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”
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.
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.
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.
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 become 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
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
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.
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.
Singleplayer games have no reason to require an internet connection to be able to play the game.
I choose not to play these games.
If it’s a strictly multiplayer game, fine.
If not, that’s just DRM, and it should die in a fire.
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
If it’s single player games, there should be ZERO reasons to have it requiring online connectivity 24/7. No buy for me. There will be times where your internet goes offline for ISP related issues or Xbox Live or PSN experiencing server issues. How am I going to play those games?
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.
Always-online singleplayer is bullshit, and we all know it.
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.
There’s a difference between always-online SP and essentially one-person MP games though.
It sucks that they did it that way, but at least it makes slightly more sense there.
I honestly don’t really like it even when implemented well. It’s even what caused me to uninstall Just Cause 3. As fun of a game it was, I hated being constantly harassed by Square Enix telling me to connect to their servers or that there was some kind of error in connecting to said servers. I just want to play the damn game.
I find games to be less fun the more time I’m spending not actually playing said game and dealing with some menu option or another, and always online games seem to be the worst offenders in this category. There always seems to be some kind of server error or I lose connection for 5 seconds and now the game’s paused while it loads, or the game has to load the servers every time I open the menu.
And there’s almost always some sort of problem with “going offline.” Maybe it’s in a sub-menu of a sub-menu or maybe it takes an inordinately long amount of time to load. For some reason it’s never easy.
