I don't know about you but uhm... even though I have a rather stable internet connection and am almost constantly online I'd like to be prepared for the eventuality that something will be going down. I'm not against the availability of being always connected, I'm against of being forced to.
id Software Praises "Always On" in Diablo 3
- Thread starter Andy Chalk
- Start date
Andy Chalk said:
You love it, you slaaaahhhg.
Forcing someone to love it does seem a little...against the point?
Exactly, Diablo and its sequel were fun because while they were really quite shallow in the plot, story, and both primary and secondary aspects, it was fun to go on a demented nature hike and kill everyone. It's not worth being on the leash twenty four seven when you want to play it.kitolz said:
In fact. Diablo 2 had a very deep character building aspect in the stats and abilities sense (even though most just find what's considered the best and go with it). However, I'm afraid in 20011 (assuming it doesn't take longer) that would be very shallow character development as well. We've come to expect not only awesome powers but at least a glint into the soul and personality (or the ability to make those things happen in our character). I don't think Diablo 3 will provide that. I think you're going to be the same emotionless golem slaying crap for fun and then only profit.
I mean how often have you wanted to tell those dimwitted NPCs to go down the damned maze themselves? Me, every, freaking, time.
I think this has to do with their development cycles. Ten years is too long. You can say all you want about perfecting it, but there just comes a point when the world leaves you behind in tech, or in popularity, or in trend when you take ten years. I think at most five to six years should be the longest. I've looked at a lot of good and bad games. One year's too short, two to three are about right, four is probably best in terms of ratio, but five to six should be the max.
However, people will by D3 and it will do well, and Blizzard will dance around with impunity and probably force this change of id's apparent resident psychotic. I can always hope though that this will be a slap to the face for Blizzard.
I disagree. P2P technology, like the one Blizzard uses, can max out most connections rather easily (and does a fantastic job of maxing out your upload speed, which is something you need to tell your DRM server that you're still connected to it). It's definitely the future in downloading considering it takes a lot of the load off the servers and results in faster download for the users. So yeah, "archaic download limits" are not the issue.Coldie said:
As for the crappy ISPs, sure you can solve most issues there (if you live in lala-land anyway), but it still doesn't solve the issue of you not being able to play your game when there is no internet connection - which as I said above, happens in a lot of situations, not all of which can reasonably be remedied.
In a perfect world, I would be totally fine with this. Cutting down on piracy makes business sense and if you even made piracy just a little more inconvenient, a lot of people stop doing it.
On the other hand. Seriously, who on the entire goddamn planet has a perfect, continuous, unbroken internet connection at all times?
This is going to make a lot of people angry. Look at how many people jumped the PS3 ship after the whole hacking incident. I get antsy when the EA servers are down and I can't play Bad Company 2 for a few hours. It often leads to me popping in Black Ops - and then inevitably I end up playing it for a month instead.
Especially with a game like Diablo, this is going to be maddening. My old roommate practically spent his entire college career grinding in Diablo 2. Gamers like that are going to take even one hour of denied access as a personal affront.
On the other hand. Seriously, who on the entire goddamn planet has a perfect, continuous, unbroken internet connection at all times?
This is going to make a lot of people angry. Look at how many people jumped the PS3 ship after the whole hacking incident. I get antsy when the EA servers are down and I can't play Bad Company 2 for a few hours. It often leads to me popping in Black Ops - and then inevitably I end up playing it for a month instead.
Especially with a game like Diablo, this is going to be maddening. My old roommate practically spent his entire college career grinding in Diablo 2. Gamers like that are going to take even one hour of denied access as a personal affront.
I was interested in this game. I won't be buying it now.
Vote with your feet, and with your wallet. Always-on DRM is for the convenience of developers, and inconveniences consumers, especially globally.
People keep saying in this thread how bad the situation is in places in the United States - guys, you have some really great Internet services relative to places like my own country, Australia.
You think you will have trouble, but you have no clue how much worse this is going to be outside of the US if it becomes a conventional way of designing big budget games to "protect against piracy".
It just doesn't work against piracy anyway. I'm willing to bet that a pirate could easily hack and re-code a heavily single-player game to work offline with relative ease, unless there are files that exist and load only on the server (which is how MMOs separate your character from your map files).
And once that's happened, this will become an extreme inconvenience to those who honestly bought the game but don't have urban, highly sought after connection stability.
Who is this meant to please? It certainly can't please the consumer and it can't save the developers money. The only group I can see pretending that this helps anything is investors who don't know anything about games or about piracy. Maybe that's the real reason for all of this - for Blizzard and companies who use DRM to pretend it's the perfect shield against piracy when an investor queries about the impact of illegal sharing.
