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D3 - Online Only?

Discussion in 'Diablo 3 & 4' started by Splunge, Aug 25, 2011.

  1. Splunge

    Splunge Bhaal’s financial advisor Adored Veteran Pillars of Eternity SP Immortalizer (for helping immortalize Sorcerer's Place in the game!) Torment: Tides of Numenera SP Immortalizer (for helping immortalize Sorcerer's Place in the game!)

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    Link

    I admit I haven't really been following D3 development much, but I was intending to get it when it comes out. But maybe not, if this means that it will essentially be a multi-player game only.
     
  2. hannibal555 Gems: 9/31
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    This and the integration of an ingame item store pretty much kills it for me.

    "why would you want it any other way?” is like a slap in my face.

    This is the perfect sentence for a lot that annoys me in games nowadays:
    limited number of registrations?
    "why would you want it any other way?”
    permanent online authentification even for single player games?
    "why would you want it any other way?”
    glorious item packs as DLC for only a lousy 5$?
    "why would you want it any other way?”
    I could go on...
    Well at least, there is Torchlight 2 to look forward to ^^.
     
  3. Blades of Vanatar

    Blades of Vanatar Vanatar will rise again Adored Veteran Pillars of Eternity SP Immortalizer (for helping immortalize Sorcerer's Place in the game!)

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    After reading that, I won't be purchasing D3. What a bunch of BS. I hate MP play in any game. I prefer to keep my gaming to myself. The only MP games I would play are games that are set to be versus another player. Like a board game or war game. Jackasses....
     
  4. Faye

    Faye Life is funny. Veteran

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    I agree it is ridiculous. And their excuses are horrible and condescending. They make an a** out of us and themselves by making a whole lot of assumptions.
    - "the game’s not really being played right if it’s not online"
    - "because the players want it"
    - "Erm… upgrade the wiring in his house? I mean, in this day and age the notion that there’s this a whole vast majority of players out there that don’t have online connectivity – this doesn’t really fly any more. I mean, at our hotel, there’s nine wi-fi networks that I can access. Just from the hotel! And they’re all public – they’re all paid – but they’re pretty cheap, and they’re all publicly available. So the notion that there’s just tons and tons of people out there that aren’t connected – isn’t… I don’t think is really accurate."




    And the auction store is literally a cash-cow for them. They get a cut when you put the item for auction, they get a cut when you sell the item, and they get a cut when you withdraw the money from them. If e-bay operated like this, I doubt they would see so much business.
    http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/08/01/diablo-3-will-let-players-buy-and-sell-items-for-real-money/
     
    Last edited: Aug 26, 2011
  5. Rawgrim Gems: 21/31
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    Won`t be getting D3 then. On pure principle.
     
  6. Tarrasque

    Tarrasque Whoever said Paladins had to be charismatic? ★ SPS Account Holder Veteran New Server Contributor [2012] (for helping Sorcerer's Place lease a new, more powerful server!) Torment: Tides of Numenera SP Immortalizer (for helping immortalize Sorcerer's Place in the game!)

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    Oh well looks like I won't be buying it then. That's another customer lost.

    I love the fact they try to justify the always on rubbish as helping to prevent piracy as well. Ubisoft tried that one, and infact the only people that could consistently play their always on games were the pirates who'd cracked the protection within a couple of days. The people who'd 'shock' actually bought the games couldn't log on due to server issues etc.
     
  7. The Great Snook Gems: 31/31
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    While I will be buying the game, I am disappointed by this. There are times when you just don't want to deal with the noise of an online game. By noise I mean spam, PKers, perverts, annoying twits, etc. You don't get those in a single player game.
     
  8. Blades of Vanatar

    Blades of Vanatar Vanatar will rise again Adored Veteran Pillars of Eternity SP Immortalizer (for helping immortalize Sorcerer's Place in the game!)

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    Exactly Snook. I do not want to have to deal with depending on other s to help me in a game, I don't want to share or fight over loot and I don't want to deal with all the idiot kids.
     
  9. Ragusa

    Ragusa Eternal Halfling Paladin Veteran

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    Not my game. Count me as not buying. If I want something that's online only I'll go for a real MMO instead - like perhaps 'Old Republic' for 2012, and of course, LotRO.

