Posts Tagged ‘deal with it’

“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 Robert Bridenbecker, Vice President of Online Technologies at Blizzard, to MTV Multiplayer. “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 III, 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…

“Internally I don’t think [DRM] ever actually came up when we talked about how we want connections to operate,” he said. “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.””

Yes, yes, everyone knows that Diablo 2 had an offline mode where you could basically do anything you want; use character trainers, give yourself any item, etc.

These were great things, but people also seem to forget the rampant hacking, botting, and duping that fucked up the game for so long. Blizzard’s answer to this is to require a connection to the internet at all times in order to play the game. The response from the ragers has been, as expected, to rage.

Rob Pardo really upped the ante when he said, “I want to play Diablo 3 on my laptop in a plane, but, well, there are other games to play for times like that.” Blizzard knows that people have been fiending for this game for 10 years, that’s why they don’t give a shit about DRM. People are going to line up to hand over their mom’s cash regardless of the DRM and Blizzard knows it.

All you anti-social dweebs can still play by yourself, you’ll just have to be online. And you’ll have to buy the game. And you won’t be able to dupe items.