I don’t know why people are so desperate to be exploited. This is not 2008, we have so many great games to play right now that we can ditch the toxic ones.
Because the new generation have been brought up on online services, constantly connected and micro transaction full games, it's just service as normal for them. Anyone that talks about such things and offline only etc get swept to one side and pushed away in their wheelchair rambling about the good old days.
And those who have large disposable incomes just say fuckit and pay, so prices get higher and higher until they find the spot where those people slow down purchases, then a sale!
and most of our childhood games become that way and there are often no good alternatives. The Best Diablo Alternative is Path of Exile and that's even more an GaaS
The best Diablo alternative is Grim Dawn because it's OFFLINE. PoE, while a good game still has online only which is simply unnecessary for a game you wanna play single-player. They even created a "solo-self-found" mode, the irony in this when all they had to do was implement offline single-player lmao.
Steams top sellers list the day of the starfield pre-order announcement was filled almost entirely with pre-orders for digital games.
People will never learn. Reddit, as big as it is, is a bubble. Most of the people buying don't give a shit and that indifference is what companies capitalize on.
Even reddit never fucking learns. People were acting like Cyberpunk was the second coming of christ before it came out, and got hit with reality real fast. Then immediately got hyped for the next big pre-order.
I can't understand why people love hype so much, it's just a manufactured tool at this point, and it just tricks people into feeling like they're part of something, without releasing that "something" is just buying a fucking product.
And yes, I know Cyberpunk wasn't the first, but it's the most recent big one that people hopefully would have learned from.
Not that I doubt for a second it’s true that people preordered star field like crazy but how do we know that steam doesn’t just put shit up there it wants people to buy by making them think it’s the next big thing.
The battle pass system of games-as-a-service is a very psychologically effective way to "entrap" people into staying with one specific game, so every AAA game is trying to do it. The problem is that you can really only dedicate yourself to one such game unless you can play 24/7, but there's no better strategy when it comes to player retention (and subsequent recurring revenue) and nobody cares about anything else anymore.
People want to relive their Diablo 2 experience. I saw some guys rebuilding their PC and change their lighting to a Diablo themed one. It's... interesting behaviour for one game.
Reverse engineering an online game's server is usually a question of will rather than time. I still remember WoW emulated server client popping up pretty damn fast because of how popular it was (we had a blast playing in an empty world on LAN).
D3 never had that kind of interest after the initial dud, which is kinda sad for the game in a way - to be so unpopular that not even pirates would bother.
That's why the work of AzerothCore is so important from a game preservation and even [pop] cultural preservation perspective. World of Warcraft at that time was such a phenomenon that it permeated everything. Everyone knew someone who played WoW, and it was on TV shows, commercials, and in everyday conversation. Heck, *South Park*'s "Make Love, Not Warcraft" episode won an Emmy.
I'm very grateful to the ChromieCraft team for their work and their humility to offer all their fixes and updates to the open source community.
Although it's awesome to have WoW emulators and go back and look at old versions of the game it'll never recapture the cultural impact of basically everyone you knew playing the game.
It's like the MSN and AIM server emulation projects in a way, yes you can get the old stuff going again but it's a ghost town. Good for nostalgia but will never be the same.
These things are never about will.
It's about luck and time. Jailbreakers/hackers/whoever all have the will pretty much immediately available.
Sometimes they get lucky and something is leaked, sometimes you have a collective mass of thousands of people trying out multiple things to get into a system.
It never really is a case of someone waking up and thinking "Man i want this so much more than I did yesterday, I believe I can break into this."
This. I actually love playing Diablo 3 on my switch because it can be played anywhere. Only thing that sucks about it is all the leaderboards are full of hacked chars. But if you only care about solo play and leveling that doesn't affect your enjoyment of the game at all. Maybe one day we get d4 on switch U
So weird, because I'm about to finish the campaign and have only ever grouped with 1 single person who I already know IRL. I interacted with so many more people in the previous 3 games, yet the forced online one is the one I feel the most by myself while playing.
I do love the game, but that mmo lite decision is about the dumbest shit I've ever seen Blizzard do with a game. They made it into a single player MMORPG you have to play online, lmao...
Like, where the fuck are we supposed to meet people to group with? This is literally 0 interaction with others besides some random person riding past every 15 minutes or so.
Diablo 3 had numerous weekend long downtimes when Reaper of Souls came out. All of them from Ddos attacks. It's still an online only game. Fact is people move on and forget about it eventually and the fantasy of them making an offline mode will probably never happen.
I think it's more because allowing the game to disconnect from the server, and then reconnect with a character that has progressed would inevitably lead to the offline mode being used as a method to cheat.
I'm pretty sure the reason they don't want people playing offline is because it stops them from monitoring if you got stuff legitimately. They can't have their precious cash shops value watered down by allowing an offline mode that might introduce items into the economy players hadn't earned.
It's basically "We care more about making sure no one gets anything they haven't paid for more than we care about giving our customers an enjoyable experience".
Yeah, but there is no reason they couldn’t make it so an offline character is locked out off multiplayer.
It’s obviously not what everyone is asking for, but it would be a step in the direction. Especially for consoles where you must be logged into an account that owns the game to play it. Even offline. (At least on Xbox. I game share and if I lose internet I cannot even play the games I own without a phone hotspot.)
I think it should absolutely be separated from multiplayer. If you have an offline character to play when you can’t play online then you have provided means to play the game regardless of how your network services are doing.