Vote with your feet, and with your wallet. Always-on DRM is for the convenience of developers, and inconveniences consumers, especially globally.
People keep saying in this thread how bad the situation is in places in the United States - guys, you have some really great Internet services relative to places like my own country, Australia.
You think you will have trouble, but you have no clue how much worse this is going to be outside of the US if it becomes a conventional way of designing big budget games to "protect against piracy".
It just doesn't work against piracy anyway. I'm willing to bet that a pirate could easily hack and re-code a heavily single-player game to work offline with relative ease, unless there are files that exist and load only on the server (which is how MMOs separate your character from your map files).
And once that's happened, this will become an extreme inconvenience to those who honestly bought the game but don't have urban, highly sought after connection stability.
Who is this meant to please? It certainly can't please the consumer and it can't save the developers money. The only group I can see pretending that this helps anything is investors who don't know anything about games or about piracy. Maybe that's the real reason for all of this - for Blizzard and companies who use DRM to pretend it's the perfect shield against piracy when an investor queries about the impact of illegal sharing.
Am sure there will eventually be a h4x0r3d version that works offline just fine. Again, genuine customers get burned.
Depends on you as a customer really.KingsGambit said:
But market economy claims as long as you are given clear terms of usage before you pay, you as a customer have to make a choice if its worth your purchase or not.
Some customers might not like these clearly stated terms and decide not to buy. But people that get hacked versions are not customers ... at least not Blizzard's. Good luck getting any clear terms of usage or support from the hacker syndicates.
A customer getting burned would only apply if Blizzard lied about terms of use (i.e. always on) until after you purchased. But from what we see they are very open about it up front.
Living in Indonesia, with some of the dodgyest internet services around, I will say this Tim Willits: Fuck off.
You asshole. I don't care if I sound like a whinger or an echo, but this is BS, and I will NOT be buying this game, even though I was dying for its release for a decade. Seriously, Blizzard have crossed the line, and to see id following the path makes me very sad. Blah blah, overreacting, I don't give a shit! I will be one of the few who don't buy it, and stand by that statement.
I can't even watch a youtube video without waiting 10 minutes for it to buffer, online gaming is a thing of the past for me because of my apartment connection being shared with hundreds of people on a miniscule line, and you have excluded me, and others like me, from getting your game.
"I'm actually kind of surprised in terms of there even being a question in today's age around online play and the requirement around that," - Blizzard's Robert Bridenbrecker
Surprised, uh yeah, right. Well I have 2 words for you too buddy.
It's not that this game has made me so upset, it's a disappointment, but so what. The world keeps spinning. The biggest fuck off that could happen is if this becomes a staple of the gaming industry in times to come, and just shows that corporations can do whatever the hell they want to the industry, fuck the consumer. Gaming happens to be my favorite pastime unfortunately, and I am scared of what might happen to it. Forget modding, forget having control of your software, forget being able to play while in remote areas. It's all about CONTROL, that's why cloud computing is coming.
You asshole. I don't care if I sound like a whinger or an echo, but this is BS, and I will NOT be buying this game, even though I was dying for its release for a decade. Seriously, Blizzard have crossed the line, and to see id following the path makes me very sad. Blah blah, overreacting, I don't give a shit! I will be one of the few who don't buy it, and stand by that statement.
I can't even watch a youtube video without waiting 10 minutes for it to buffer, online gaming is a thing of the past for me because of my apartment connection being shared with hundreds of people on a miniscule line, and you have excluded me, and others like me, from getting your game.
"I'm actually kind of surprised in terms of there even being a question in today's age around online play and the requirement around that," - Blizzard's Robert Bridenbrecker
Surprised, uh yeah, right. Well I have 2 words for you too buddy.
It's not that this game has made me so upset, it's a disappointment, but so what. The world keeps spinning. The biggest fuck off that could happen is if this becomes a staple of the gaming industry in times to come, and just shows that corporations can do whatever the hell they want to the industry, fuck the consumer. Gaming happens to be my favorite pastime unfortunately, and I am scared of what might happen to it. Forget modding, forget having control of your software, forget being able to play while in remote areas. It's all about CONTROL, that's why cloud computing is coming.
I seriously need to come find where all you people are living where you have such internet problems in 2011. I've been dropped from a Starcraft match once I think because a storm took out my internet.Atmos Duality said:
The point of the Penny Arcade comic is that people are bitching about being forced to do something that they have been already doing for nearly a decade now anyway. And then to make it worse, on top of all that incessant bitching is the lingering fact that most gamers are hypocrites who will still buy Diablo 3 despite posting a treatise online about how always-on DRM is the lovechild of Hitler, Satan, and Kotick.
When people not in the US buy it Blizzard will realise that they have to change that policy.