    I am currently playing LotRO (nominally f2p, and indeed enjoyable as an f2p player but way better when paid for) and am throwing money at these folks, but I play in a nice community and it's very RP oriented, which makes it worthwhile. One thing that annoys me though is that indeed you do depend on others to finish parts of the game (which is somewhat offset by the fact that playing in groups is both re2warding, challenging and indeed, a very different experience than single player). By and large I prefer single player because of that. LotRO is the first MMO that got me hooked.

    When D3 will be online only, the reason that that Blizzard does want to be in on the trading. They expect more profit from the game that way. I hope this will blow up in their face.
     
  10. Taluntain

    Taluntain Resident Alpha and Omega Staff Member ★ SPS Account Holder Resourceful Adored Veteran Pillars of Eternity SP Immortalizer (for helping immortalize Sorcerer's Place in the game!) New Server Contributor [2012] (for helping Sorcerer's Place lease a new, more powerful server!) Torment: Tides of Numenera SP Immortalizer (for helping immortalize Sorcerer's Place in the game!) BoM XenForo Migration Contributor [2015] (for helping support the migration to new forum software!)

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    I guess not many of you check the news on SP...
     
  11. Blades of Vanatar

    Blades of Vanatar Vanatar will rise again Adored Veteran Pillars of Eternity SP Immortalizer (for helping immortalize Sorcerer's Place in the game!)

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    [​IMG] I loved D1. D2 was great as well, though I never delved deep like some others here(Aldeth!). But with so few games coming out these days that fiulfill my gaming needs, I was really hoping for a great game in D3. It really sucks that they are going this route. I would never pay real life money for extra items in a game. That is just plain retarded. And can get real expensive, real fast! I was not placed here on Mother Earth to fill Blizzard's pockets. My 50-60 dollars on the original release should be enough for them. Greedy bastards! :nono:
     
  12. Taluntain

    Taluntain Resident Alpha and Omega Staff Member ★ SPS Account Holder Resourceful Adored Veteran Pillars of Eternity SP Immortalizer (for helping immortalize Sorcerer's Place in the game!) New Server Contributor [2012] (for helping Sorcerer's Place lease a new, more powerful server!) Torment: Tides of Numenera SP Immortalizer (for helping immortalize Sorcerer's Place in the game!) BoM XenForo Migration Contributor [2015] (for helping support the migration to new forum software!)

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    Well... if you think about it, all the serious Diablo 2 fans have been treating it as a MMO for a decade. Honestly, it was a crappy single player experience and it was quite obvious the whole time that you played it that it was geared almost exclusively at multiplayer gamers who would replay it ad nauseam for years. You simply didn't get much out of a single playthrough - the lack of golden unique items from D1 bugged me to no end for instance and the whole environment felt dead - because there was so much room left all around for the other players who weren't there. You could only find so many set pieces in a single playthrough and you just didn't get the same kind of satisfaction finding fancy armour part #4 as say The Butcher's Cleaver.

    And as far as item sales go - they're a huge market and one that is completely player driven. If people didn't want to buy items, there wouldn't be dozens of providers catering to that market. Blizzard stepping in and formalizing that market and providing a safe and regulated environment for the transactions just makes sense. If you don't want to trade the items you don't have to, after all.

    People spend a lot of money on MMOs and various addons so it's unrealistic to expect that Blizzard wouldn't want to get into such an obviously lucrative market with the Diablo franchise as well. The gamers always have the option to vote with their wallets, but in practice they almost never do (short of pirating the games) - they complain and ***** and whine, but in the end still wind up playing the games they bemoan. The publishers and developers aren't stupid - they know this very well so I'm sure they aren't giving any negative feedback on this a second thought. For every lost single-player gamer (who's worth little), they'll gain 3 who'll play D3 online for a long time and be happy to regularly spend money on it. Game development business is business like any other but this is something that many gamers either don't realize or forget...
     
  13. Blades of Vanatar

    Blades of Vanatar Vanatar will rise again Adored Veteran Pillars of Eternity SP Immortalizer (for helping immortalize Sorcerer's Place in the game!)