That a win and all that I am asking for.
You don't understand. They don't give a shit if you are able to play unless you are playing the way that pushes you towards the cash shop.
To them offline mode is a threat because it could be possible for people to experience all the weapons and cosmetics the game has to offer without jumping through the hoops designed to encourage you to spend more money.
They don't give a shit if that means you can't play most of the time. Like I said, making sure no one gets anything for free is more important to them than making sure people who paid for their product can actually use it.
That's just how Blizzavision operate these days. Can I suggest you stop giving them your money?
>I think it's more because allowing the game to disconnect from the server, and then reconnect with a character that has progressed would inevitably lead to the offline mode being used as a method to cheat.
They solved this back in D2... Have them be separate. We had Open battle.net, which allowed you to use your single player characters online, and then we had Closed Battle.net which was only online characters.
Worked perfectly. You're right, this is exactly about that dumbass shop and Blizzard being greedy as fuck.
If that logic was true then Campaign mode of Starcraft would be fine and just authenticate for multiplayer. Bliz feels like its been burned by StarCraft being heaviy pirated in the 90s, and Diablo and Diablo 2 having had hacks to create items and screw with progression.
They won't ever give the ability to for future games to not be online required.
It seems an extra slap in the face considering they didn't even try to make the game a social one. They just crammed all the other irrelevant MMO features, but without anything resembling a good matchmaking or LFG method.
I don't know if it's lag or some sort of performance issues or both but travelling the world feels awful. Which they make you do constantly on a terrible horse.
I remember at Blizzcon they had a Starcraft 2 huge match mess up because they didn't have a LAN option and them showing Morhaime's face as people were chanting LAN, LAN, LAN. If that wasn't enough embarrassment to tear Blizzard away from making games online only, it's never going to happen for Diablo.
WC3R also had a ton of problems like this. Players in professional tournaments *in arenas* would get disconnected mid-match. For some absolutely idiotic reason, it didn't come with the "courtesy timeout" that every other Blizzard RTS did.
Gives even worse. Bliz thought they could do better than Kespa and were so stringent on ass fucking people over no LAN they let their entire esports they built up dwindle since they didn't have the same infrastructure in SK.
https://youtu.be/XsmvXiRZsBQ
Not sure if we're thinking of the same event, but this was IPL4 in Las Vegas 11 years ago. MKP was playing...someone, and the game disconnected. Was a really good match too.
Star 2 was so hype back then, hearing the GSL theme song gets my nostalgia going, can't believe it's been that long already.
Getting ripped and watching the Artosis and Tasteless archon casting tournaments was super hype with the wild chat and stuff.
It's not going to be any time soon, but I don't want to imagine the amount of WoW players revolting once they decide to just shut the game off. Are they still sending cease and desist to unofficial servers?
No time soon != never
D1 and D2 can be played forever. D3 and D4 can be played for as long as Activision turns a profit on them and can justify running the servers.
this is why my super nintendo will always be hooked up.
i wanna play some super mario rpg? earthbound? mario kart?
fuck, i still used my copy of command and conquer red strike!.
Everquest is still going, despite that it peaked at like 1/10th wow's subscribers. By the time blizzard shuts off wow it will have been bleeding subscribers and shoveling out lower and lower quality updates for so long the outcry will be tiny. It won't be any time soon.
And it won't be game over, because people will emulate it just like they already do.
I think the always online thing is a valid criticism of a lot of games, but not really for MMOs. It's just the nature of the beast for mmos.
No, it's always online until they turn the servers off. Probably won't happen for 15+ years, but it *will* happen. Then D4 doesn't exist unless someone has an offline emulator up and running by then.
Meanwhile I will be able to play D1, D2, and D3 until I die. I highly doubt we'll be able to play D4 in 30 years.
15 years is being generous. Overwatch 1, a game you had to buy to play, only lasted 6 years before the servers turned off for overwatch 2. It's what made me think twice about buying diablo 4.
This article is blogspam, the original source is from /r/diablo:
* https://old.reddit.com/r/Diablo/comments/14igl9a/6hrs_downtime_in_a_lifeservice_game_by_a_multi/
Yeah, I am shocked this is still even a debate. And why is it this topic only comes up for Diablo 4 and not any other GaaS?m Not to mention the MMO-lite nature of D4?
Blizzard hasn't released a stand alone game with offline since what Starcraft II?
At this point, you can't feel bad for the players who are disappointed with their purchase. They absolutely know what they are getting into, server issues included.
They knew this going in on the LAST game... Which was released just over 11 years ago by the way, so you still would've known 10 years ago, and it would've been a bit silly to complain then too.
At this point, what'd you expect? Honestly. This is just the kind of game that Diablo is now. This wasn't a surprise to anybody. If it was, you've been living under a rock. They ripped off that band-aid over a decade ago.
It's also a Blizzard game, which is everything I just said but x10, because I'm pretty sure all of their modern games have been like this.
The online mode is garbage. You are forced to be on this multi-player mode with all these other people who never talk, never group, never acknowledge chat. Only ever play with people I group up with from discord.
There's no chat, trade chat is opt in and dead, never had anyone respond in local, I've had better grouping in diablo 1 way back in the 90s.
And we pay for it with queues, lag and connection problems. I just want a random group of 4 to do nightmare dungeons.
