The.Bard said:
I agree with you in theory... at least insofar as at some point technology does move on, and expecting outdated tech to work forever is unreasonable.
Howeverrrrrr, you're using a completely separate argument to cover Blizzard for making a decidedly anti-consumer move. Moving on with the times involves - generally speaking - things getting better and discarding the older, inferior things. HD gaming, new consoles, faster internet speeds... these benefit us in many obvious ways.
This Draconian DRM is the exact opposite of that. This is not progress. This is not "times moving on." This is times moving backwards. This is regression. At its "finest."
Every example you listed involved a small sacrifice in favor of something better. What is the benefit to the consumer of forced online servers? That's right, there is not ONE single way in which forced online servers (MMO) benefit the customer more than providing an offline single player option where anything goes and your chars aren't backed up.
Forced online servers (MMO) for a single player experience are a noose around gaming's neck. WE the consumers get screwed because they think they can delay piracy. And all the while, Diablo 2 - which had an offline single player option - STILL goes for $20, despite being pirateable.... 12 years later.
I'm sorry, asinine decisions should be treated like they are asinine. And summarily blown up with as large a pile of exposives as we can muster.
TL;DR - Blizzard is being anti-consumer, there is NO benefit to turning D3 into an MMO, & I hope they choke on this decision for a long long looooong time to come.
I know quite a few people who have ended up getting D2 through less than legitimate means due to losing the disks and whatnot. One or two that never got them and find it too hard to get the game so just acquired it through illigitimate means. A game like D3 would have been pirated to hell. At best this system of things always being online will prevent the pirates getting hold of the game for free. At worst it allows Blizzard a few weeks/months of actually getting paid to make the game.
You think it adds nothing to the game. To a degree, I agree with you. But, and this is a pretty hefty "But", forced online gameplay is not a new thing to Diablo. The best runewords? Ladder only. The best Runes? ladder only. The best loot? Ladder only. Quite a lot of gameplay features in the original were, you guessed it, ladder only.
Sure you COULD play the game offline and many people do. I still play D2 for a nostalgia trip with my sisters bloke. Hell, our last runthrough we got to Nightmare. Just got into Act 4 on Nightmare. Annoyingly, my character was lost following having to replace a very, very broken computer. Which would not have happened if it had been backed up onto a server.
And as anyone who has EVER played the original online will tell you, Hacks were game breaking and depressingly common. All balance goes out the window if a fool with some charm that gives him godlike auras runs past, oneshotting you and eveything around you without having to so much as press a single button.
Forcing always online play prevents that. It prevents people being in situations like my own, losing several high level (50+) characters due to a hardware crash. Now, you could argue that if I had ripped the harddrive out of my old computer, bought some more hardware and spent some time with it, I could have saved my old characters. But that is a lot of effort and whatnot which an always online system would prevent.
Yes, It sucks that people with outdated hardware, people without access to DSL will be unable to play the game. However, there are benefits to this system. Blizzard gets paid for what they make, people cannot lose characters unless something happens server side, hacking is prevented from utterly buttfucking online play (For now, at least).
Now you can refute most of those statements. In the early days of WoW, characters of mine got annihilated. In the early days, items of mine got deleted and very, very rarely, someone with hacks would turn up and fuck things up for people (Or, in the case of one of the servers I was on, hand out thousands of gold for the lols whilst moving at near enough to Lightspeed) and it is possible to find private servers. But now, a few years on, the system works well. Hacks have been all but annihilated, bar the occasional bot. I cannot remember the last time I lost anything due to a server issue.
So does always online gameplay add anything?
Yes. It makes those who choose to play Multiplayer happier. It adds a safety net, preventing hardware issues or viruses from fucking over your characters. And, Quite importantly, It stops, at least for now, rampant pirating of the game.
I will admit that I cannot find too many good factors to being forced to stay online. And I can see the negatives, not everyone has a stable internet connection and sometimes we are away from our routers. But, well, we might not like the way technology is going, but in my eyes this is a step in the right direction.
I know this view is less than popular. But in todays world of pirating and the like, this is what publishers are going to be doing to prevent their games being stolen. And for those who cannot afford or do not have access to DSL? Well, I am not going to be a prick and state that videogames are a luxury. But at times in everyones life sometimes there are just games we cannot play.
I grew up in a country where rampant censorship meant getting hold of games or movies was all but impossible. DSL was ludicrously expensive. I used to play WoW with an average of 1200ms. As for the expansions? Ordering online meant a several week wait and insane prices to get the bloody thing delivered. It sucks. But not everything is going to be equally available to everyone, everywhere.
But the clear difference between me and those who are complaining about the future is, well... I didn't. I thought it sucked but I never thought that games companies should do anything different. I never thought I had a "Right" to play games that could not make it into a conservative muslim country. Shit happens.
Always online is the future. It is the future for many, many reasons. Primarily though, its the future because these days, the majority of the gaming market, has DSL. Simple enough. So games are being produced to take advantage of that. Games are always going to be marketted towards the majority.
This entire thread is filled with three kinds of people. Those who are fighting the inevitable. Those who accept the inevitable. And people like me who are trying to look on the positive sides of the inevitable.
tldr;
The future is what the future is. Blizzard is being pro-consumer as the majority of its market will be able to use the always online feature to its advantage and it prevents some of the issues with the earlier game from being repeated. I accept the inevitable and see that perhaps our future is not so bleak as some would seem to think.
