While I don't condone DDoS attacks, the only reason for D4 to be online-only is monetization IMO: Blizzard wants to sell cosmetics, so people have to see other people wearing them. There is little gameplay benefit from being an MMO-lite.
A system that tracks what store items you might be interested in, and places you in matches with high-skilled players who own that item, making you associate the item with high skill
A system that places you against lower-skilled opponents immediately after you bought an item, making you associate making a purchase with being better.
From here to "they want you to look at other players and how expensive their shit is" is only one step. Honestly at this point I'm even surprised they're not faking it entirely, making other players just happen to be wearing expensive skins on your screen even if the actual account hasn't bought that. It's not like you can check anyway.
Indeed. It also has the inherent side effect of making the game pay to win, because if you don't pay you get put in hard matches against the skilled people who paid, and if you do it puts you against weaker opponents. This is why micro transactions should be banned straight up, even if they do not impact gameplay. Belgium had the right idea.
I experienced this first hand playing wow. The team will straight up send out email surveys asking if players would be willing to pay x for y service with different people getting different prices. They calculate these things to extract as much money from the dedicated fans as possible. I went back to playing the private servers.
I came to the same conclusion as you: why would people buy their stuff if they could just run an unlocker script or edit a config file to give that stuff to them?
It's basically malicious DRM
Potentially unpopular opinion, I like running into random other players in the world, particularly when doing events. I don't give a fuck about Blizzard's cosmetics and, frankly, unless I'm examining people, I can't even tell what they're wearing half the time.
There is little gameplay benefit from being an MMO-lite.
There would be benefit to it if they embraced it. I'm convinced they wanted for it to be more of an MMO-lite but got cold feet and played it safe, as with everything else.
Loot rolls need to be controlled by the server, or else people will just exploit all that stuff.
Diablo doesn't have a lot of mechanics that really need players to interact with each other, but games like that and WOW are entirely based around gear grind. All accomplishment requires players to have a level playing field or players just won't want to play. It's just wierd like that.
If people want an offline game, they should buy an offline game. It's not that smart to buy an always-online game and then complain about it.
I don't know anything about the most recent games, but if it's anything like D1 and D2, a huge part of the game is single player. So what if someone wants to cheat their way through the game? It's not affecting other players and you get to enjoy the game the way you want to.
IMHO the best way is what Blizzard did with Diablo 2, where players simply had every choice:
Want to play alone? You can, just play offline. Want to play with people in your house? You can, using LAN mode.
Want to play with people online with your own single player character? You can, using open Battle.Net.
Want to play with people online with a server-stored character to prevent cheats? You can, using closed Battle.Net.
There is IMHO no technical reason blizzard couldn't offer exactly this with Diablo 4
Also, I haven't bought Diablo 4, one of the reasons is it being online-only. Would it be playable offline, I might have had bought it.
I'm a bit wary of their DDoS claims. This happened during their Battle.net sale (which would increase traffic) and during the outage their CS was telling people to try multiple times (which is a great way to hammer the servers).
It's likely they just couldn't handle the load, or ran into the thundering herd problem, and just claimed ddos because they didn't know better.
Doesn't matter. You can rape children and murder an entire bus of puppies. If you're releasing a new version of everyone's favorite thing, you're immediately forgiven.
That's the society we live in. "my entertainment and desires above all else!"
A mix between lower expectations and "I have better things to do than (trying to) destroy a company because of a single-player mode that does not exist."
Even if it was a DDoS, they're the ones that decided to make the game vulnerable to such attacks in the first place. Even if they had valid reasons (which I find suspect), actions have consequences.
Forced online is literally the only reason my husband and I didn't buy this game. We can't be the only ones and they're definitely missing out on a good chunk of money
We saw this coming when, what was it...Xbone was announced as Always Online only to get scrapped later due to backlash? They've just been waiting and slow-rolling it into everything.
Easier to pull metrics and your data if you're always online. Easier to force other players into your games so they can show off MTX and battlepass items if you're always online.