I'm all out of sympathy for blizzard fans, they have demonstrated again and again that they desperately want to be shit on by the company, so I'm not going to pretend I care when it happens.
"Guys we should never preorder games anymore because it encourages bad business practices but it's totally okay if it's a game from a popular franchise owned by a company known for its shitty always online game releases that have always been buggy and had server issues in the past but we're still going to complain about it even though we knew exactly what we were getting into when we bought it"
A small but vocal community on reddit always whines about pre ordering but the reality of that is is that it's been a staple for nearly 15 years now.
It's not going to go away and people aren't going to suddenly stop doing it.
Surely Blizzard will learn with d5 said the sheep who is going to order anything that says diablo. Offline mode is dead for this blizzard, and also expect server issues the first month or two.
Fuck all online games. In a few years when they shut down their servers, your game will be trash and fuck your sixty or seventy bucks. Why do people continue to pay money for these not-even-that-good-to-begin-with games?
Offline sounds good with the caviot that I can pause the god damn game, pause cutscenes, or just not feel anxiety that I put the controller down to go do something. This is the perfect god damn game to drop in for 10 minutes put your system in rest mode and pick back up later.
There has been multiple times I've hesitated then decided against doing something in the game because I wasn't confident I could complete it before having to walk away to do something else. It has seriously degraded my enjoyment of this game
Making it offline only would legit make me enjoy it more because I'd feel like I was alone in a giant isolated world, slowly gathering strength to defeat the darkness. Having it a shared world with a bunch of people running around makes it feel (again, just my opinion) like I'm socializing and hanging out and primping myself up to higher levels rather than truly battling a desperate lonely darkness overtaking the world. It kinda kills the experience for me. :/
Same atmosphere that made me love d1 and d2 up to this day. I am a big diablo fan, can live with the un-original itemisation, but breaking my mood with kids running around and a "store" in this desolate world where I have to use my real life credit card.... nope
Every time I've walked away for much time it's DC'd me. Offline games don't do that. PoE doesn't do that.
No, I cannot just resume where I was reliably in D4. Like that user, it has lessened my enjoyment. Maybe it doesn't matter for your use case. It does matter to some of ours.
If I could play D4 single player, and especially if I could pause it, it would be a better game for me. The "gain" of being an online game is easily outweighed by the negatives for some players, such as myself.
> or just not feel anxiety that I put the controller down to go do something.
Very much a feature for them, not a bug. If you cant step away then you'll keep playing.
Pausing/Cancelling cut scenes would be amazing.. There have been a number of times where I'll start a cutscene and I'll realize I haven't been paying attention and want to start it over, but all I can do is skip it. SWTOR does this just fine as a GaaS, just hit Esc and it exits you out of the conversation.
You would need to.make separate offline char for it, people who call for that mode thinks you could play one character as just switch modes, but it won't be a case.
Why, because in every arpg where u have offline mode, character files are save on your pc and you can edit those files.
At the very least they should give you an option to create an offline only character where you're locked into only playing that character on offline or over LAN
Blizzard is over estimating the micro transactions. I will never want them or even consider buying whatever they are offering. Never ever. It’s a game.
If people are still blindly supporting Blizzard and throwing day one release money them, then they frankly deserve to eat shit like this.
This is what you paid for. This is what you’re supporting. It’s not like it’s without precedent or that this is new.
You paid for this.
Offline mode would make the game play better, no more weird rubber banding and other related issues. But it's never happening, Blizzard designed this game to sell microtransactions and for that to work they need you to be online sitting next to someone in town with a fancy costume looking cool.
I don't know how many people this works on, but then Diablo Immortal made them millions, and that game is a pile of shit.
Imagine buying D4 after D3 being a disaster because of always online and then complain about always online again xd
Stop buying games with shit like this or they'll keep doing it.
They didn't even allow "offline" in D2R to be "offline", you still have to authenticate to blizzard servers.
They also got rid of TCP/IP play.
I don't think we'll ever get *true* offline again.
I'd love to play D4, but I'm not willing to play an 'always on' game. I've never liked games that forced me into being online, and I stopped buying them.
yeah it wont happen the second it does people will pirate the shit out of it. because $110 (For my country) is not worth it in my opinion for a Diablo game after the last one they released i don't trust em
At this point I have no sympathy for anyone that supports blizzard. Even if you ignore the internal controversies, all they do is continually shit in their customer's mouths.
It's one of the main reasons I didn't buy the game. Played the beta; knew how this would play out if servers took a crap. (Additionally, there are a multitude of other reasons, but just addressing the "always online" aspect)
If one stops supporting them with their money they'll listen, but that will never happen because there's too many Blizzard-adults (think Disney-adults but with Zerg merch)
Here’s the thing. Other games in this genre have split options and they do this by keeping offline and online completely separate. This is the perfect solution. Wolcen and I think Lost Epoch both do this and they are from small Indie studios
Reminds me of that time that Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood was brought down by a DDoS attack, so all the people who bought the game legitimately were unable to play it, but all the people who pirated it were playing uninterrupted.
I feel bad for the people that bought it, but come on, you knew this was bound to happen. Blizzard isn't the same company it once was. It's gone the route of greed.
Let’s be real, it’s online because they want you to be able to spend money buying shit. There’s literally no other reason, it’s a digital storefront with some dungeon crawl side game.
If you get an off-line mode then you won't have a reason to spend your real world dollars on custom outfits to flex to other players.
