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?
D3 still doesn’t have an offline crack to my knowledge because the crack isn’t going to be simple. In most games, a DRM crack is typically as simple as editing a single instruction to jump over whatever code is trying to call the DRM feature.
But D3 and D4 are different. Essentially, a lot of game logic just isn’t available to the client and stored on the server, so any hack will need to replace that. Console versions of D3 actually do have that code available, but now it’s a non-trivial matter of porting that code back to the PC…
This will probably never happen unless the source code gets leaked.
I just can’t justify purchasing a game where one day someone is going to flip a switch and permanently remove my ability to play it. I’m still playing catch up with games from the 1980s.
I would hope that in case of D3 they would patch offline mode to it and after that shut down the servers.
If they do that then I’ll consider getting the game. But I wouldn’t hold by breath. If they’re wanting to shut down the server then they’re probably not going to want to keep hosting a server for the patch either.