Steam, as well as numerous other marketplaces, have already proven the piracy boogeyman was nonsense.
The overwhelming majority of customers are happy to pay for games as long as it's not a giant pain in the ass to do so. The people that pirate games either:
Lack the money to buy the game in the first place in their budget
Were motivated by the act of piracy itself
Neither were actually going to pay for the game in the first place. And with the significant increase in both risk and awareness regarding information security, people that were "on the fence" for one of the above reasons have a high probability of deciding not to pirate just to play it safe.
They want us to eventually just pay monthly forever to own nothing, that is where we are going,.
This will lead to more piracy -- I am sure some community is already working to reverse engineer the servers for D4 without blizzard.
Also fuck bobby kotick for ruining a whole generation of gaming.
I quit everything Blizzard after Starcraft 2, that game had so much down time, and although it did have an offline option, you couldn't get new technologies as rewards in the campaign, when servers were down. Making it kind of redundant to have the offline mode IMO.
You can call it a boycott, but a company gone bad, rarely turns back to good again.
I started playing PoE after getting to somewhat endgame in D4. Got to level 60 something and my buddy and I were like....sooo...whatcha wanna do now? Dungeon I guess? Then we just kinda stopped playing. The rubber banding and random lags were super annoying and resulted in many deaths - we had a great time but needs a lot more cookin in the oven.
PoE on the other hand has been super refreshing and non laggy (the joy of 10 yrs of development I guess) and there's soo much to chew on. In a way it feels like a natural extension of D2 (played D2R for the first time last year).
It's real good man. D2 I found had a great loot feeling, but the general signposting of where to go was shit. But this was mostly because they didn't update D2 in the remastered version much because I guess they knew people would be pissed if they updated it too much.
D4 was initially epic with the bois, but the slow grind and analysis paralysis of loot was annoying in the end. So much garbage loot with no filters and way too many affixes on weapons, you sit there for ages wondering if that bit of loot is better...or worse?? Or maybe good for that thing, but not the other. Urgh, and the legendary aspect thing was annoying to manage (shit, I found a weapon, but uh oh, I don't have an aspect in reserve to apply to this cool new weapon, so my build will be fucked??? yay!)
PoE has that D2 loot feeling, power growth and SPEED that D4 simply can't have due to level scaling. Honestly, why is a group of minions giving me a hard time in D4 when in PoE I can blast a screen worth of little shits in one go? Super fun.
I don't mind being a shit character when i'm level 10, NOT 70. It was a pain post campaign in D4, I should be a god not some weak maggot after I saved Sanctuary lol.
Give it a shot, it's free :) I think it's due an update in August [new league].
I'm not exactly a fan of forced online games, but I decided a long time ago that any game that I couldn't download the server for wasn't worth 10¢ let alone how ever much they charge for it
Path of Exile is online only as well. Diablo 3 however many years ago was online only too. This genre has been this way for a LONG time now. I understand people would like an offline mode but that fight should have happened 12 years ago if they really cared.
I disagree, the genre has not been this way for a long time. You named two games and one was Blizzards test for online only. Should I counter those examples with Grim Dawn, Torchlight 2, Diablo 2 Resurrected, Van Helsing, and Titan Quest?
Forced online is literally the only reason my husband and I didn't buy this game. We can't be the only ones and they're definitely missing out on a good chunk of money
an offline mode being available... would mean offline only characters that cannot be in seasons etc.
i'd like the option.
but based on a lot of "hotfixes" they've applied so far..
it seems like a lot of the game is run purely server-side. so i guess its not possible without a large overhaul of some code.. which of course, i'm fine with. it just means more work from blizzard, and thus i doubt it'll happen anytime soon.
I gotta be honest based on the comments here, can we not be busy constantly overly negative and angry about this stuff? The games fun, and in the end most costumers, including myself, that's really all they care about. What does being so angry about something that frankly effects very little of the population of developed countries or saying things like " fuck the devs" " or "fuck blizzard " actually accomplish? This kind of anger filled discussion online is so taxing and unhealthy on everyone when it's everywhere on every possible subject.