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    Well, I think every game designer who asks for more money are greedy bastards, not just Blizzard. I would think that one company had to have this idea first, this offer to the public.

    As for single player not being satisfying, that is your opinion. The fact that you were very unlikely to find a full set in one playthough just means you can play it many times to find all the possible itmes. Replayability with incurring greater expense. That is what I am looking for. Obviously a full set of anything wasn't a necessity to beat the game as I beat the game many times over with all characters and never rec'd a full set on any of the playthroughs. I am not against MP for others, whatever floats your boat, but to strip SP as an option? That is f****d up. I know, it's their game, their design, their business. But they will lose this customer over it, that is for certain.
     
  14. Taluntain

    Taluntain Resident Alpha and Omega Staff Member ★ SPS Account Holder Resourceful Adored Veteran Pillars of Eternity SP Immortalizer (for helping immortalize Sorcerer's Place in the game!) New Server Contributor [2012] (for helping Sorcerer's Place lease a new, more powerful server!) Torment: Tides of Numenera SP Immortalizer (for helping immortalize Sorcerer's Place in the game!) BoM XenForo Migration Contributor [2015] (for helping support the migration to new forum software!)

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    Companies are in business to make money so you can claim inherent greed as part of their nature. Just like you could call anyone who works for more than the minimum wage "greedy". I have yet to meet someone who would prefer to be paid less than more. Or were you trying to say that there should be an artificial limit imposed on game developers saying how much money they're allowed to make with every game? We're obviously wading into the realm of the absurd here... Games are commercial products on the market, same as everything else. Blizzard isn't a charity and neither are any other game developers. Modern games cost up to tens of millions of dollars to develop - the companies that aren't damn good at selling lots of copies simply don't survive.

    And certainly, I'm sure that some people enjoyed D2's single-player... just like with everything else. My idea of fun simply doesn't include replaying the same game 20 times just to put together a few sets of items that I don't really need to win the game anyway. And it's a fact that most people who played D2 (and still do today) pretty much exclusively played it multiplayer. I played online for a while and most gamers I chatted with told me that they never bothered with single-player - they were in it solely for the multiplayer experience. If you don't think that I'm right, trust Blizzard. They know their Diablo audience better than anyone else and if they feel confident that they can ditch SP without much loss, then I'm pretty sure that they're right. The proof will be in the pudding soon enough.

    Also, it'd be interesting to get back to this thread a year or two after the game's been released and see how many of those who said that they won't play it will have changed their minds.
     
  15. Blades of Vanatar

    Blades of Vanatar Vanatar will rise again Adored Veteran Pillars of Eternity SP Immortalizer (for helping immortalize Sorcerer's Place in the game!)

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    Of course the players you speak with online are mostly MP players, as most of them are also internet junkies. Not so with the SP players. Most SP players are fans of the older school of games. Like me. I only post on this site and you were up for years before I joined. I'm not a fan of too many other sites. Why? Because you host forums for most of the games that I find enjoyable. Black Isle games. Mostly non-MMO games. A few other sites do, but not with nice mix of options you put together here.

    And yes, they the gaming manufacturers of today are greedy. Their original fan base came from the SP world, as that is where PC/Console games got their start. They are abandoning them. Why not have a single player element? I am sure the cost wouldn't be much. They are min/maxing profit. As a SP player, I and many others contributed to their start. Helped build their base. And then we are left in the dust. I am supposed to be happy with this? I think not my fire-breathing friend...
     
  16. Cap'n CJ

    Cap'n CJ Arrr! Veteran

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    In D2 I ALWAYS played online. Know what I did when I wanted to play by myself?

    I made a server with a stupid password that even I couldn't recreate. That's probably what i'll do again.
     
  17. Taluntain

    Taluntain Resident Alpha and Omega Staff Member ★ SPS Account Holder Resourceful Adored Veteran Pillars of Eternity SP Immortalizer (for helping immortalize Sorcerer's Place in the game!) New Server Contributor [2012] (for helping Sorcerer's Place lease a new, more powerful server!) Torment: Tides of Numenera SP Immortalizer (for helping immortalize Sorcerer's Place in the game!) BoM XenForo Migration Contributor [2015] (for helping support the migration to new forum software!)

