Diablo 3 Constant Connectivity a Digital rights move?

[CrazyKooK]

You have all likely heard about the constant internet connection that will be required to play Diablo 3. The reaction was very sour to the surprise of Blizzard VP.

You can play by yourself but your character is going to be saved on our servers. You have to authenticate through our servers to be able to play the game. I think it's not just 'Diablo 3' but with our games as a whole we're tying everything into Battle.net these days...We can provide a much a much more stable, connected, safer experience than we could if we let people play off-line.

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," said Bridenbecker. "We've been doing online gameplay for 15 years now…and with 'World of WarCraft' and our roots in Battle.net and now with 'Diablo 3,' it really is just the nature of how things are going, the nature of the industry. When you look at everything you get by having that persistent connection on the servers, you cannot ignore the power and the draw of that.

Most fans consider the move a DRM (Digital Rights Management) tactic, as well as I. However Blizzard denies this.

Internally I don't think [DRM] ever actually came up when we talked about how we want connections to operate. Things that came up were always around the feature-set, the sanctity of the actual game systems like your characters. You're guaranteeing that there are no hacks, no dupes. All of these things were points of discussion, but the whole copy protection, piracy thing, that's not really entering into why we want to do it. I'm a huge purveyor of online sites and from my standpoint, I don't look at DRM solutions and go, 'Wow, those are awesome.' I look at those and say, 'Wow, those kind of suck.' But if there's a compelling reason for you to have that online connectivity that enhances the gameplay, that doesn't suck. That's awesome.

But why not offer an offline mode for players that wish for it? "Let's say we want to create an offline capacity," he explained. "You're introducing a separate user flow, a separate path that players are going to go down. And, at the end of the day, how many people are going to want to do that?"

>> Well considering I had crap internet for the last year and a half, I would have strongly appreciated it. Blizzard seems to forget that not everyone has reliable high-speed cable. I know it sounds impossible to a lot of people but there are many more rural areas on dial-up or satellite that has too much of a delay to play video games. In my opinion it would not be difficult to allow offline mode for people that would buy the game for that.

If [offline players] want to come over to the online environment , what are we going to have to do about those players that are in the offline environment coming into the online environment? We said we don't want to look at that [in 'Diablo 3']. Let's just keep everything clean.

Well Blizzard, you could tell the players Straight Up from the start, "hey, this character you are making won't be able to transfer to the online gameplay. We're sorry, it's the only way we can make sure that you didn't modify the game"... hmm, I would accept that.

The VP continued on about soloing, stating that while connectivity is required, being social isn't.

There seem to be folks that believe that because you have to be connected, it's like you're on Facebook or out there with the rest of the world. That's really not the case. Yes, you're going to have a connection, yes, your character will be stored on a server, but it doesn't mean you have to socialize with people. It doesn't mean you have to do anything but play the game by yourself. You'll still be able to have a private game. You'll still be able to go off and play the game solo and adventure solo. You can opt to bring other people to your world if you want, but that's up to you.

We all know that Diablo III will be wildly successful, but Blizzards denial of constant connectivity being a DRM move lacks credibility. If somehow it wasn't, then when is it that they stopped listening to what their customers want?

 

[Ultimate Empire]

From an engineer's perspective, it seems to me that designing the game with the requirement of "online-only" gameplay facilitates maintainability:
-Less shared code between client-side and server-side deployments means a easier maintainability
-Typically, thin-clients are easier to manage, deploy, and update to customers than full-featured ones. With Diablo in mind, this means not having to update single-player loot drops that coincide with server-drops, etc.

From their perspective: this facilitation of maintainability will hopefully lead to faster patches.


Maybe DRM is 'also' a motive, but from my days of D2...closed battle net is where I played...which required a valid cdkey. I did not mind this at all.

So to me, not much has changed in terms of Diablo DRM. They can control my ability to play just like they could have shut down battle.net if they wanted to with D2...at which point I would have stopped playing. Sounds like this is still the case? :****happens:

 

[Wing Zero]

i dealt with this in starcraft and i dont mind.
what i am really peeved about is 4 player limit and region lock

 

[Emperor Pan I]

To me this is a hit and miss.

No offline singer player is silly. It really is. There will be a server crack, and we will play the game offline. The people who are never going to buy it, still won't regardless of it. People will still play the game illegally. It happens. Hell, even Starcraft II has lan .

I can understand the reasoning that having an open Battle.net and Closed Battle.net is equally silly.

Is it a question of DRM? Hell yes. Of course it is. Always connected is always DRM no two ways about it.

I really don't care, as long as I can play the game without needing other people. I prefer to play Diablo games solo, and I can still do that even if online.