This is the legacy of Wow, Blizzard made too much money from that and now everything has to have the same revenue potential.
they will NEVER give Diablo 4 an offline mode. Im in AUS and I get kicked every 30minutes. Its to the point if I cant clear a dungeon in 15min, there is no point as I'll get kicked and lose my progress. I've just accepted I cant enjoy Diablo 4, its pretty much killed the game for me. Im sure I dont matter, most other people are paying $$$ so its okay.
This is on PS4, any time of the day. Checked all network settings, its a Blizzard server issue
Lmao, while i agree games should have offline mode there is something hilariously morbid about people not having an alternative when a single computer game is offline for half a day... So fuckin depressing.
Everyone remembers what happened with SimCity and Diablo 3. If you bought D4 and are affected by this, that's on you I'm afraid.
Rewarding this practice only let's them get away with it more.
so you bought a game knowing it was always online and now are upset that something happened during it being an always online game making it so you couldnt play it.
Yet you somehow, bought the game knowing this could happen. It's like buying an MMO and being mad when the services stop for a while, shit happens you knew what you paid for.
Will never happen. An OFFLINE mode would allow people to get the useless and overpriced Macro transactions for free instead of selling your soul to afford them.
Cant tell what’s the worse realization here. Diablo 4 needing an offline mode or gamers unable to find something else to do for 12 hours except sit and cry that the game is down lol
Do you actually think that people sat in their gaming chairs for 12 straight hours doing nothing but trying to log in to D4 with tears streaming down their face?
Or is it more likely that they're just annoyed because the game they paid money for wasn't working when they wanted to play it for a few hours after work or something?
I'm with you on this one. There were people freaking the fuck out because the game went down for like 2 hours shortly after launch and people were asking for refunds because of it. A game that will likely still be running and getting updates in 3 or 4 years, and people refunded it over 2 hours of downtime. It's absurd.
It needs an offline mode because the game doesn't even feel alive online lol. Online only feels pointless besides world boss / legion events.
When people are finally done with the game its going to be even worse.
The game definitely needs an offline mode, but Blizzard will never give us that...
It sucks even more because d3 on console at least had an offline mode. But d4 was designed as a mmo/gaas so it will never happen sadly
Games as a service fucking blows.
I don’t know why people are so desperate to be exploited. This is not 2008, we have so many great games to play right now that we can ditch the toxic ones.
Because the new generation have been brought up on online services, constantly connected and micro transaction full games, it's just service as normal for them. Anyone that talks about such things and offline only etc get swept to one side and pushed away in their wheelchair rambling about the good old days.
And those who have large disposable incomes just say fuckit and pay, so prices get higher and higher until they find the spot where those people slow down purchases, then a sale!
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and most of our childhood games become that way and there are often no good alternatives. The Best Diablo Alternative is Path of Exile and that's even more an GaaS
The best Diablo alternative is Grim Dawn because it's OFFLINE. PoE, while a good game still has online only which is simply unnecessary for a game you wanna play single-player. They even created a "solo-self-found" mode, the irony in this when all they had to do was implement offline single-player lmao.
“The future is now old man”
Steams top sellers list the day of the starfield pre-order announcement was filled almost entirely with pre-orders for digital games. People will never learn. Reddit, as big as it is, is a bubble. Most of the people buying don't give a shit and that indifference is what companies capitalize on.
Even reddit never fucking learns. People were acting like Cyberpunk was the second coming of christ before it came out, and got hit with reality real fast. Then immediately got hyped for the next big pre-order. I can't understand why people love hype so much, it's just a manufactured tool at this point, and it just tricks people into feeling like they're part of something, without releasing that "something" is just buying a fucking product. And yes, I know Cyberpunk wasn't the first, but it's the most recent big one that people hopefully would have learned from.
That's because "reddit" is more than 1 person. We learn, but we also see new people join up constantly, who haven't yet learned.
Not that I doubt for a second it’s true that people preordered star field like crazy but how do we know that steam doesn’t just put shit up there it wants people to buy by making them think it’s the next big thing.
2008 was a dope year in games. I’d gladly take Bioshock, GTA 4, Mass Effect, Fallout 3, and Rock Band all over again.
Rockband fuck yeah
The battle pass system of games-as-a-service is a very psychologically effective way to "entrap" people into staying with one specific game, so every AAA game is trying to do it. The problem is that you can really only dedicate yourself to one such game unless you can play 24/7, but there's no better strategy when it comes to player retention (and subsequent recurring revenue) and nobody cares about anything else anymore.
People want to relive their Diablo 2 experience. I saw some guys rebuilding their PC and change their lighting to a Diablo themed one. It's... interesting behaviour for one game.
Everytime i see GaaS come up, i have to post this video, DEFINITELY worth your time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUAX0gnZ3Nw
Except maybe games which ARE a service, like MMO. *Maybe* Single player? Not a service, don't try to make it one...
Try? They've handedly succeeded.
Just recent came across a post, forget where, where there's apparently a server emulator to allow Diablo 3 on PC to be played offline.
Yeah but that took 9 years to be released. Needless to say reverse engineering D4 server calls might take near equivalent time.
Reverse engineering an online game's server is usually a question of will rather than time. I still remember WoW emulated server client popping up pretty damn fast because of how popular it was (we had a blast playing in an empty world on LAN). D3 never had that kind of interest after the initial dud, which is kinda sad for the game in a way - to be so unpopular that not even pirates would bother.
