Blizzard continues to state the most peculiar stuff regarding Diablo III, which was revealed at the beginning of August to require a constant internet connection, dubiously claiming that it wasn’t an anti-piracy measure. Now, Blizzard is stating that an offline Diablo III would be flawed, and that it is ”not really being played right if it’s not online.”
This statement was made by game director Jay Wilson when he was interviewed at Gamescom and asked about the always-on requirement.
When asked what a player should do if the internet wiring in their house was flawed, Wilson replied, “Erm… upgrade the wiring in his house? I mean, in this day and age the notion that there’s this a whole vast majority of players out there that don’t have online connectivity – this doesn’t really fly any more.
“I mean, at our hotel, there’s nine wi-fi networks that I can access. Just from the hotel! And they’re all public – they’re all paid – but they’re pretty cheap, and they’re all publicly available. So the notion that there’s just tons and tons of people out there that aren’t connected – isn’t… I don’t think is really accurate.”
How very Marie Antoinette-ish of you, Jay.
Wilson continued regarding single player Diablo III, “There’s two basic problems with us doing that. One is players default immediately to that. So, they basically unintentionally opt out of all the cooperative experience, all the trading experience, and the core of Diablo is a circle-trading game. So for us we’ve always viewed it as an online game – the game’s not really being played right if it’s not online, so when we have that specific question of why are we allowing it? Because that’s the best experience, why would you want it any other way?”
“You’ve got to make choices about what you want to do, and sometimes those choices are going to make some people unhappy, but if you feel like it’s what is the right thing to do to making a better product then you have to do it.”
“An online experience is what we want to provide for this game. Every choice you make is going to omit some part of the audience. Some people don’t like fantasy games, so should we have not made Diablo a fantasy game, because some people don’t like that? Some people don’t like barbarians. Should we not have put a barbarian in the game because some people don’t like it?” he contiuned.
Regarding piracy and modding, Wilson added, ”If we allow an Offline mode, it changes the structure of the data that we have to put on the user’s system. Essentially we would have to put our server architecture onto the client so that it can run its own personal server. Doing that essentially is one of the reasons why Diablo 2 was a much easier game to hack than obviously any other game you’d mention and so it’s what led to extensive cheating and item dupes and things like that.”
“I would never guarantee that we’re never going to have those things in Diablo 3, but it’s one of the things that our community has been the most vocal about, wanting this fixed, and if we essentially are putting the server out there…we’re not really going to be able to better than Diablo 2.”
The question PC Gamer never asked was, ”What if Blizzard’s servers go down?” Recently, Dragon Age: Origins players got zonked when they could no longer accept their DLC because the servers went down, and before that, Assassin’s Creed and Command & Conquer 4 both had similar problems.
And the worst part? Diablo III will probably be pirated in some form anyway.