I’m currently playing Diablo IV (and having a blast with it) but finding one small gripe which I only think is going to get worse and probably stop me playing it completely in the long run.
My girlfriend is currently pregnant. This means in 6 months time we’ll have a newborn. With this in mind I’m expecting to only be able to grab a few minutes at a time to game and even when I think I’ll have longer I may end up jumping off at short notice. This means I’ll almost certainly come to rely on games which I can pause. Unfortunately this isn’t possible with Diablo IV since it requires an always online connection even though I’m essentially playing it as a single player game.
What are other people’s thoughts?
That is awful. What are their reasons for that?
It prevents the most obvious cheating like savegame editing, save scum item duplication, and similar. If the game has PvP or leaderboards while still allowing your game character to be taken online when you feel like it, it makes technical sense.
If you don’t want to participate in leaderboards and just play single player and maybe co-op or PvP with trusted friends or on a curated server (like people do in Minecraft, Space Engineers, Terraria, old school shooters…), it’s just a degradation.
Much easier to monetize when the game is a live service, compared to pure offline game where you the player has all the control. It’s a disgusting trend.