While I don't condone DDoS attacks, the only reason for D4 to be online-only is monetization IMO: Blizzard wants to sell cosmetics, so people have to see other people wearing them. There is little gameplay benefit from being an MMO-lite.
Probably all sorts of datamining regarding the way people play also. Can't do that so easily if people are playing offline.
Brilliant insight. They probably are tracking metrics on what will encourage people to buy stuff the most too
Activision owns patents on the following:
A system that tracks what store items you might be interested in, and places you in matches with high-skilled players who own that item, making you associate the item with high skill
A system that places you against lower-skilled opponents immediately after you bought an item, making you associate making a purchase with being better.
From here to "they want you to look at other players and how expensive their shit is" is only one step. Honestly at this point I'm even surprised they're not faking it entirely, making other players just happen to be wearing expensive skins on your screen even if the actual account hasn't bought that. It's not like you can check anyway.
Bloody hell this is some nefarious brain hacking type stuff.
Indeed. It also has the inherent side effect of making the game pay to win, because if you don't pay you get put in hard matches against the skilled people who paid, and if you do it puts you against weaker opponents. This is why micro transactions should be banned straight up, even if they do not impact gameplay. Belgium had the right idea.
I experienced this first hand playing wow. The team will straight up send out email surveys asking if players would be willing to pay x for y service with different people getting different prices. They calculate these things to extract as much money from the dedicated fans as possible. I went back to playing the private servers.
Probably looking at the wardrobe to see what people like looks-wise with what's in-game already. Then ensure they push more of that into the store.
Never open the store.
I came to the same conclusion as you: why would people buy their stuff if they could just run an unlocker script or edit a config file to give that stuff to them? It's basically malicious DRM
All DRM is malicious, and DRM is why not to buy. Plenty of other games that you can buy and also own.
Potentially unpopular opinion, I like running into random other players in the world, particularly when doing events. I don't give a fuck about Blizzard's cosmetics and, frankly, unless I'm examining people, I can't even tell what they're wearing half the time.
And you should have the option to do so.
But that doesn't mean other people shouldn't have the option to play offline if they so choose.
There would be benefit to it if they embraced it. I'm convinced they wanted for it to be more of an MMO-lite but got cold feet and played it safe, as with everything else.
This one is hard for me to have an opinion on.
Loot rolls need to be controlled by the server, or else people will just exploit all that stuff.
Diablo doesn't have a lot of mechanics that really need players to interact with each other, but games like that and WOW are entirely based around gear grind. All accomplishment requires players to have a level playing field or players just won't want to play. It's just wierd like that.
If people want an offline game, they should buy an offline game. It's not that smart to buy an always-online game and then complain about it.
I don't know anything about the most recent games, but if it's anything like D1 and D2, a huge part of the game is single player. So what if someone wants to cheat their way through the game? It's not affecting other players and you get to enjoy the game the way you want to.
IMHO the best way is what Blizzard did with Diablo 2, where players simply had every choice: Want to play alone? You can, just play offline. Want to play with people in your house? You can, using LAN mode. Want to play with people online with your own single player character? You can, using open Battle.Net. Want to play with people online with a server-stored character to prevent cheats? You can, using closed Battle.Net.
There is IMHO no technical reason blizzard couldn't offer exactly this with Diablo 4 Also, I haven't bought Diablo 4, one of the reasons is it being online-only. Would it be playable offline, I might have had bought it.
That was probably the intention of the DDoS attack. Screw always-online singleplayer games.
Do you know if there's any statement or if it's known who did this?
I'm a bit wary of their DDoS claims. This happened during their Battle.net sale (which would increase traffic) and during the outage their CS was telling people to try multiple times (which is a great way to hammer the servers).
