GB Feature: Diablo III and the Road to Hell Editorial

In a new four-page editorial, GameBanshee editor Eric Schwarz takes a closer look at Diablo III’s design conventions, and why some of them could threaten to overthrow the king of action RPGs from its throne. A bit from his take on the “always online” issue:

Previous Diablo games have, of course, largely gained their longevity out of their multiplayer side, with the original Diablo launching Battle.net and setting down the framework for centralized online networks that many games would take after in the future. At the time, this was an innovative step forward for online gaming on the PC. Friends lists, IRC-like chat functionality within the game itself, leaderboards and ladders, game searching, and so on were all things Diablo boasted over its competitors, and those same systems still exist years later in just about every single other online gaming network. However, despite all these multiplayer features, they never ended up imposing onto the main single-player game, or TCP/IP direct connection play for that matter.

Right from the beginning, it’s been clear that Blizzard intend Diablo III to be a multiplayer-centered game first, but fans soon learned it would come to the detriment of those who weren’t interested in online play. Taking from the infrastructure and successes of World of Warcraft and StarCraft II, no doubt, the new Battle.net offers up a wide variety of new features that gamers now expect from online-focused games. Achievements and other meta-game challenges are in. There’s the Auction House, borrowed from World of Warcraft, to help centralize and control the item trade market; however, in a new twist, it will also be possible to sell your hard-earned loot for real money, a decision that’s proved controversial amongst players who value the in-game economy. The player-versus player (PvP) side of the game has also been overhauled, complete with new arena levels made specifically for battling others.

The elephant of the room about this, of course, is that Diablo III will be an online-only game. Every player will need to have an active Internet connection to play, even if they want to play by themselves, and speaking from experience, I know that there are quite a few people who do indeed play Diablo as a single-player title as well as a multiplayer one. Of course, while Blizzard can attach a bunch of new features to Battle.net to help mitigate the requirement, there’s no mistaking that this is a form of DRM, and one of the most restrictive kinds to boot. Admittedly, staying plugged into Battle.net may sound like a good idea for a lot of people, and they might well go along happily with it. At the same time, it’s important to understand what’s been lost in this transition.

The first and most glaring issue is that mods are now no longer permitted, at all. In fact, it will get your account banned, no matter how innocuous or innocent that mod is. Diablo and Diablo II never had the biggest mod communities, granted, but there were certainly plenty available that would add new gameplay, character classes, items, areas to explore, quests, and so on. Even basic interface improvements, like larger inventories and higher screen resolutions, could help make Diablo II more playable for some people. Most importantly, many of these mods were cross-compatible with one another and could even be played over TCP/IP and Open Battle.net (a version of Battle.net where characters are stored locally, rather than on Blizzard’s servers). I speak from experience when I say that some of my most fun with Diablo II came from playing with mods installed, and now, in Diablo III, that will be impossible.