Of course, Diablo 3 has yet to actually BE always on, but..
I do not yet own Diablo 3. There was a time in my life, years ago, when I younger me would’ve been shocked at older me saying that. I played the heck out of Diablo 2, and it’s one of the few games I can play with my wife where one of us isn’t absolutely destroying the other in some way. We played it both separately, and together, often when one of us needed some backup against a lesser or prime evil. It was simple fun that only needed a couple of PCs and a LAN.
But I’m realizing now that Blizzard doesn’t want my money. I am not their target market. I like playing solo or just with another person or two I know, not random strangers. Having all games hosted ‘in the cloud’ is an unneccesary tether. I don’t want to buy items in an auction house. I like killing monsters and taking their stuff instead. So why do I have to play D3 like a pseudo-MMO? If you don’t want to allow items from local games into the online games, that’s fine. I never encountered a hacked or duped item myself, but I just played the game for fun, not to break it or make money off of it. Single player gaming is much more convenient for a good bit of the population, so of course let’s make it hard/impossible. I know, DRM! They steal our games! Read that story about Kingdoms of Amalur’s devs being broke and you can kind of understand that angle. But you can still have the key requirement for online play, which means MOST buyers of the game will need one, some of the rest of us will buy the game anyway because we like to be legit, and a few jerks will pirate it.
That’s not my problem, though, and I’m being penalized for it. That is, if I were to buy the game. I don’t think I am, at least not while it’s $60 for a game that’s only half-working anyway. It’s obvious from their sales that they don’t need to cater to my interests to keep me as a customer. That’s fine. I think the $20 for Torchlight 2 will be money much more well spent for me, as it has LAN play and can be modded. This is what everybody means when they say ‘vote with your money’, right?
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