I’m currently playing Diablo IV (and having a blast with it) but finding one small gripe which I only think is going to get worse and probably stop me playing it completely in the long run.
My girlfriend is currently pregnant. This means in 6 months time we’ll have a newborn. With this in mind I’m expecting to only be able to grab a few minutes at a time to game and even when I think I’ll have longer I may end up jumping off at short notice. This means I’ll almost certainly come to rely on games which I can pause. Unfortunately this isn’t possible with Diablo IV since it requires an always online connection even though I’m essentially playing it as a single player game.
What are other people’s thoughts?
It sucks, plain and simple. Single-player games should never require internet access, and if the game has a multiplayer component, it should be a separate mode that leaves the single-player mode working even when there is no internet connectivity.
It’s just basic fucking common sense… except that it conflicts with financial interests and greed.
also the asshole dev “THiS is tO preVenT uSer dOinG ILLEGaL acTIon suCh As TEmPerING gamE AND Cheat EngInE”
Which we all know is going to happen anyway.
It makes sense in that having a local single player and a multiplayer mode requires writing much of the game twice. Having a remote single player mode only requires making the game once, with a special instance spun up for each single player game.
I live a life where I often don’t have a persistent connection. That means for me, I can’t play new games. While I have been a fan and player of Diablo since the first one I’ll have to sit this one out.
If the game is single player, there’s no reason for it to force you to be connected to the internet. It’s annoying and it shouldn’t be the norm
If it’s single player game, having an always online component is straight up dumb. Fuck anybody who does this.
D4 is worse, imho. It forces you to play multiplayer at all times, completely destroying any immersion in the lore.
Sucks, too, because they nailed Diablo’s atmosphere (from games 1 & 2, not the WoW-ified D3 aesthetic.)
Is Diablo 2 still worth playing in 2023? I played D3 a few years back and thought it was just okay.
Absolutely… with mods!
Granted, I haven’t had time to sink into it recently, so I’m a bit out of the loop, but Path of Diablo is very popular, and I know there’s another big one I don’t have time to hunt down rn.
D2R is also an option.
That said, I have the nostalgia and patience for D2’s idiosyncrasies from having played it for years; I’m not sure how well it holds up for someone completely new, coming from the more streamlined/polished UX from modern games.
Sweet, thanks for the mod recommendations! Do you know how Diablo 2: Resurrected differs from the original version and if it’s worth the $30 extra?
If you’ve never played the original, take the Resurrected. They’re the same game, but Resurrected is beautiful. Be warned though that mechanically, it’s an old game, and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who hasn’t played it back then.
That I don’t know. I’ve never played it. I just bought it myself in a bundle sale with the D3 stuff I didn’t have. I have to on D3 within a month of launch, so I thought I’d give it a try sometime since they say it’s a lot better since the expansion.
Diablo 2 has aged fantastically. It is still pretty much the king of the genre despite being 23 years old. D2R did a lot to bring the visuals up to date. Unlike other ARPGs, you can actually beat the game pretty fast if you know what you are doing. It’s a very efficient and clean game design. The game is a blast to play casually.
Not directly answering your question about D2, but if you’re looking for a more modern D2 style experience Grim Dawn is worth looking into. May scratch that itch.
Games that completely disable single-player with no internet connection bother me. I like to be able to play my games whenever I want. What happens to these games down the road when the servers go down?
And if ever they take their servers offline, the game becomes abandonware.
I hate it.
Usually I’m online but what if I’m not, or what if they have server problems, or what if in 5 years they feel done with the game and remove the servers. If I pay for a game, I want to be able to play that game on my terms
It just leads to a worse player experience now, and limited likely an inability to play later
Such a bad idea.
Internet goes? Can’t play
Power goes? Can’t play
Travelling? Can’t play
Servers go down? Can’t play
Servers are shutdown? Can’t play
Not being able to pause a single player games is so silly, its such a good feature especially for situations like yours.
I pirate any single player games that require always online and its just a better experience, the game doesn’t pause when the internet goes and I don’t have to worry about servers being shutdown
I’m sure Blizzard and EA are looking at the way Netflix is forcing its users to only watch content in their own household and dying to implement that into their games too
Honestly fuck always online games. Piracy prevention methods at the cost of the paying customer. Absolute ridiculous that you cant play things you own offline
Honestly? I used to not care. I usually have internet connectivity and have at least one backup method of getting online.
But now my father is psuedo-homeless and there’s so many games he’s missed out on because his Van/RV didn’t get enough cell signal to work.
After that I understood the problem in a far deeper way.
Games were accessible to me as a kid, not because I could afford them, but because I could just pop in my neighbors CD (and enter their CD key if needed) and be off to the races! If I were to grow up poor now, it would be miserable.
Always-online “single player” games, huge downloads, and if you happen to avoid all that you STILL need to check in online occassionally to use your own Steam Library.
I mean, if 15 year old me existed today, I’d still be pirating things but it would be through a network of friends with Blu-ray burners and good internet connections.
These days, I try to buy on GOG only, and only their non-DRM titles. Then I can throw them onto a samsung t5 and sneaker net it to my dad without worrying if Steam/Origin/Blizzard/Epic will get in the way.
GOG really is the way to go. I try to support them whenever I can.
With 2 kids now, gaming time is very hard to come by. At least I know that when I do have time to game again, I’ll be able to play these games because they have no server to connect to.
I would never buy such games in the first place. If a singleplayer game doesn’t have an offline mode I’m not interested.
Imagine if they’d ever properly released Fallout 76 as SP or local co-op. Pivoting franchises into multiplayer/always-online that don’t benefit from it is such a petty, obvious cash grab
Singleplayer games have no reason to require an internet connection to be able to play the game.
If a single player game requires online connection im not buying it.
This. If I’m gonna gave to get a pirate version in order for it to work, I’m donating to the crackers that fixed it, not the publishers that deliberately broke it.
It’s a case of the game industry creating a problem to sell the solution in my opinion. They insist that they need fo force increasingly ridiculous monetisation onto us because they need to maintain the servers, but the reason they need servers to maintain in the first place is because they made their functionally single player game phone home unnecessarily every ten seconds. The irony being that if I’d just pirated the game I wouldn’t have to deal with that.
I choose not to play these games.
If it’s not a multiplayer game then it shouldn’t need to be online.
Like I play Hitman a lot and occasionally the game pauses because it loses connection to the server even though it’s single-player. It’s usually able to reconnect but its still a bit annoying. And I am playing with 500mb internet and an ethernet connection, so the issue is on their side.
So yeah, I really don’t see why it’s necessary or why it’s become such a trend.
There seem to be two Diablo IV games.
One is a single player or co-op offline RPG where you’re running around killing monsters and collecting loot so that you personally can save the world. Seeing other players running around just breaks the illusion.
The other is some online multi-player thing where you can run around and team up with other people in the quest to min-max your build, where you pay stupid amounts of money to make your character look the same as all the other people who paid for the same skin.
I like the first game, have no interest in the second, and I resent where the mechanics designed for the second game interfere with the first.
If it’s a strictly multiplayer game, fine.
If not, that’s just DRM, and it should die in a fire.