It is not a problem at all if people cheat on their offline chars. Online and offline chars should of course be separate. No offline chars online. No online chars offline.
They did.
Which turns the lament into “if only you could read…”
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its all about protecting their IP… you let people play offline then people will download the game for free and play offline…
Online only makes it so you can’t just steal the game.
No they wont. The vast majority of games can be played offline, and they still sell. Somehow all people are not criminals.
Besides, people would likely play online some times, and offline at other times, with different chars. The ability to play with friends etc. is desirable for a lot of people, so online mode would have that going for itself.
Plus the added value of having an offline mode. Who knows, they might sell more copies than by being online only.
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except every game that can be played offline is available for free on the internet and D3 isn’t
Except what?
You can steal those games (well, at least some of them) on the internet, yes?
They still sell. So did D3.
With that logic, cars are free, since you can just steal one?
Most people do not seem to be criminals.
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Its a business… Activision got a LOT of shareholders.
“So 30 000 people got the game for free, but we still sold copies guys”
Not the kind of news shareholders like
Plenty of game companies got shareholders, yet still releasing offline games. I haven’t heard about the shareholders for those companies having a heart attack recently.
But yes, if you lose 30,000 copies to pirates, then sell 50,000 more due to having an offline feature, shareholders should be happy.
I was a shareholder in Activision up until recently. I’d most certainly like them not to be shortsighted, by releasing games without offline modes. I bet the offline mode in D2, with the longevity it created for the game, increased the Diablo franchise fanbase by millions.
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Worst example, that game gotta be the most pirated game there is lol
I very much doubt it. Any sources for such a claim?
Heck, even if it was, it might still have been a great decision to have an offline mode for the additional playerbase it created.
Starcraft makes the top 10 all time, but not D2… so I guess you’re right that D2 isn’t the most pirated game, although every game on that list hace an offline mode.
But interesting fact, 35% of PC gamers play pirated games. That’s 1 in 3 pc gamers who doesn’t pay
I’d certainly question such ‘statistics’.
If its the source I googled, it is even an unscientific and bad poll. As in, quite useless. Not fact.
A pirated copy is also not the same as a lost sale.
Online games certainly can get pirated as well. Happened with WoW.
Heck, D3 probably got pirated too. There seem to have been unofficial servers early on.
None of it means that having an offline mode is a bad idea.
Here goes another offline mode thread that tries again to sell offline mode to Blizz. It is not gonna happen at all. Don’t care how many times it is posted or how many accounts the same old players that ask for it. Nor how many different reasons they give for it. It will not happen.
Offline mode is >>>>>>> console, Nintendo Switch.
This means that the PC won’t be getting offline mode. The only way it might happen is if D3 servers are ever permanently shut down.
Then we question the ethics of releasing and citing an article that support piracy and shrug off its impact, then claiming it as a legit source while it’s buried down by legal means. Because in real practice, piracy is denting the effect of your advertisement costs (which can be measured in million dollars) and production costs (which is hundred million dollars over the course of years) for big companies. It’s really damaging for your image at the eyes of your shareholders awaiting growth. You have no right to question any statistics if you believe anything that is buried by legal means.
Not a bad idea, however due to how genre works based on player progress the framework have to be perfect to completely separate the two modes which is not the case due to human mistakes and tight deadlines. Bugs will slip, feedback cycle will be broken without online mode then this will threaten the economy of the online portion (deflation as we saw from D2) and game’s consistency unless you separate the modes as a completely different titles, different games.
We went over this for hundred times. Same framework, same hardcoded core is not enough to separate the two properly as we saw live examples from D3 at consoles and D2 at PC.
And no, nowhere else you can storage the save files for an offline mode. If you’re dreaming of keeping save files online only in an “offline” mode which defies the purpose in an absurd way; player can mod the entire game to bypass this if no other measures are taken. Encrypt something for security and processing will be slower; give client the keys for decrypt and you can’t prevent anything where you go back to square one.
As we saw from pre-alpha demo, D4 uses a heavily modified engine of D3; new gimmicks, new exploits, new bugs to fix. Maybe an A.I work could array the entire thing but I wouldn’t await it sooner.
For coming up with a solution you can just separate them completely (which Blizzard did in the past by consoles and PC) or try to come up with a working example for the model which failed several times. Anything you can come up with don’t have accumulative progress, nor is randomization heavy as RPG genres.
There will be a console version for sure, as previous generation is still a thriving market for them and hopefully will have kboard-mouse support as we saw from the new CoD on consoles. Anything you see at PC will be subject to DRM (again newest remake of an old CoD game on PC) because company wanna keep their biggest profit target platform on control.
Some other companies releasing DRM free games is completely irrelevant to the another company’s policies as their public float is a fraction of Acti-Blizzard if you were to check it. To add, with way less shareholders and smaller charities under their name. Acti-Blizzard can not be another company, nor another company can replace Acti-Blizzard.
Why do you think OP opened this again? With 0 posts, right away. To bait all into an argument which you all gladly jumped in.
I always wondered if D4 enemy AI will be trained by google and ran on nvidia Tesla cards. Since those aren’t on a majority of PCs, making an offline mode would be pointless
Still nonsense.
Blizzard chose to save the online character data on the local console. That is crazy of course. But doesn’t mean it has to be that way. Other games manage just fine to store their online chars online.
Online chars online, offline chars offline. It is not rocket science.
I have not really mentioned the research you talk about. Though it at least seemed to aim at being scientific, unlike a random freaking internet poll. Not remotely the same.
That should certainly happen.
It would indeed be a smart idea to use DRM.
Though you are right that other companies do release DRM free games. While also doing fine at the same time. Using DRM is also perfectly fine though.
Online characters on consoles were not really “online” characters to begin with. D3 at PC was online only, so they catered offline fans with consoles while not giving away control or funneling them to paid services.
Knowing this Blizzard devs didn’t even tried to separate mods apart as no amount of bolstering would fix it when you give data to the hands of the client. It took them years to keep the integrity of D2, why should they even try at D3 knowing the result will be same?
Aimed at being nonsense. Both. No exceptions. Take it as a grain of salt if you wish but a simple article from out of industry wouldn’t reflect it fully.
Which was the mistake.
But it would have been no problem to make online chars online only, and offline chars offline only, AT THE SAME TIME.
Hopefully they will realize their mistake and cater to offline players once again.
That is fair.
Fixed that for you…
And what would those reasons be?
Outside of baseless fearmongering that is.