Seriously asking as a very long D2 player. Sure, offiline mode is good, fun and sometimes necessary but it will hurt blizzard sales (IMO) and there are much much much bigger problems to care for such a : good story , d1-2’s eviorment, decent item and skill tree level, how the MMO thing will turn out, campaign mode and bunch of other stuff that can make or break this game. Sure offline mode is a nice add on but if the game is bad, an offline mode won’t save it .
Lets go this way : if an offline mode will come out for D3, will some one even bother? 
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It seems like it’s a bigger issue than it is because people keep making new threads about it when they could have posted in an existing thread =P
Other than that, it’s important to some people. We all have own our priorities. Plenty of people here don’t care if the story is garbage so long as the gameplay is fun.
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All perfectly valid concerns, and i share many of them.
Think of it like this. D4 launches with an offline mode. But maybe the itemisation isn’t very good, or the skill trees aren’t very deep.
Mod it.
Now they are.
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There are. But we are able to care about many issues at once.
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It’s highly doubtful that offline will have any significant impact on their sales.
Offline mode should be as simple as running the classic version of their game. “Classic” meaning release day install without any patches. The game can be programmed to run this Classic unpatched version of the game with no server connections. You’d lose all the online perks as well, no help, no world bosses, etc.
It should just be available, it doesn’t have to be maintained. They have the technology.
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My top 5 reasons for wanting an offline-mode:
-
Disconnects/Lag
I play HardCore; I exclusively played hardcore for D2, and similarly for D3. However, in D2 my losses were always due to my own mistakes, such as underestimating my foes. However, in D3 my losses are usually due to lag or random disconnects. -
Game Client Legacy
I seem to be one of the few, who prefer D3 in its vanilla form over the RoS version which has 250 difficulty levels and infinite paragon scaling. However, i am unable to play the vanilla version i paid for! This is because blizzard abandoned vanilla D3. An online-only game is always changing and evolving, there is no way to opt-out from game design changes. -
Mods
Offline-modes are more moddable, and I enjoy seeing the creativity of the gaming community. Often times gamers can do whacky super creative things that blizzard developers are just too conservative to try, and are perhaps barred from publishing.
Modding can have gameplay benefits too, sometimes there is a feature that just drives you crazy (like limited stash size). A mod can often remediate these design choices so you can customize your experience. -
Stories (in games) are best told as single player experiences
Its hard to integrate online social interactions with a game’s story without damaging the storytelling. I tried playing D3 through the first time in a public setting, but i missed all the cutscenes, because everyone was rushing through the game so fast that I felt pressured to skip them just to keep up. If Diablo4 online-only restrictions lead the gameplay to be more like an MMO, it likely won’t be possible to go through the story w/o a party, which damages the storytelling. -
Convenience
It is so refreshing to be able to play a game w/o being forced to update your client because blizzard made a bunch of changes. Sometimes you only have a few minutes to waste, and this can be eaten up by patches and updates if you haven’t played in a while. Its also nice to play if the internet is off, or if you are traveling.
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Ironically this is exactly why they won’t.
Would be harder to sell micro transactions and expansions when a MOD community exists.
Every single Blizzard title that’s current is DRM.
It was also announced that DIV will not support offline at Blizzcon. An official statement. People can ask or demand but I seriously doubt that will change their current plans.
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Tbqh its kinda odd that the company that spawned so many good mods (loosely SC / WC maps) that even spawned their own core games / genres (AoS / Moba) wouldnt want to include the possibility in the diablo series.
Offline mode lets you enjoy the game the way you may want to enjoy it; rather than being forced to only ‘enjoy’ the game the way blizzard feels as though you should.
This is kinda what makes D3 so unappealing years later. If the designers dont actually create and keep updating with actual content (new areas; new items; new skills; new whatever) then the game invariably becomes stale.
Tbqh even Everquest 1 still receives more regular updates / expansions / content than this game; and you can play that for free too.
Mods and modders bring life to your game; and not everyone ‘enjoys’ the game the same way as other players. EG: maybe someone does just want to have godmode on; or does want to have infinite gold; etc etc. Poor examples for this game I realize; but my point just is that you can achieve more sales and more revenue from including an offline mode that is mod-able; than you get from just having only-online-play-our-way-that-we-want-or-dont-play-at-all.
It alienates people that would otherwise spend money on your game. Case in point; I only own XCOM 2 because there are mods for it. Otherwise I absolutely hate the base game’s mechanics / pacing / design choice / etc.
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It’s a divisive issue…
There are 3 criteria (mostly) at play with incompatible outcome
- (popular) offline game would have game editor and mod (many player like that, particularly the kind that play 1000+ hours)
- Competitive video game should be free of any player editing and work better online (some people care strongly about Diablo being competitive… or not all…)
- Blizzard seems to care about Diablo being online. It’s good for game update, which increase the game life expectancy (i.e. vanilla only versus 2.6.8), reliability and anti-cheating. Also it is (possibly) believed by some exec perhaps (and probably wrongly) to “fight piracy and increase sales”
You will never make everyone happy on that topic (due to the incompatible requirements).
Blizzard opted for Online (semi) competitive game.
And this is a general marketing and operating trend. “Online service” is the new buzzword! Arguably it’s good for money making…
Offline mode is what made Diablo 2 was unable to sell 30 millions like D3 did at that time.
No matter how reasonable you guys’ argument about offline mode, there is no way Blizzard going to sacrifice their profits in present just to please the minority.
By the way why were PoE players don’t have issue with always online but diablo players had?
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Maybe they did? But they might obviously not be PoE players at this point because of it.
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At least I never saw them whine anything, or at least not in the large scale as Diablo fans about PoE. They seem accepting anything from GGG. They even praise PoE mobile without any hesitation.
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Only a few people want Offline, less than 0.01% of the player base.
Proof of this is a Poll created here in the forum, only a hundred people want it, everything else doesn’t care.
Offline mode only serves to ruin the game, which is why the game will be only online.
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Me? I want it purely so I can play whenever I want. Not only those times when Blizzard’s servers aren’t having a case of the juicy scoots. That and zero latency. Latency matters in realtime games. 
The forum “polls” are worthless for data points. The forum users are the tiniest sliver of actual players that play the game. Your point, such that it was, is negated by that fact. Neither side can claim anything with forum polling being such an infinitessimally tiny data set.
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No, in this case all the people who want Offline voted, and it’s just the ones who create threads every day wanting it.
The data is accurate, only these people want and so it will only be Online.
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Now that it is proven that only a minority of topic creators want Offline, now that they have proven it themselves, they mean it is not worth it.
Haha, I loved this one.
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Some do. I am sure others do not.
I see a lot of complaints about the trading in PoE anyway.
While the poll didn’t tell us much about the general population, it indicated that the support for offline could be quite substantial. At least among the most ‘dedicated’ Diablo players.
No, poll has shown that the amount of people it wants is insignificant.
Dedication to the game has nothing to do with creating repeated forum topics on the same topic, in which case the dedication is just to try to subject the majority to the desire of a noisy minority.
The game will be only online, deal with it.
It certainly didn’t show that. If it showed anything at all, it was the opposite.
That is not what I mean by dedication. But people who bother to post on a game forum (outside of the tech support forum), are by definition fairly dedicated to a game. That is true for both the ‘online only’ and ‘online/offline’ supporters.
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Rhetorical juggling does not work.
Poll showed exactly what is explicit about the topic: Offline mode is not popular, the people who want it are insignificant in number, and their dedication is to creating repeated topics or about the same subject.
Just that.