How Diablo III’s DRM Will Affect You

Having spent a while playing the beta, Rock Paper Shotgun’s John Walker discusses how Diablo III’s always-online DRM will potentially impact the (singleplayer) Diablo III experience.

You can’t pause. In fact, in most ways, the game acts like an MMO. For instance, quit it, and you’re given the optional cooldown to have your player clear the server properly. But it’s not an MMO. It’s not even close to an MMO. So when I’m playing the single-player game, and I’m in the middle of a frenzied mob, and there’s a knock at the front door, there’s nothing I can do. As happened to me yesterday. Twice. On another occasion I was surprised by a phone call that led to my having to do some other things. I’d safely left my character in a cleared area, but long between checkpoints. When I came back to the PC, I’d been idle for too long and the game had logged me out.

I’d been logged out of a single-player game because I was away for an hour. And thus lost all my progress (although not my items and stats) since the last checkpoint, a long, long way back.

In fact, currently, losing your connection (either by idling or the server going down) resets huge chunks of what you’ve already played, such that the map is blank, and you need to battle through it again. Whether that’s an issue with the beta, or something that will also carry through to the finished game, we obviously don’t know. But it’s another clear example of how having your single-player, offline game require a constant connection is massively idiotic and counter-productive.

Games with occasional checkpoints are obviously a massive pain for anyone who might or need to stop playing at that moment something that’s not exactly an uncommon occurrence. But a game where that’s the case, AND you can’t even leave it running in the background, is beyond acceptable.

Hopefully a lot of this will be fixed before release.