It's likely they just couldn't handle the load, or ran into the thundering herd problem, and just claimed ddos because they didn't know better.
At least there should be a mandatory "Always On" warning.
Online requirement for single player content is insane.
It’s a dealbreaker for me, personally. I just won’t buy a game like that, no matter how much I want to play it.
Yup. Unless it's a multiplayer-only game, there's no reason to require an always-on Internet connection except to data mine you.
Yeah, same here: I definitely avoid games with this sort of bullshit.
People are still buying games from Blizzard? It's like everybody forgot what a terrible company it is.
Doesn't matter. You can rape children and murder an entire bus of puppies. If you're releasing a new version of everyone's favorite thing, you're immediately forgiven.
That's the society we live in. "my entertainment and desires above all else!"
Look, it's a shitty version of a game I loved 20 years ago. Rape all the kids you want, just please let me have diablo 4!!!
This sadly works for people these days.
A mix between lower expectations and "I have better things to do than (trying to) destroy a company because of a single-player mode that does not exist."
I actually bought Diablo 4 during the downtime, and refunded it the next day when their support page was back up.
I find their claim of DDoS a bit dubious, and it's not like there aren't playbooks against DDoS. A 12 hour outage is insane either way.
Even if it was a DDoS, they're the ones that decided to make the game vulnerable to such attacks in the first place. Even if they had valid reasons (which I find suspect), actions have consequences.
Forced online is literally the only reason my husband and I didn't buy this game. We can't be the only ones and they're definitely missing out on a good chunk of money
Between always online games, and Starfield confirmed not having a physical disc release, I am weary for the future of gaming.
Don't worry.
At the end of the day, a good piece of art will always be the one thing that stays in people's minds.
Sure, "triple A" gaming might crash and burn if it's built on endless growth and monetization, but indie games will always be there.
We saw this coming when, what was it...Xbone was announced as Always Online only to get scrapped later due to backlash? They've just been waiting and slow-rolling it into everything.
Easier to pull metrics and your data if you're always online. Easier to force other players into your games so they can show off MTX and battlepass items if you're always online.
Blame the era of rampant gaming piracy. No disc is fine, useless overhead that's just more plastic in a landfill.
Steam, as well as numerous other marketplaces, have already proven the piracy boogeyman was nonsense.
The overwhelming majority of customers are happy to pay for games as long as it's not a giant pain in the ass to do so. The people that pirate games either:
Neither were actually going to pay for the game in the first place. And with the significant increase in both risk and awareness regarding information security, people that were "on the fence" for one of the above reasons have a high probability of deciding not to pirate just to play it safe.
Don't forget the third category, paying customers who cannot play the game due to problems with overreaching DRM.
They want us to eventually just pay monthly forever to own nothing, that is where we are going,.
This will lead to more piracy -- I am sure some community is already working to reverse engineer the servers for D4 without blizzard.
Also fuck bobby kotick for ruining a whole generation of gaming.
This has never been a problem for Path Of Exile, but that is free to play.
I quit everything Blizzard after Starcraft 2, that game had so much down time, and although it did have an offline option, you couldn't get new technologies as rewards in the campaign, when servers were down. Making it kind of redundant to have the offline mode IMO.
You can call it a boycott, but a company gone bad, rarely turns back to good again.
Fool me once and all that.
Blizzard died for me when they started killing Hearthstone. I haven't regretted it since.
Blizzard people are experts at ruining amazing games.
Blizzard died for me when Activision bought them and they became another victim to capitalism.
How do you know that no one who has played PoE has needed/wanted offline mode?
Personally I don't play PoE because of their policy on respeccing. An offline mode would likely make it possible for me to bypass that with mods.
Speaking of mods D2 had awesome ones so it's sad 3, 4 & PoE are so locked down with the online mode to prevent this.
I don't, but I have never seen anyone complain about it. I am but one voice is this world, though.
