? strawberry float him, who cares.

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.

There, now don’t you feel better?