Always Online: What Diablo III’s Battle.net Does Wrong and Right

Eurogamer has penned two separate editorials on the benefits and drawbacks brought by Blizzard’s always-online requirement for Diablo III, which has proven to be highly controversial and we have already discussed at large in the recent and less recent past. A snip from the first:

Right-click on any player – in game, from your friends list, or from a list of players you’ve recently played with in public games – and you can view not just their achievements, basic stats and game progress, but models of all their characters, complete with skill and rune selections and all equipment pieces. Although the character models can’t be customised, the variety of looks and builds is entrancing, and you quickly come to feel a collector’s pride in your roster. Even if you only play solo and have a few friends, your online presence still feels meaningful. It’s Gamerpoints and an Avatar, but far more fun.

Blizzard has a complete mastery of this stuff, having learned enough about persistence, motivation and player identity from WOW to fill an encyclopedia. Another neat touch is your banner, a cross-character identifier that can be customised from a huge range of unlocks to both look cool and reflect your progress in the game. In the four-player co-op, banners for each player appear at home base in each game, and clicking on one instantly warps you to that player’s location.

The speed and ease with which you can join a friend in Diablo 3 is truly remarkable. Thanks to the banners and a feature called Quick Join, you’re a literal two clicks from the character screen to standing next to your friend in-game. If a friend has the option enabled (and it’s enabled by default), Quick Join puts their name on a button on the front end that warps you instantly to their game. Then click on their banner and you’re in the fight. (If it’s not enabled, there’s a two-click option to request an invite from a friend, or a prominent button to invite them to your game.)

And from the latter:

Customers should feel that they want to buy it. That’s what we’re up against here. We’re being bullied into accepting a future where we don’t actually want to buy the things that we’re buying, because there is no other way to experience this phenomenal entertainment medium that we’ve all come to hold so dear unless we do so on terms that we find unacceptable.

The answer isn’t to just live with it and try to make the best of a bad situation; the answer is to tell people that we don’t want things to be this way.

I used to make the point on our podcast that the only way to vote on issues like this is with your wallet, and that when publishers say they are “listening to consumers” it just means that they are counting your money and using that to decide whether what they did was justified. But while that’s true, of course I don’t think it’s hypocritical to buy Diablo 3 and at the same time make a stand against games that demand a permanent internet connection. If nothing else, it’s our right to buy things in full knowledge of their flaws and then moan about them: that is pretty much the foundation of the internet! Publishers should listen to us anyway.