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I'd rather talk about playing Diablo III , but since I'm working on a poky-band smartphone connectionthat makes playing much of anything online a lurching debacle,let's talk about Diablo III ‘s always-on requirement, or digital rights management, orhacker-repellent — or just "Blizzard'salbatross," as I'm sure some of you would rather it becalled. I'm talking about the need for a persistent Internetconnection to play Diablo III . Blizzard, in its infinite 800-pound-gaming-gorilla wisdom, hathfrom its lofty baroque tower decreed that Diablo III be played at all times online. Oh, there's aplay-by-yourself mode of sorts, one that lets you carve off a chunkof embryonic demigod before launching down gaming's longest(and slowest) loot-stuffed waterslide, bringingdeath-by-a-thousand-clicks to groaning/chittering/frizzling throngsof woefully inferior enemy riffraff that shuffle/scurry/sprinttoward you like iron fillings to an electromagnet. ( MORE: How to Play ‘Diablo III' on Your iPad ) But no, to do what in other games you'd be able to withoutthe providence of cyber-tethering, you have to log intoBlizzard's equivalent of that primitive CGI face at the endof Tron : Battle.net, Blizzard's master control program, the800-pound- cyber -gorilla worrisomely redefining the whole"how-we-play-games" thing. Or is it? I know many of you are angry, and part of me feels thesame way you do for probably the same reasons. How dare Blizzardrequire we connect to the Internet to play in solo mode! How darethe company require we connect to buggy servers, for that matter — servers that have beendemonstrably knocking players offline whether they're playingwith others or just by themselves! How dare the company forcehonest, paying buyers — the majority, that is — to payfor the sins of those who'd crack and pirate the game!(Which, incidentally, looks to have happened already.) How darethey pitch their business-minded decision as a consumer win-win byremoving all that old school brain-defeating complexity of, youknow, manually downloading a patch to keep the game updated! But walk with me a bit here. World of Warcraft requires an Internet connection to play. Even the hacked versionsthat involve pirate servers, still, by definition, require aclient/server-style network connection to get the job done. Andhere's the thing no one talks about: WoW can be played, at least for virtually all of the core levelingparts, as a solo game, too. And if you play on one ofBlizzard's PvE (player vs. environment) WoW servers, with the player vs. player angle off the table, hewingstrictly to NPC storyline quests, fellow players become like theghostly passerby in a game like Dark Souls. Could Blizzard have offered that offline? Of course. Why no "always on" indignationover that aspect of WoW ? Because it was pitched as an MMO — a massively multiplayeronline roleplaying game — from the start, and the expectationlevels were set. All MMOs, by definition, have "always onDRM," we just don't call it that. But with Diablo III , Blizzard's ambiguity about the game's modus operandiand post-launch technical incompetence are a double-whammy.Blizzard allowed its marketing department to pitch the game assingle-player in the traditional sense (like Diablo II and Diablo before it), presenting the online modes as supplementary insteadof the core experience. And the company loused up post-launchbecause its servers weren't prepared to handle the tsunami ofnew player accounts, culminating in game-snapping glitches,including ones that can yank a solo player out of the game simplybecause the server goofs and drops the connection. What a mess. ( MORE: Diablo III Battles Battle.net Blues as Players Slam the Game in Reviews ) In theory — that is, one where Diablo III ‘s servers perform impeccably — the only genuinenegative about Diablo III ‘s always-on play requirement is that we can't play itwithout a solid Internet connection. That's still alegitimate point. One of my annual travel stops is a farm inNowhere, Iowa , limited to my cellphone's sporadic data connection. Playingonline games like WoW or Lord of the Rings Online is a crapshoot. So my holiday gaming usually involves offlinestuff. At some point someone's going to pull areas like theseout of the Pleistocene, but until then, I'm stuck, as aremost of you with residences (or vacation cabins) in the middle ofnowhere, on planes, in deserts, visiting either of the arcticcircles, or anywhere else without a dependable broadband link. But it's less and less of an argument. Companies can'tdesign around extreme cases, and there's no design orconsumer rights principle that says offline games are inherentlysuperior to online ones. Given the industry shift toalways-connected gaming, I can't really fault Blizzard (oranyone else) for having always-on requirements in games. The issuein this case is how Diablo III was marketed (that is, ambiguously) exacerbated by how it'sactually performed, stability-wise, post-launch. Blizzard shouldhave sold the game as an explicitly multiplayer experience from theget-go, and done more to ensure its stability out of the chute. Given what's happened, Blizzard could do a lot to mend fenceswith Diablo III buyers by patching in an offline play checkbox, ala StarCraft II . It wouldn't just be "angry masses" placation,either, given the way the game was pitched (even while noting thealways-on requirement). And going forward, Blizzard, along with therest of the industry — laser-tuned to the precedentscompanies like Blizzard are setting — needs to be clear thatgames like these are multiplayer first and solo-play, if at all, second. Always-on as a way to thwartpiracy and hacking, or just to make updating more"convenient," isn't enough — that'sjust public-relations-speak for lazy "can't think ofanything better-to offer" design. Diablo III ‘s solo mode is arguably an afterthought to its more robustcooperative-play angle. Blizzard should have sold it as such.It's paying the price in low-starred Amazon reviews and savaged Metacritic user averages for not doing so. MORE: Buyer s Guide: ‘Diablo III' and ‘Max Payne3′ The e-commerce company in China offers quality products such as Embroidered Bed Sheets , Personalized Pillow Covers Manufacturer, and more. For more , please visit Custom Made Bedding Sets today!
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