And the Diablo III news just keeps on coming, however this time there’s no silver lining.
Blizzard has confirmed to PC Gamer that mods are “expressly prohibited” for Diablo III and that the dungeon crawling RPG won’t be playable at all when gamers are offline.
Now we shouldn’t be entirely surprised as similar policies were implemented for Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty, but for a series which isn’t entirely famed for its multiplayer this news is very surprising.
“One of the things that we felt was really important was that if you did play offline, if we allowed for that experience, you’d start a character, you’d get him all the way to level 20 or level 30 or level 40 or what have you, and then at that point you might decide to want to venture onto Battle.net,” explained Diablo III’s executive producer Rob Pardo to PC Gamer.
“But you’d have to start a character from scratch, because there’d be no way for us to guarantee no cheats were involved, if we let you play on the client and then take that character online.”
So Blizzard are penalising regular players to eliminate the effectiveness of any would-be cheaters out there? Perhaps, but Pardo also admitted that their ‘online, all the time’ strategy is also about eliminating piracy.
The lack of mod support would also feature into this policy, as Blizzard wish to control all and any content going into the game which includes exploits, trainers etc.
However one of the key reasons why Diablo as a series has remained so relevant is its thriving mod scene, which is building exciting new content for the previous two games in this series even to this day, exponentially extending both games’ shelf life.
Entities such as DoTA would never have existed in the guise we know today if Blizzard had implemented such stringent game controls for the first two Diablos and we suspect this new policy will significantly impact the life span of the series’ forthcoming sequel.
These developments, in addition to the auction house which will utilise real money as currency, are all in aid of transforming Diablo III into a platform Blizzard can control every aspect of.
Whether that’s a bad thing or not depends on whether you trust the makers of World of Warcraft to not nickel and dime players at every opportunity.
Diablo III is still in development, so there’s still time for Blizzard to rethink some of their more controversial strategies.
Tags: Diablo
Diablo III feature plus previews for Crysis 3, Dishonored and War of the Roses. As well as reviews for both The Walking Dead and Sniper Elite V2.
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