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August 8th, 2011, 21:21 GMT · By

Player Reaction to Diablo III Always On Announcement Surprised Blizzard

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A lot of people were surprised and somewhat annoyed by the fact that Diablo III, the next big game launched by Blizzard, will require a constant connection to the Internet and to the Battle.net service in order to work, even for the single player section of the title.

And now a representative from Blizzard has expressed surprise over the reaction of the fans, saying that the company was not interested in creating DRM measures and only cared about protecting the game systems of Diablo III.

Robert Bridenbecker, who is the vice president on online technologies working at Blizzard, has talked to MTV Multiplayer about the announcement and said, “You're guaranteeing that there are no hacks, no dupes.”

He added, “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... let's just keep everything clean. 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.”

Keeping the game always connected to Battle.net means that there's no way for a player to tinker with the game and maybe overpower their characters and is also a good way of reducing piracy for Diablo III.

The always on nature of the game also means that players will not be able to mod the game in any way and Blizzard has outright forbidden them.

The company has not yet said when Diablo III will be launched and partner Activision has also refused to talk about the release window.

The game will get a beta stage during the fall, with players able to meet and kill the Skeleton King, with Blizzard interested in testing the systems that will handle the constant Battle.net connection.

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READER COMMENTS:


Comment #1 by: Aaddron on 08 Aug 2011, 22:39 UTC reply to this comment

All of these restrictions are purely for the AH... "for the player" is just the cover. It's all about money and Blizzard stands to make a nice chunk of it if the AH pans out.


Comment #2 by: Xelliz on 09 Aug 2011, 13:00 UTC reply to this comment

Did even Blizzard forget that Diablo 2 had online only characters? The game offered choices, where as now players are given none. In D2 you had offline chars that could be brought online in games where other people could also have their offline chars and online only where the chars were stored on the blizzard servers and only these chars were allowed in this game mode.


Comment #3 by: anonymoose on 12 Aug 2011, 15:43 UTC reply to this comment

Thank god for pirates... They'll solve this problem if Blizzard won't support offline single player mode... :P

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