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That's why the work of AzerothCore is so important from a game preservation and even [pop] cultural preservation perspective. World of Warcraft at that time was such a phenomenon that it permeated everything. Everyone knew someone who played WoW, and it was on TV shows, commercials, and in everyday conversation. Heck, *South Park*'s "Make Love, Not Warcraft" episode won an Emmy. I'm very grateful to the ChromieCraft team for their work and their humility to offer all their fixes and updates to the open source community.
Although it's awesome to have WoW emulators and go back and look at old versions of the game it'll never recapture the cultural impact of basically everyone you knew playing the game. It's like the MSN and AIM server emulation projects in a way, yes you can get the old stuff going again but it's a ghost town. Good for nostalgia but will never be the same.
These things are never about will. It's about luck and time. Jailbreakers/hackers/whoever all have the will pretty much immediately available. Sometimes they get lucky and something is leaked, sometimes you have a collective mass of thousands of people trying out multiple things to get into a system. It never really is a case of someone waking up and thinking "Man i want this so much more than I did yesterday, I believe I can break into this."
There's already a working emulator running. It's a broken mess, but it's definitely not 9 years away.
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Yeah that was an old way to sort of "pirate" it, but it wasn't really much stable and had weird stability bugs with spawns and such.
This. I actually love playing Diablo 3 on my switch because it can be played anywhere. Only thing that sucks about it is all the leaderboards are full of hacked chars. But if you only care about solo play and leveling that doesn't affect your enjoyment of the game at all. Maybe one day we get d4 on switch U
So weird, because I'm about to finish the campaign and have only ever grouped with 1 single person who I already know IRL. I interacted with so many more people in the previous 3 games, yet the forced online one is the one I feel the most by myself while playing. I do love the game, but that mmo lite decision is about the dumbest shit I've ever seen Blizzard do with a game. They made it into a single player MMORPG you have to play online, lmao... Like, where the fuck are we supposed to meet people to group with? This is literally 0 interaction with others besides some random person riding past every 15 minutes or so.
All of this just reminds me when that Starcraft tournament got delayed because it was online only and people started chanting "WE WANT LAN!"
Blizzard didn't make LAN for SC2 because they wanted to control the E-sports which is pretty sad
GSTL finals at IGL i believe 😂
Diablo 3 had numerous weekend long downtimes when Reaper of Souls came out. All of them from Ddos attacks. It's still an online only game. Fact is people move on and forget about it eventually and the fantasy of them making an offline mode will probably never happen.
they won't because they'd rather allow legit owners to suffer than let people pirate the game lmao
I think it's more because allowing the game to disconnect from the server, and then reconnect with a character that has progressed would inevitably lead to the offline mode being used as a method to cheat. I'm pretty sure the reason they don't want people playing offline is because it stops them from monitoring if you got stuff legitimately. They can't have their precious cash shops value watered down by allowing an offline mode that might introduce items into the economy players hadn't earned. It's basically "We care more about making sure no one gets anything they haven't paid for more than we care about giving our customers an enjoyable experience".
Yeah, but there is no reason they couldn’t make it so an offline character is locked out off multiplayer. It’s obviously not what everyone is asking for, but it would be a step in the direction. Especially for consoles where you must be logged into an account that owns the game to play it. Even offline. (At least on Xbox. I game share and if I lose internet I cannot even play the games I own without a phone hotspot.)
I think it should absolutely be separated from multiplayer. If you have an offline character to play when you can’t play online then you have provided means to play the game regardless of how your network services are doing. That a win and all that I am asking for.
You don't understand. They don't give a shit if you are able to play unless you are playing the way that pushes you towards the cash shop. To them offline mode is a threat because it could be possible for people to experience all the weapons and cosmetics the game has to offer without jumping through the hoops designed to encourage you to spend more money. They don't give a shit if that means you can't play most of the time. Like I said, making sure no one gets anything for free is more important to them than making sure people who paid for their product can actually use it. That's just how Blizzavision operate these days. Can I suggest you stop giving them your money?
>I think it's more because allowing the game to disconnect from the server, and then reconnect with a character that has progressed would inevitably lead to the offline mode being used as a method to cheat. They solved this back in D2... Have them be separate. We had Open battle.net, which allowed you to use your single player characters online, and then we had Closed Battle.net which was only online characters. Worked perfectly. You're right, this is exactly about that dumbass shop and Blizzard being greedy as fuck.
If that logic was true then Campaign mode of Starcraft would be fine and just authenticate for multiplayer. Bliz feels like its been burned by StarCraft being heaviy pirated in the 90s, and Diablo and Diablo 2 having had hacks to create items and screw with progression. They won't ever give the ability to for future games to not be online required.
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Not a chance sadly because the game has paid cosmetics so they want you to see others players and be tempted to buy cosmetics.
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It seems an extra slap in the face considering they didn't even try to make the game a social one. They just crammed all the other irrelevant MMO features, but without anything resembling a good matchmaking or LFG method.
"Don't you guys have ~~phones~~ internet?"
I know all Blizzard cares about is their whale customers, but I'd buy D4 in a second if it had an offline mode.
I don't know if it's lag or some sort of performance issues or both but travelling the world feels awful. Which they make you do constantly on a terrible horse.
I'm rubber banding 80% of the time while in open world, especially in towns. Game is borderline unplayable.
Its a goddamn walking simulator.
