This is something that bothers me about Diablo 3. Truth be told, it bothers me about every game it’s in that isn’t explicitly a multiplayer game, but it really bothers me about Diablo 3 that the game is an always online one — that even if I intend to play the game wholly by myself I have to do so connected to Blizzard’s servers. If you tried playing Diablo 3 when it came out, you may remember Error 37. If not, trust me, it wasn’t fun. Well, except for people making memes.
So when Diablo 4 was announced as an always on, somewhat multiplayer game where you can run into dozens of other players, the first thing I thought was but I don’t want to run into dozens of other players. It’s not enough to make me cool on the game — I’ve been waiting for this for years, I’m super invested in the game happening — but am I the only person who maybe plays Diablo with at most two other people and that’s plenty?
Demons can be slain alone
I may be a complete outlier. I’m willing to admit this. Perhaps the vast majority of Diablo players are desperate for all these multiplayer experiences, with Diablo Immortal essentially an MMO and Diablo 4 doubling down on the multiplayer aspects that Diablo 3 tried to introduce. It’s not that this is entirely a new thing, but even with all of its Battle.net support, Diablo 2 was still a single player game that felt like a single player game. Diablo 3 felt like it was only a single player game because it was used to being one and didn’t feel like going all the way. And that bothers me, because it’s exactly what I want from my Diablo experience — at most, I’ll play with a couple friends, and I enjoy playing it solo a lot of the time.
Now, I hasten to point out that Diablo 4 will by all accounts still be a game with a single player mode. The demo I played at BlizzCon (a lot) was definitely single player. But I’m still wondering why I have to be tethered to an internet connection to play a game I bought and installed. Especially a game like Diablo 4, which is basically perfect for solo playing. I understand that for many games, the always online feature is in fact a way to prevent piracy, but the idea of not being able to play Diablo 4 at all when my internet is out is really troublesome for me.
The online tether doesn’t add anything
Because that’s the real trouble I have with this whole thing — it’s not really the multiplayer angle per se, because I know I’ll be able to opt out of much of that. I do prefer single player Diablo or, at most, small group Diablo, but I don’t mind the multiplayer being there for others. I just hate the idea of not being able to play at all at the vagaries of my connection. This isn’t World of Diablo here. The idea of a persistent multiplayer world isn’t why I’m playing this game, and I think the ability to keep playing when there’s an ISP problem or an outage somewhere between here and the datacenter is a good idea. I shouldn’t need to log on to anyone’s server to play a game I own that has a single-player mode.
I don’t know how Blizzard will implement its always-on aspect of Diablo 4. Maybe it’ll be so seamless I won’t even notice. Maybe I won’t be inconvenienced by the servers being down or a DDoS attack on Blizzard. But I really can’t help but think this wouldn’t be a problem at all if Blizzard put some form of offline play in from the start.