http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/08/01/diablo-3-cannot-be-played-offline/

I know how unpopular Ubisoft is for this and while Blizzards reasoning is more sound than Ubisofts, i wonder gow people will react to PC's wonder child Blizzard doing this?


here's the transcript of the story

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.”

Yes it can. Judging by Starcraft 2's guest mode, the full single player experience will be free.

Nice sensationalistic 'news' there, this was known at BlizzCon 2009.

hey, i didnt create the story, i merely posted it here

The bit with the "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.” " kind of hints that there might not necessarily be a guest mode, even though an earlier game of theirs had it.

It was the same thing with Starcraft 2 in the beginning.. "Nooooo, you have to be online to get the full experience and whatever..."

A simple guest pass activation gives you the full campaign.

Maybe they've changed this, we'll see in the final product. Not personally affected by this, since I play Blizzard's games when I have internet connection only (Starcraft 2 stats and all that).

I guess for the Diablo model it would make sense. Starcraft 2 could have an offline mode because the main campaign and the multiplayer were always completely disconnected, with nothing carrying over between the two, except achievement rewards which you had to be online to get anyway.

In Diablo though, I guess the single and multiplayer universes will be the same. Given the more drawn out nature of the game, I guess you can switch between single and multiplayer when you feel like it for your character, and with a completely offline mode there would be no way to sanitize the character data when it "comes back" from offline.

It's an anti-cheat feature above all, but couldn't it also be solved by allowing characters to be played in offline mode and offline mode only? Playing a character offline at any time would permanently lock it out from online play, with a server-side track of which characters are eligible for off- and online, and a reasonable cap on number of chars pr. player.

No information on this in the article though.

No, from their announcement, the guest mode isn't present in Diablo 3; now, if they're going to go back and rectify that is a different thing, but as of right now, the only way to play Diablo 3 is by being constantly connected to the internet.

to sum up


The game requires a constant internet connection. It cannot be played offline.
Mods are “expressly prohibited.”
Items in the auction house are bought and sold for real-life money.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/08/01/diablo-iii-no-mods-online-only-cash-trades/

i took this quote from Skystrider in the other thread but i think it shows diablo 3 going downhill

Yes, it seems that way... They've changed it, it was supposed to be like Starcraft 2. BlizzCon will give us more info.

When they started banning people’s battle.net account for cheating in Starcraft 2, an act which prevented installing the game and authenticating for OFFLINE play, I said they had gone too crazy at protecting their game. People laughed that off… well now they’ve gone a whole other step.

People say this a lot about DRM but I never have.. they just turned a purchase into a not purchase. I will not buy this game even though I want to. Will I pirate it? I don’t know. I have honestly never downloaded a game I never bought before… I will have to struggle with my morals on that one. I likely will not, which makes the whole thing even more of a bummer.

I give us even odds that they reverse this though.

wth blizzard we dont care about your damn online crap and trade :X
just give us the loot and the lord of terror :X in single player :X

I can safeky say that those 3 things combined have killed any interest i had

That wasn't really cheating though. There are official cheat codes released, but those banned were modifying the game which could have possibly effected online play...

.. and we all know at what level Starcraft is on the eSports scene.

I am fine with banning people from online play. I am not fine with taking someone's access to singleplayer away for any reason what-so-ever. I felt dirty that I gave them $60 for that game when that news broke. I won't make the same mistake again.

Yea, but that was the whole point, to ban everybody using third party stuff. These 'cheats' were actual modifications for the game (done by reverse engineering it), if I read it correctly back then.
While their reasoning for not allowing offline seems fine, they could have made a fully offline system where you can only play by yourself and are not allowed to take that char online.