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    Blades, not necessarily happy with it, just not angry about it... the way I see it, Blizzard didn't bother to put a single-player component into D3 because only a small part of D2's players made use of it to begin with, and in 10 years the market has changed so drastically that a game that was predominantly played MP 10 years ago would only be that much more so today when MMOs are the norm. So it does make sense to focus on multiplayer only with it.

    Sure, they could have just thrown in a single-player component to keep the old-school fans happy... but that kind of half-hearted catering to any user base doesn't seem to be the norm today any more. Games are made either for single-player or multiplayer/MMO play. Case in point: the TES and Dragon Age series. The devs preferred not to include a half-baked MP component at all just for the sake of appeasing the MP fans. And there were A LOT of such people. All because in classic RPGs, single-player is experienced by far more people than multiplayer.

    With Diablo though, the series' focus has shifted completely to multiplayer with D2 already based on the fact that D1 was played online so much. Single-player was and felt just tacked on to keep SP fans happy. For most of us, it failed at that. I believe that Blizzard thinks so as well, hence their decision to abandon it in D3. Well, that and greed. :D
     
  18. Blades of Vanatar

    Blades of Vanatar Vanatar will rise again Adored Veteran Pillars of Eternity SP Immortalizer (for helping immortalize Sorcerer's Place in the game!)

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    Tal, you are right of course. I know it and everyone else knows it. I am just griping. I'm an old-schooler who loves single player mode. But if just one person of the team from Blizzard reads the above posts, maybe... just maybe, a glimmer of hope will appear for the next great game they make. Who knows, I might get lucky...:)
     
  19. Aldeth the Foppish Idiot

    Aldeth the Foppish Idiot Armed with My Mallet O' Thinking Veteran

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    No, no, no people. Just because you are required to have an online connection to play, it isn't required for you to play with anyone else - you can still play by yourself. In fact, you are only allowed to bring an NPC along with you if you are PLAYING BY YOURSELF. If you are in a party, you cannot have an NPC, so there's actually content you can only access when going solo. And don't worry about PKers - there is no PvP in the regular game. They have an arena set up for all PvP - there is no way for players to go hostile against one another in the regular game.

    It's just like with Starcraft 2. You have to be connected to battlenet to play, even if you are playing a single player version of the game (which, as has been stated, can be done by simply creating a game with a password that only you know).

    There is also one very practical reason for this. Most of the item hacks that people had in D2 were made in single player mode that they brought to online play. While I doubt this will stop people from duping items and the like, at least it won't make it easier for the dupers.

    Finally on the in-game store. Regardless of whether or not Blizzard had an in-game store, many other people would be buying, trading, and selling items for D3 - they just would be doing so on other sites. There were ways to buy your way to the top for years on D2, and to think that won't happen in D3 is just silly. At least when you buy something from Blizzard it has to pass a server check so that you know the item you're buying is real and wasn't duped or hacked.

    And guess what? If you are totally against the idea of buying, selling, or trading items in D3, then don't do it. They aren't going to make you do it.
     
  20. Splunge

    Splunge Bhaal’s financial advisor Adored Veteran Pillars of Eternity SP Immortalizer (for helping immortalize Sorcerer's Place in the game!) Torment: Tides of Numenera SP Immortalizer (for helping immortalize Sorcerer's Place in the game!)

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    That had actually occurred to me when I created this thread, but the wording in the quote I cited made me wonder if that was going to be the case. I guess we'll just need to see how it's implemented (although the password idea seems like a fairly easy workaround).

    The odd thing about my reaction to this is that while I loved D1 as a single-player game (I didn't share Tal's dislikes), I really didn't enjoy D2; I'm not sure why not, although Act 3 had a lot to do with it. I also didn't have the expansion, which might have made a difference. Having said that, given my "meh"-ness towards D2, I'm not sure why I want to play D3; maybe I'm hoping to re-create the D1 experience (unlikely, since D1 was completely new for me, while the subsequent games are in many ways more of the same).

    (New word of the day - "meh"-ness.)
     
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