Town portals have been supplanted by the Stone of Recall, an infinitely reusable item that takes up no inventory space and provides essentially the same functionality. That said, as I understand it Stone of Recall has a cast time and is interrupted when you take damage, so it doesn't work in combat. If you have to go pick up a phone in the middle of a horde of monsters, you're shit outta luck.Haakong said:
Diablo III Has Single Player Online
- Thread starter Shamus Young
- Start date
This game quickly went from a "must-have" to a "bargain bin" game. They definitely lost their $60 sale from me with the always online BS. I just won't support this crap at all. Last week I lost my online connection for a few days, if that had happened when I was playing a game like this man that really would have pissed me off.
Steam pisses me off enough already since you have to continually make sure your games are up-to-date or their offline mode just refuses to work. Screw blizzard and their crappy tactics. I'll still laugh when their game is hacked day 1 (maybe day 2, if they're lucky).
Steam pisses me off enough already since you have to continually make sure your games are up-to-date or their offline mode just refuses to work. Screw blizzard and their crappy tactics. I'll still laugh when their game is hacked day 1 (maybe day 2, if they're lucky).
Originally, I thought that people who said they weren't going to buy the game because of the always online were overreacting a bit. It seemed stupid to be, but not so stupid that it made the game not worth buying. After looking at this, I've changed my mind, and I probably won't be getting Diablo III, at least not very soon after its launch. Looking at the comments here, this looks like an atrocious business decision on Blizzard's part.
And so it is when a company becomes so big they can profit from showing pure contempt for their playerbase.Shamus Young said:
Blizzard is so used to having minimal piracy issues with WoW, due to the login/subscription model. They want that in all of their games. Or, more accurately, they want to prepare all single-player games to become microtransaction oriented, so they can control the game and sell people add-ons that used to be free.
(Allowing player-made mods is a major threat to the profitability of downloadable content, after all.)
This.Paradoxrifts said:
Developers are listening to their players, and listening very well. And then they're using that knowledge against us.
They learned, for instance, that little player-made mods and add-ons can keep people playing a game for many, many years past its prime. And now they've found a way to monetize that knowledge: the always-online DRM ensures you have the stock, unmodded client, which ensures that free player-made mods won't distract you from our very affordable DLC.
Players used to get a game that was also a self-entertainment tool kit. But apparently we were just participating in long-term market research that allowed these guys to figure out what we love doing, take it away from us, and then sell it back piecemeal.
Won't happen *quickly*. Always the chance someone will spend the time to either get into their server and find the equations, or start to extrapolate them based on data that can be collected while playing.ionveau said:
Are either of these likely to happen anytime remotely soon (or even sane in the case of the latter)? I'm pretty certain not, but that doesn't make this "always-on" DRM invulnerable.
Side note: Was so hyped about this game since my first time beating Diablo 2 (many years ago), and I'm still sad to think I will pass this one up until it either gains an offline single player or is $5 (very unlikely). I still think single player felt like a more "legit" mode of play (given there was no backup, it was harder to rush/skip content, and finding those special items meant so much more [this all based on my experiences from playing both online and offline heavily] )
Blizzard have not given the consumer a real choice on whether or not they wish to have their time monetised in this fashion, effectively turning the player's time into a form of currency without their direst consent. This is a dangerous & dehumanising shift of how certain sections of the gaming industry have started to envision the leisure hours that consumers pump into their products. I can't get behind the idea of any design philosophy that treats my time as the money of somebody else.Dastardly said:
Once upon a time if a player wanted to cheat the game in order to get a particular item then they loaded up a trainer or entered a cheat code and got the item that way. In Diablo 3 you'll use the shop to achieve exactly the same result but you will be spending real world currency to do it.
The last straw for me will be when they go after somebody for modding the game that I payed for in such a way that threatens their ability to properly monetise my time.
