Always on; no mods; real cash auction house. Diablo 3's going to be a very different game, and we're not sure Blizzard's making the right move at all.
Once again, the US news cycle means most rabid Diablo fans have likely already read and internalised (not to mention, cried tears of pure rage) the PC Gamer news, but for those of you late to the party and still waking up, here's the skinny on Diablo 3.
It will require a constant connection to the Internet.
It will feature a real-cash-your-actual-dollars auction and trading system.
It will not feature any kind of modding functionality whatsover.
Blizzard's justifications are many and somewhat tried and true. The constant connection will make cheat-levelling harder and keep the playing field between single-player and Battle.net play level. People trade items for money anyway, so why not bring that system into the game (and make a slice of profit out of the exchange). As to modding... Blizz is claiming "security and gameplay" reasons, and also lumps mods in with bots. That decision seems particularly harsh, and one that flies in the face of the rich mod landscape that Blizzard has fostered for many of its other games.
So what do we think?
First up, we're kind of sad that, in the words of John Gillooly, the Diablo that we all cut our teeth on is well and truly gone. It was a game that you could muck about with your mates on a laptop, play some Iron Man (the ONLY way to play, in our opinion), kill some Goblins and have a bit of fun. The always-on requirement kind of makes that a lot tougher. Admittedly, most people do have an always on connection, so it's really not that big a thing, but PC gaming has always been about choice, and anything that removes that - and makes a game impossible to play, for instance, while travelling our on the go - kinda sucks.
The cash auction system is interesting, and if the game's priced appropriately, we won't mind so much. Ideally, if Blizz is going to be making money of a non-subscription game, then it really should be free-to-play. No mods, though... that's a killer. It really sounds like someone's being lazy and rather than coming up with a way to work against bots and malicious code, while allowing mods, they're stamping it all out.
Of course, at the wrap we're still very keen to see Diablo 3 and play it, but this news certainly dampens our ardour a little. And it makes us think back to our adament belief that Activision's (and Bobby Kotick's in particular) influence on Blizzard would be minor.
Perhaps we were wrong...
Issue: 137 | June, 2012