I started playing PoE after getting to somewhat endgame in D4. Got to level 60 something and my buddy and I were like....sooo...whatcha wanna do now? Dungeon I guess? Then we just kinda stopped playing. The rubber banding and random lags were super annoying and resulted in many deaths - we had a great time but needs a lot more cookin in the oven.
PoE on the other hand has been super refreshing and non laggy (the joy of 10 yrs of development I guess) and there's soo much to chew on. In a way it feels like a natural extension of D2 (played D2R for the first time last year).
I never played D2 but I've been told it is supposed to be a spiritual successor.
It's real good man. D2 I found had a great loot feeling, but the general signposting of where to go was shit. But this was mostly because they didn't update D2 in the remastered version much because I guess they knew people would be pissed if they updated it too much.
D4 was initially epic with the bois, but the slow grind and analysis paralysis of loot was annoying in the end. So much garbage loot with no filters and way too many affixes on weapons, you sit there for ages wondering if that bit of loot is better...or worse?? Or maybe good for that thing, but not the other. Urgh, and the legendary aspect thing was annoying to manage (shit, I found a weapon, but uh oh, I don't have an aspect in reserve to apply to this cool new weapon, so my build will be fucked??? yay!)
PoE has that D2 loot feeling, power growth and SPEED that D4 simply can't have due to level scaling. Honestly, why is a group of minions giving me a hard time in D4 when in PoE I can blast a screen worth of little shits in one go? Super fun.
I don't mind being a shit character when i'm level 10, NOT 70. It was a pain post campaign in D4, I should be a god not some weak maggot after I saved Sanctuary lol.
Give it a shot, it's free :) I think it's due an update in August [new league].
That's why I don't buy a blizzard game until like 6-12 months after. It's cheaper and actually finished. D3 launch was a fuckfest too.
Unfortunately that's how I feel most triple A game launches feel.
I'm not exactly a fan of forced online games, but I decided a long time ago that any game that I couldn't download the server for wasn't worth 10¢ let alone how ever much they charge for it
I don't buy games that don't have an offline mode.
Path of Exile is online only as well. Diablo 3 however many years ago was online only too. This genre has been this way for a LONG time now. I understand people would like an offline mode but that fight should have happened 12 years ago if they really cared.
I disagree, the genre has not been this way for a long time. You named two games and one was Blizzards test for online only. Should I counter those examples with Grim Dawn, Torchlight 2, Diablo 2 Resurrected, Van Helsing, and Titan Quest?
That figtht happened 12 years, we lost..
PoE is at least free lol
I quit buying Blizzard products after the bNetd fiasco. Fuck them straight to hell.
Forced online is literally the only reason my husband and I didn't buy this game. We can't be the only ones and they're definitely missing out on a good chunk of money
If you haven't tried it, I highly recommend Grim Dawn.
but if they did that, how would they try and tempt you into buying Mtx by showing other whales with all the cash shop gear?
They spent money patenting for this shit after all.
I would not be surprised if they tried to make this a subscription offer.
an offline mode being available... would mean offline only characters that cannot be in seasons etc. i'd like the option.
but based on a lot of "hotfixes" they've applied so far..
it seems like a lot of the game is run purely server-side. so i guess its not possible without a large overhaul of some code.. which of course, i'm fine with. it just means more work from blizzard, and thus i doubt it'll happen anytime soon.
Same as they did for D2 remaster. Clearly it's possible, they just made the choice not to.
Only reason I haven't bought the game yet. If I can pirate the game and get a better offline experience, they're doing something wrong.
Calls that will go sadly unanswered
Simple solution, wait for someone to crack the game if it's not already and bam. Offline mode for your single player game
I gotta be honest based on the comments here, can we not be busy constantly overly negative and angry about this stuff? The games fun, and in the end most costumers, including myself, that's really all they care about. What does being so angry about something that frankly effects very little of the population of developed countries or saying things like " fuck the devs" " or "fuck blizzard " actually accomplish? This kind of anger filled discussion online is so taxing and unhealthy on everyone when it's everywhere on every possible subject.