One thing that’s guaranteed to make headlines is a video game developer making a few design choices on the PC that get people up in arms. After continually raising eyebrows back during the lead-up to StarCraft 2, Blizzard invited a few games journalists down to Irvine, California to sample some of Diablo 3. While I’m certain they came away with the excellent taste of RPG/brawler in their mouths, a couple bits of news might have left a sour taste.
Diablo 3 will feature an in-game auction house where players can exchange real money for items or receive cash for selling theirs. As a kick-back for running the service, Blizzard will take a little off the top (like Valve and the community TF2 items), but the seller will still see some payouts in the end. In addition to Blizzard taking their cuts, an un-announced third party will be handling the transaction and taking their piece of the pie as well.
Blizzard sees this as an extension of the trading system in Diablo 2 where the best items would get filtered around by the players on Battle.net. While the auction system will be closely regulated by Blizzard and there are several safeguards in place to prevent abuse, this seems like quite the gamble to be taking with Diablo 3.
Speaking of gambles, Blizzard also announced at the same event that Diablo 3 will require a constant Internet connection, even if you want to play all by your lonesome. The constant connection will be used to authenticate your character with Blizz’s servers and prevent piracy, auction house fraud and other sorts of nastiness. Another part of the reasoning was that Blizzard thought that people wouldn’t appreciate maxing out a character in single-player and starting over from scratch if they wanted to try Battle.net.
That’s quite the pair of head-scratchers right there, if you don’t mind me saying so. Blizzard is always trying to push the envelope in these terms, so this might not be the weirdest things we hear pre-release. What do you guys think about this news? Does this affect your perception of Diablo 3? Oh, and there will also never, ever be mods. So there’s that.
I can see this causing a few ‘raised eyebrows’. Hell I’m annoyed by it and I was still on the fence! Constant internet connection? In Ireland? In the friggin’ country? Fuck that. I usually get signed out of PSN when the phone rings so I’m well and truly off the fence now. Ugh, God help us.
Don’t pull an Ubisoft, Blizzard. Please.
dammit blizzard the only reason I was ok with the whole battlenet thing was because starcraft 2 was first and foremost a multiplayer game for me. Constant internet connection is something that is not necessary what so ever for a action rpg like diablo. Was going to get but not anymore, Blizzard is getting pretty shitty, not when it comes to game quality, but as far as drm and other policies are concerned. Remember that whole real id shit, that is still somewhat there. Me no likey.
also, I finally got Starcraft 2. So whenever you are going to play, my ID thingy is USK. Also I am in bronze
Really smart move by Blizzard and I think its a really good idea for a real money auction house, can’t wait to see how it turns out.
But for every positive there is a negative and constant internet connection is certainly negative but saying that you need a constant internet connection for WoW too and I hear that has a good few players.
I don’t think it’s too much to expect that an MMO would have an always online requirement, though…
I was discussing the auction house with a friend this morning and he told me that item trading on EBay was a big deal back in Diablo 2, so I guess this is Blizz’s way of circumventing that. They’re trying to prevent gold-farming, so I can respect that.
There’s a reason I didn’t put Today’s WTF in the title and that’s because, however strange we think these things are, I trust Blizzard to have a good reason for these things at this point. I can see where the always-online thing would needle some people (and it’s unreasonable to expect that everyone will have 24/7 Internet even in 2011), but this is still part of the company’s effort to combat piracy. I wouldn’t say it worked (given how StarCraft 2 was pirated) but it could be worse.
I’ve never been a Diablo guy, but were you serious at the end of the article when you said no mods ever? Or was that a joke..?
DRM is crazy, and they can try all they want to prevent piracy, but normally, just having a multiplayer component is what prevents piracy. Can’t play online without a unique ID. And if you’re counting to make most of your money from the Auction house anyways (if you’re shooting for the TF2 approach), then why not let the pirates play Single Player all they want? That’s not the market you’re selling to anyways…
Blizzard has said that they won’t open up modding for Diablo 3. Not surprising, considering the other news.
The lack of modding and the need for constant internet connection has put Diablo 3 into my Will-Not-Buy list. I was really on the fence about it beforehand but Diablo 3 just looks unappealing and now feels like it’s really not worth it. I’m probably just going to buy Torchlight 2 when that comes out and have all of the dungeon crawler fun I want. Blizzard isn’t really acting like a company with competition in this field, and I think that’ll kinda bite them in the ass. Not that it matters, since they already have more money than god and could probably keep afloat even if literally not a single person bought Diablo 3.