I remember at Blizzcon they had a Starcraft 2 huge match mess up because they didn't have a LAN option and them showing Morhaime's face as people were chanting LAN, LAN, LAN. If that wasn't enough embarrassment to tear Blizzard away from making games online only, it's never going to happen for Diablo.
WC3R also had a ton of problems like this. Players in professional tournaments *in arenas* would get disconnected mid-match. For some absolutely idiotic reason, it didn't come with the "courtesy timeout" that every other Blizzard RTS did.
Fucking embarrassing
I played Frozen throne for like 10 years plus and everything about the Remake turned me off to the point where I never even tried it
Gives even worse. Bliz thought they could do better than Kespa and were so stringent on ass fucking people over no LAN they let their entire esports they built up dwindle since they didn't have the same infrastructure in SK.
https://youtu.be/XsmvXiRZsBQ Not sure if we're thinking of the same event, but this was IPL4 in Las Vegas 11 years ago. MKP was playing...someone, and the game disconnected. Was a really good match too.
Star 2 was so hype back then, hearing the GSL theme song gets my nostalgia going, can't believe it's been that long already. Getting ripped and watching the Artosis and Tasteless archon casting tournaments was super hype with the wild chat and stuff.
that will never happen it's owned by activision, it's always online forever.
its online as long as blizzard has its servers connected. its game over once those servers go offline
It's not going to be any time soon, but I don't want to imagine the amount of WoW players revolting once they decide to just shut the game off. Are they still sending cease and desist to unofficial servers?
No time soon != never D1 and D2 can be played forever. D3 and D4 can be played for as long as Activision turns a profit on them and can justify running the servers.
this is why my super nintendo will always be hooked up. i wanna play some super mario rpg? earthbound? mario kart? fuck, i still used my copy of command and conquer red strike!.
it is nice to have the original console ofc. dor everything else theres emulators!
Everquest is still going, despite that it peaked at like 1/10th wow's subscribers. By the time blizzard shuts off wow it will have been bleeding subscribers and shoveling out lower and lower quality updates for so long the outcry will be tiny. It won't be any time soon. And it won't be game over, because people will emulate it just like they already do. I think the always online thing is a valid criticism of a lot of games, but not really for MMOs. It's just the nature of the beast for mmos.
No, it's always online until they turn the servers off. Probably won't happen for 15+ years, but it *will* happen. Then D4 doesn't exist unless someone has an offline emulator up and running by then. Meanwhile I will be able to play D1, D2, and D3 until I die. I highly doubt we'll be able to play D4 in 30 years.
The original D2 is running strong at 23 years. Hell, I think D1 still has battlenet support.
Overwatch 1 lasted 6 years. It was also buy to play and online only.
I do wish they add a way to make a group and just do dungeons. To be honest I hate running around the over world.
The funniest thing is they had this same problem in WoW and it took them years to fix it but finally did. Now they're just repeating themselves.
15 years is being generous. Overwatch 1, a game you had to buy to play, only lasted 6 years before the servers turned off for overwatch 2. It's what made me think twice about buying diablo 4.
Be a shame if someone made a private server...
Oh man, I would have never seen this coming.
Never pay for a game that forces online to play single player.
100%. Don’t support this shit, fuck those guys.
lol, players already lost that battle with d3. blizzard isn't going to change now.
D5 will be extra online at this rate
You won't even be able to buy it, it'll just be stored in the cloud
It will be a browser game
D3 can be played offline on console.
Can D4 console play offline?
No, cause its an “always online” game
Hard no
Who the fuck is still supporting this shit company anyway?
Pretty much everyone I know who plays games. Its sad really. People with standards are the minority these days.
This article is blogspam, the original source is from /r/diablo: * https://old.reddit.com/r/Diablo/comments/14igl9a/6hrs_downtime_in_a_lifeservice_game_by_a_multi/
I mean maybe 10 years ago I'd care, but players knew this going in, you get what you pay for.
Yeah, I am shocked this is still even a debate. And why is it this topic only comes up for Diablo 4 and not any other GaaS?m Not to mention the MMO-lite nature of D4? Blizzard hasn't released a stand alone game with offline since what Starcraft II?
At this point, you can't feel bad for the players who are disappointed with their purchase. They absolutely know what they are getting into, server issues included.
They knew this going in on the LAST game... Which was released just over 11 years ago by the way, so you still would've known 10 years ago, and it would've been a bit silly to complain then too. At this point, what'd you expect? Honestly. This is just the kind of game that Diablo is now. This wasn't a surprise to anybody. If it was, you've been living under a rock. They ripped off that band-aid over a decade ago. It's also a Blizzard game, which is everything I just said but x10, because I'm pretty sure all of their modern games have been like this.
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The online mode is garbage. You are forced to be on this multi-player mode with all these other people who never talk, never group, never acknowledge chat. Only ever play with people I group up with from discord. There's no chat, trade chat is opt in and dead, never had anyone respond in local, I've had better grouping in diablo 1 way back in the 90s. And we pay for it with queues, lag and connection problems. I just want a random group of 4 to do nightmare dungeons.
I'm all out of sympathy for blizzard fans, they have demonstrated again and again that they desperately want to be shit on by the company, so I'm not going to pretend I care when it happens.
that would be great. as it stands i probably won’t get this game without an offline mode.
