Diablo 3 WILL HAVE offline, but is "discouraged".

Olrod

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I just checked the Blizzard forums and found this tiny glimmer of hope:
There is offline single player, but it's something we're going to attempt to discourage as best as possible.

A lot of us, myself included, and probably a lot of you and your friends had the exact same Diablo II experience. You get the game, start playing, your friend says let's try co-op, and when you log in your characters aren't there. After a slight freakout moment and potentially some use of Webcrawler to search the World Wide Web with Netscape 6, you realized or figured out that you had to start over. That's actually an experience that can cause someone to stop playing the game. Maybe you or I let out a huge sigh, and maybe a brief mourning period after realizing the last 60 hours were completely wasted, but we pressed on. That's not the case for everyone. Maybe most people. I actually refused to start over for a while and continued on in single-player before finally jumping on Battle.net. Who knows what a lesser man would have done... ;)

So, if we can get people online and creating character on Battle.net from the get-go, there's less chance of that catastrophe. But there's still a play offline option, if you should need it.
The thread with that comment in is here: http://forums.battle.net/thread.html?topicId=27387874231&sid=3000

So it looks like Diablo 3 isn't going to be a lost cause after all...
 

ZeroMachine

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Online play wouldn't have made it a lost cause to begin with. It's Blizzard. It's Diablo. It's going to be a best seller. How so many people could think otherwise for a reason like that just seems silly to me.
 

Fiz_The_Toaster

books, Books, BOOKS
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They can discourage the living hell out of it until the cows come home, people will still use offline.

I'm in the minority of 'I will just have to deal with it being online', still getting it. I've waited 10 years for this game and nothing will stop me from getting it.
 

Saelune

Trump put kids in cages!
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Or....just let you keep the characters. Im playing Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom. I can play offline, online, whatever...with the same character. Not exactly a huge game like Diablo 3 either. I sense laziness or poor judgement.
 

Benth08x

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That quote is from October 2010. I think it's safe to say they've changed their mind since then.
 

Ilikemilkshake

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I dont really see why you cant play online with the same character as offline, like in borderlands, or even an fps like rainbow six vegas 2
But at least their giving people this option
 

Dogstile

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Ilikemilkshake said:
I dont really see why you cant play online with the same character as offline, like in borderlands, or even an fps like rainbow six vegas 2
But at least their giving people this option
Borderlands kind of has this massive problem of hacked guns getting in.
 

Blackpapa

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Saelune said:
Or....just let you keep the characters. Im playing Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom. I can play offline, online, whatever...with the same character. Not exactly a huge game like Diablo 3 either. I sense laziness or poor judgement.
How does the game prevent you downloading the character, hexediting the stats to 0xFF and giving uber loot items?
 

lacktheknack

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Come on. Try learning from Titan Quest. You didn't have to start over in Titan Quest if you decided to go from singleplayer to multiplayer.

If anything, some singleplayer was ENCOURAGED for your first twenty levels, so you had time to make a unique and useful character who wasn't necessarily "bop heads, repeat".
 

SixWingedAsura

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Wait, so I can't make a character offline and bring it to offline?


NOOOOOO-wait.

I don't give a sh*t. As long as there's offline single player, then boo-freakin'-yah! Blizzard, you might not be a lost cause after all!
 

Benth08x

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Olrod said:
http://www.gameplanet.co.nz/pc/games/156898.Diablo-III/features/137613.Diablo-IIIs-Jay-Wilson/

Gameplanet: At what point did you decide that Diablo III would be only playable online?

Jay Wilson: It was a decision we crept into over the duration of the project. A big part of it is just to give the players the best possible experience. We felt like we'd reached a saturation point with online play and networking that prevented it from being a big concern. 99.9% of people out there have internet connections, even planes now have internet connections, so the old argument of 'I want to be able to play on the plane', well, the plane has internet now too.

We felt like there was enough pervasive online technology that the best possible experience we can give players was to offer them persistent characters that can play multiplayer at any time, that we can store forever, that don't get deleted, which is something we had to do for the previous system because of storage concerns. And also just the enhanced security we can offer in a game that's only online. A big problem with Diablo II was security, and security is a lot better when we don't have to ship all the server infrastructure out with the game.

From 8/1/11, as opposed to 10/24/10 in the linked thread of the OP.
 

Olrod

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*sigh*

Bloody, bloody damn.

Well I guess there's really no point in this thread anymore, is there? :(
 

SixWingedAsura

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Well, I take back what I said.

Screw you Blizzard.

Screw you and your online play. Screw you and your AH. Screw you and your no Mods.

I hope you enjoy being the demise of gaming as we know it.
 

Matt Dellar

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99.9% of people out there have internet connections, even planes now have internet connections, so the old argument of 'I want to be able to play on the plane', well, the plane has internet now too.
99.9% of people have Internet? Maybe so (though I seriously doubt it). Now look at how many people have dial-up. How about low-reception 3G (me)? DSL shared by a hundred people? High-latency satellite connections? Blizzard, come on. I can understand an online requirement to log in or something, but "always-online" is, in my eyes, a bad decision.

My choppy, low-reception 3G gets reset randomly. Theoretically, I COULD play Diablo 3 online, but I'd sign in, create a character, click to move my character, and I'd get an error message saying I was signed out of the server. I sign in again or wait until the connection can be reestablished. Three minutes of gameplay, usually with heavy lag because I live in the middle of a forest. Then I get signed out again. I can't play a game like this. I quit Runescape after switching to 3G because it was actually CHOPPIER AND LESS RELIABLE THAN DIAL-UP. You read that right. I'd click on a tree and my guy would eat a sandwich, take a nap, twiddle his fingers, and then he'd move to the tree if he felt like it. He'd chop it only if he was in a really good mood.

If that offline isn't in the game, I'm not buying it. I never thought I'd say this concerning a company whose games I actually buy and enjoy, but I might actually support the pirates this round. Or I'd just sit D3 out and play something that doesn't require something I don't have. Like Skyrim.
 

Dragonheart57

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Matt Dellar said:
I agree, my internet is shit as well. I can play online, if my computer is in a good mood, but sometimes it dies for no good reason. I cannot play a game like Diablo 3 with a constant internet connection, its not possible.
 

willard3

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I'm curious...how many people here actually played Diablo II a lot? Because some of these responses seem to indicate a lack of knowledge about how the game worked.

Locally stored characters could be used in single-player, LAN games, and Open Battle.net. This was great for playing with friends, because you could grind for a while by yourself, then trade and co-op over a LAN...excellent for dorm halls. Open B-net allowed this as well, but it also meant that these local characters could be HACKED local characters...which happened surprisingly often. Blizzard didn't like that very much, but the option was there.

They also had standard B-net, where you created a character stored on the Blizzard servers. This prevented a lot of the common hacks and muling programs, so everyone had a more even experience when playing with people you didn't know.

Back OT: sounds like Blizzard is continuing this practice with Diablo III, albeit reluctantly, and probably without Open B-net. Sooooooo....more of the same? I'm ok with that.
 

Altorin

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ummm... the whole "your character being gone", might have been because Diablo 2 deleted your online characters after 3 months of being idle