Nothing to see here, internet as usual, you either scream or it's like you aren't talking at all, I know it, you know it and you can bet Blizzard knows it too. In the end, when the reviews start coming in, only thing that will be important is how good, how fun the game is.Haakong said:
When i buy a game, I NEVER EVER buy it because I want to support the way a dev studio conducts it's business, only relevant factor is, is the potential amount of fun i can get from the experience equal or greater to the amount of money spent.
I don't see how this is any different.
Heh. I thought Blizzard already went all out with their DRM when they released SC2, but I was wrong.
So now on top of mandatory online login, the SP game will fail when the connection drops in game and you can have lag in SP.
The lack of pause is just a minor insult on top of everything, since you could prolly use a town portal anytime and nothing ever happens in diablo towns.
So now on top of mandatory online login, the SP game will fail when the connection drops in game and you can have lag in SP.
The lack of pause is just a minor insult on top of everything, since you could prolly use a town portal anytime and nothing ever happens in diablo towns.
Maybe Blizzard think we are like those parents that would let their kids die of starvation rather than being able to pause the game. I wonder what the penalties are for dying in game, they would have to be pretty severe for parents to risk their kids welfare for.
Actually I would bet my life on it being hacked. The fact that it is mostly server-side certainly hasn't stopped hackers from hacking almost every MMO that is worth hacking. Take WoW for example, you can get on hacked servers if you did a bit of research. I'm almost positive that it's going to be the exact same for this game.eventhorizon525 said:
The act of telling hackers they will never be able to hack a game is only fuel for the fire, it's going to happen eventually. Especially for a game of this "magnitude".
They're not having to "go after" anyone -- they just require that your client be linked to their system and put under constant surveillance, so you simply can't do it.Paradoxrifts said:
To my mind, it's not so much malicious as it is childish, as if you were a child playing over at a friend's house, and that friend suddenly said, "No! If you won't play the game the way I want you to, then I'm not letting you use my toys!"
Does that 'friend' have the right to do that? Sure. They are his toys, after all. But that kind of attitude doesn't promote fun, and it doesn't promote that sort of "partnership of imagination" that playing really requires. So while it's within his rights, it's a counter-productive idea for the friendship -- he has forgotten that you may have to follow his rules at the moment, but you don't have to stay his friend.
Were people actually expecting it to have a pause? It would've had to be like the StarCraft 2 pause... and Blizzard has shown that, at times, if the fans make a big enough uproar and word their criticism intelligently and constructively enough, they'll change features. If you guys really want to have a pause, push it over on their forums. Tell them that if SC2 can have it, then Diablo 3 can have it too.
That would be an entirely case-by-case basis. There are many situations when hackers do in fact get the better product, quite a few are better off from the hacking. The issues (draconian DRM) being stripped away from the game, thus ending up a better game without it. Even though I'm not saying hackers should hack a game, I completely understand why they do it, it's the devs and publishers fault for thinking they can screw the paying customer over just to get back at the hackers, while the hackers see it as a good time trumping them and rising to the challenge.Hammeroj said:
Would it really have been too much effort to split characters as "online" and "offline", where offline characters are singleplayer and LAN only, while online characters are multiplayer and one person multiplayer as they have it now?
I can see the simplification they get by making the game ONLY a client, so that they don't have to put any effort into ensuring that the server can run on a regular system, and the client itself can be smaller, simpler, and faster (with the hidden part that it is now limited by the network as well, and any limits from the CPU, RAM and disk speed are only slightly reduced).
... though I wonder how well it would work if they sold a LAN server program separately... At least they could justify it as another source of profit.
I can see the simplification they get by making the game ONLY a client, so that they don't have to put any effort into ensuring that the server can run on a regular system, and the client itself can be smaller, simpler, and faster (with the hidden part that it is now limited by the network as well, and any limits from the CPU, RAM and disk speed are only slightly reduced).
... though I wonder how well it would work if they sold a LAN server program separately... At least they could justify it as another source of profit.