$70 game
"Guys we should never preorder games anymore because it encourages bad business practices but it's totally okay if it's a game from a popular franchise owned by a company known for its shitty always online game releases that have always been buggy and had server issues in the past but we're still going to complain about it even though we knew exactly what we were getting into when we bought it"
A small but vocal community on reddit always whines about pre ordering but the reality of that is is that it's been a staple for nearly 15 years now. It's not going to go away and people aren't going to suddenly stop doing it.
Surely Blizzard will learn with d5 said the sheep who is going to order anything that says diablo. Offline mode is dead for this blizzard, and also expect server issues the first month or two.
Fuck all online games. In a few years when they shut down their servers, your game will be trash and fuck your sixty or seventy bucks. Why do people continue to pay money for these not-even-that-good-to-begin-with games?
Live service is a cancer on Gaming.
$63.4 billion dollar company BTW.
Offline sounds good with the caviot that I can pause the god damn game, pause cutscenes, or just not feel anxiety that I put the controller down to go do something. This is the perfect god damn game to drop in for 10 minutes put your system in rest mode and pick back up later. There has been multiple times I've hesitated then decided against doing something in the game because I wasn't confident I could complete it before having to walk away to do something else. It has seriously degraded my enjoyment of this game
Caveat
They already got your money. Your feedback has been tossed in the bin.
Making it offline only would legit make me enjoy it more because I'd feel like I was alone in a giant isolated world, slowly gathering strength to defeat the darkness. Having it a shared world with a bunch of people running around makes it feel (again, just my opinion) like I'm socializing and hanging out and primping myself up to higher levels rather than truly battling a desperate lonely darkness overtaking the world. It kinda kills the experience for me. :/
Same atmosphere that made me love d1 and d2 up to this day. I am a big diablo fan, can live with the un-original itemisation, but breaking my mood with kids running around and a "store" in this desolate world where I have to use my real life credit card.... nope
You do know you can always teleport back to town, and then take your portal back to exactly where you left off right? Takes all of 10 seconds.
Every time I've walked away for much time it's DC'd me. Offline games don't do that. PoE doesn't do that. No, I cannot just resume where I was reliably in D4. Like that user, it has lessened my enjoyment. Maybe it doesn't matter for your use case. It does matter to some of ours. If I could play D4 single player, and especially if I could pause it, it would be a better game for me. The "gain" of being an online game is easily outweighed by the negatives for some players, such as myself.
> or just not feel anxiety that I put the controller down to go do something. Very much a feature for them, not a bug. If you cant step away then you'll keep playing.
Pausing/Cancelling cut scenes would be amazing.. There have been a number of times where I'll start a cutscene and I'll realize I haven't been paying attention and want to start it over, but all I can do is skip it. SWTOR does this just fine as a GaaS, just hit Esc and it exits you out of the conversation.
Not a chance in hell that will ever happen
People are so sensitive nowadays. Can’t comment without it being removed. Sheesh
I mean stop supporting Blizzard if things like this upset you.
"But how will we sell you our macrotransactions?" Games as a service is a virus and the games industry is infested with it.
You would need to.make separate offline char for it, people who call for that mode thinks you could play one character as just switch modes, but it won't be a case. Why, because in every arpg where u have offline mode, character files are save on your pc and you can edit those files.
Just like in diablo 2
everyone would be happy with an online and an offline-only mode.
Yea, they should do that, D2R have that.
I mean I guess that's what you get for giving blizzard $70
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I remember the PlayStation outage of 2011(?) That was the longest month of my life lol
Get em
ITT: people that dont learn didnt learn
At the very least they should give you an option to create an offline only character where you're locked into only playing that character on offline or over LAN
Blizzard is over estimating the micro transactions. I will never want them or even consider buying whatever they are offering. Never ever. It’s a game.
Anyone remember D3 launch lol?
DRM free gaming for life!
OVER 12 HOURS! OH MY GOD.
Blizzard has used “ddos” as an excuse for every unstable game launch for years!
There's no offline mode? What idiot buys that
Everyone needs to stop buying games that have server-dependent DRM. Not only Battle.net, but Denuvo, EA, Ubisoft, Rockstar, fuck all of it.
ONLINE ONLY! because you will own nothing and like it
Maybe stop playing shitty games like this??
Blizzard hears ya, Blizzard don't care. It's not going to happen
How else would the be able to monetize the game every quarter?
Nobody feels bothered with online only single player games, until it actually hurts them where it hurts the most.
If people are still blindly supporting Blizzard and throwing day one release money them, then they frankly deserve to eat shit like this. This is what you paid for. This is what you’re supporting. It’s not like it’s without precedent or that this is new. You paid for this.
It's actually the reason I haven't gotten it yet, if they add offline mode then I'm interested...
Agreed.
Offline mode would make the game play better, no more weird rubber banding and other related issues. But it's never happening, Blizzard designed this game to sell microtransactions and for that to work they need you to be online sitting next to someone in town with a fancy costume looking cool. I don't know how many people this works on, but then Diablo Immortal made them millions, and that game is a pile of shit.
Anyone still giving Blizzard money at this point deserves little better.
And people are surprised about a Blizzard game pulling scummy moves? Don't you guys have phones???
The Diablo 2 remaster has an offline mode. Diablo 3 for console has an offline mode. It isn't like they don't know how to provide the option.
Imagine buying D4 after D3 being a disaster because of always online and then complain about always online again xd Stop buying games with shit like this or they'll keep doing it.