Sick of this US centric crap. Think global already.
The simple fact is - the game will sell globally - so any comments that talk about "the US" are just ignorant.
And globally - Internet connections are not that great. Plus most of us have data limits on our plans.
Infrastructure is the key here and - for want of a better term - Internet infrastructure is NOT the same globally.
Gotta love companies with their archaic or just plain stupid business models.
Sick of this US centric crap. Think global already.
The simple fact is - the game will sell globally - so any comments that talk about "the US" are just ignorant.
And globally - Internet connections are not that great. Plus most of us have data limits on our plans.
Infrastructure is the key here and - for want of a better term - Internet infrastructure is NOT the same globally.
Gotta love companies with their archaic or just plain stupid business models.
For christ's sake, id, not you guys too. It's like all the developers I respect are going out of their way to shoot themselves in the foot.
I'm going go on holiday next week and have even bought a new laptop so I can play games when I have some free time when not doing stuff wil family. I've only installed the likes of Mass Effect 1 and 2 because I don't think where I'm going has WiFi - and normally the WiFi in the places I go on holiday to is shit.
So if I wanted to play an always on DRM game I couldn't play it. In fact, and I apologise for mentioning such a thing, but the only way I'd probably be able to play such a game in such a situation is to download a pirated version that had removed or spoofed the DRM. Which makes no sense to me because the whole idea of the DRM was to stop such things happening in the first place - which makes me laugh, quite honestly.
Steam auto-updates everything and it pisses me off. Why? because it slows my internet down, I can't control it (even when I set a program to NOT update automatically) and I cannot play the game until the download is complete. These can range from 14 megs to 3 gigs worth of stuff.
I'm going go on holiday next week and have even bought a new laptop so I can play games when I have some free time when not doing stuff wil family. I've only installed the likes of Mass Effect 1 and 2 because I don't think where I'm going has WiFi - and normally the WiFi in the places I go on holiday to is shit.
So if I wanted to play an always on DRM game I couldn't play it. In fact, and I apologise for mentioning such a thing, but the only way I'd probably be able to play such a game in such a situation is to download a pirated version that had removed or spoofed the DRM. Which makes no sense to me because the whole idea of the DRM was to stop such things happening in the first place - which makes me laugh, quite honestly.
I want to know full details of Diablo 3 before I think of buying it but I am opposed to DRM features. I know they say it's an anti piracy measure but I've BOUGHT THE GAME! There's no other media that requires me to be online at all times to access my purchase. Films are always in my possession, books, even e-books and also music, I can store these on my computer and access them anytime, even when my internet crashes.
DRM is just a Guantamino Bay approach to piracy, assume everyone is a pirate until proven otherwise. As a PC gamer I feel like I'm being pressured into feeling guilty for doing the right thing.
Obviously other DRM systems have been borken in recent years and become hacked very quickly, there's an extra credits episode detailing pretty much everything I'm saying here but it is true.
I want to buy my games to OWN them, the choice of when I play something I've bought with good money through the proper channels should rest with me not a paranoid dev who is making pirated games more convenient.
DRM is just a Guantamino Bay approach to piracy, assume everyone is a pirate until proven otherwise. As a PC gamer I feel like I'm being pressured into feeling guilty for doing the right thing.
Obviously other DRM systems have been borken in recent years and become hacked very quickly, there's an extra credits episode detailing pretty much everything I'm saying here but it is true.
I want to buy my games to OWN them, the choice of when I play something I've bought with good money through the proper channels should rest with me not a paranoid dev who is making pirated games more convenient.
well until blizzard switch off the servers you have to connect too, you mean?Mariena said:
or you move house and your new isp/phone supplier is slow to move.
or you find yourself in tighter financial situation and suddenly, good fast internet starts looking like a luxury you maybe cant afford?
or a drunk friend/hyper child/angry spouse spills *something* on your router?
or your ISP just has one of those spastic nights where something dies between you and the gateway?
or heavy storms hit your area?
I don't have a problem with the technical aspects myself, but others will and I'm not a selfish asshat. Not buying anything else off either company, two can play at 'fuck you' attitudes.
Also, 'force'? Force? Go suck a million dicks, sir, and choke yourself to death.
What the hell. You know, my friend stopped buying games years ago. He said he has enough replayable games and fantastic free games that he doesn't need to, with the odd exception of indie titles. I'm starting to think he might have the right idea. It's just a game, guys. You don't need it.
Also, 'force'? Force? Go suck a million dicks, sir, and choke yourself to death.
What the hell. You know, my friend stopped buying games years ago. He said he has enough replayable games and fantastic free games that he doesn't need to, with the odd exception of indie titles. I'm starting to think he might have the right idea. It's just a game, guys. You don't need it.