They didn't even allow "offline" in D2R to be "offline", you still have to authenticate to blizzard servers. They also got rid of TCP/IP play. I don't think we'll ever get *true* offline again.
I'd love to play D4, but I'm not willing to play an 'always on' game. I've never liked games that forced me into being online, and I stopped buying them.
£70 for this bollocks treatment of fans.
yeah it wont happen the second it does people will pirate the shit out of it. because $110 (For my country) is not worth it in my opinion for a Diablo game after the last one they released i don't trust em
They don't care. Supporting a bad company = bad support.
Radical idea here: you could play a game made by a company that isn't the poster child of sexual harassment lawsuits.
At this point I have no sympathy for anyone that supports blizzard. Even if you ignore the internal controversies, all they do is continually shit in their customer's mouths.
Well, if you buy it, you got what you payed.
D4 is dogshit anyway
Lol I actually didn’t know you couldn’t play offline, that’s crazy to me. Wasn’t this a $60 game?
Keep it up ddosers.
It needs an offline mode. I hate having to rely on people online for anything. I'm not a social person I like doing stuff on my own.
I refuse to buy it until I can play offline and I don’t care
It's one of the main reasons I didn't buy the game. Played the beta; knew how this would play out if servers took a crap. (Additionally, there are a multitude of other reasons, but just addressing the "always online" aspect)
Its so dumb that they have no offline mode
If one stops supporting them with their money they'll listen, but that will never happen because there's too many Blizzard-adults (think Disney-adults but with Zerg merch)
Here’s the thing. Other games in this genre have split options and they do this by keeping offline and online completely separate. This is the perfect solution. Wolcen and I think Lost Epoch both do this and they are from small Indie studios
Reminds me of that time that Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood was brought down by a DDoS attack, so all the people who bought the game legitimately were unable to play it, but all the people who pirated it were playing uninterrupted.
I feel bad for the people that bought it, but come on, you knew this was bound to happen. Blizzard isn't the same company it once was. It's gone the route of greed.
D3 all over. Don't get hopes up for an offline mode
Let’s be real, it’s online because they want you to be able to spend money buying shit. There’s literally no other reason, it’s a digital storefront with some dungeon crawl side game.
Why do they even want it to he online only? What do they gain from that?
that way you always have the shop dangling in front of your nose. also harder to piracy it
Give me a fucking offline mode. I don't care about comparing my loot rolls with everyone else. I just want to play the game.
The milk Bobby would never allow such a good idea. Diablo 2 remake still doesnt allow LAN for God's sake.
If you get an off-line mode then you won't have a reason to spend your real world dollars on custom outfits to flex to other players. This is the legacy of Wow, Blizzard made too much money from that and now everything has to have the same revenue potential.
they will NEVER give Diablo 4 an offline mode. Im in AUS and I get kicked every 30minutes. Its to the point if I cant clear a dungeon in 15min, there is no point as I'll get kicked and lose my progress. I've just accepted I cant enjoy Diablo 4, its pretty much killed the game for me. Im sure I dont matter, most other people are paying $$$ so its okay. This is on PS4, any time of the day. Checked all network settings, its a Blizzard server issue
Lmao, while i agree games should have offline mode there is something hilariously morbid about people not having an alternative when a single computer game is offline for half a day... So fuckin depressing.
That's what you get for paying for Blizzard games. You all thought that a company drowning in controversy was going to be a smooth experience? Lol
Corporations don’t understand their customers. It’s why smaller independents are going to pave the future of entertainment.
They understand very well, in fact they are raking in € because you guys keep buying.
Blizzard, hear me out: # Exclusive offline mode, for only $39.99!* ^(\*per game editions)
Keep giving blizzard money and get shit in return.
Everyone remembers what happened with SimCity and Diablo 3. If you bought D4 and are affected by this, that's on you I'm afraid. Rewarding this practice only let's them get away with it more.
so you bought a game knowing it was always online and now are upset that something happened during it being an always online game making it so you couldnt play it. Yet you somehow, bought the game knowing this could happen. It's like buying an MMO and being mad when the services stop for a while, shit happens you knew what you paid for.
Good luck. They think it's some super smart drm system to make you play online.
It...is the most effective form of DRM that exists, no? Are you aware of another solution?
Will never happen. An OFFLINE mode would allow people to get the useless and overpriced Macro transactions for free instead of selling your soul to afford them.
Nothing's stopping them from selling (the same) cosmetic dlc for use in the offline mode.
Cant tell what’s the worse realization here. Diablo 4 needing an offline mode or gamers unable to find something else to do for 12 hours except sit and cry that the game is down lol
Do you actually think that people sat in their gaming chairs for 12 straight hours doing nothing but trying to log in to D4 with tears streaming down their face? Or is it more likely that they're just annoyed because the game they paid money for wasn't working when they wanted to play it for a few hours after work or something?
I'm with you on this one. There were people freaking the fuck out because the game went down for like 2 hours shortly after launch and people were asking for refunds because of it. A game that will likely still be running and getting updates in 3 or 4 years, and people refunded it over 2 hours of downtime. It's absurd.
Hey well, it gave me my Sunday back and I tended to my yard…so there’s that
Don’t buy their games. Money is the only thing they care about.
It needs an offline mode because the game doesn't even feel alive online lol. Online only feels pointless besides world boss / legion events. When people are finally done with the game its going to be even worse.
I hate online only single player games, and subscription services, it makes what small amount of the product I own, smaller.