Diablo III: no single player mode, real money Auction House: thoughts?

http://www.1up.com/news/diablo-3-require...en-playing

Personally, I'm not at all concerned about the real money Auction House since there would be 3rd party sites where you could buy and sell items regardless. It feels a little bad that trading of in-game items for real life money is being encouraged, but that's reality, and after playing games like Spiral Knights, I've found that it doesn't actually disrupt your personal gameplay experience if you don't want it to.

I'm pretty upset about the lack of offline functionality, though. It was pretty obvious they weren't going to include LAN play since their announcements for SC2, but by completely discarding offline single player, it seems like they are going to turn away a lot of potential customers. The whole move to online is a bit too soon, I think. Real ID isn't perfect yet and not everyone has reliable internet wherever they go at this point.

Won't stop people from making Private games and playing solo, but no "Offline" modes is definitely interesting.
Also the "Real Money" AH option was a bit expected, because of how massive it was in D2. Hell, there were fansites solely devoted around that type of stuff

Well i know how the Auction house is going to turn out.

Every single godly item is going to be sold RMT only. And there will be rich players stalking the gold -tradable AH for good stuff to sell for real money, depriving players that truly want the gear from getting it.

I just see too much going wrong here. Course Just like how I dont buy Ubisoft games since that DRM Debacle, this game will be the same anyway. Anti-piracy methods that inconvience legit players in such a way is unacceptable by my standards.

No offline mode, what the f'ucking hell.

I don't want to be forced to play World of Diablo 3. It's retarded. I just want to pummel the s'hit out of enemies and bosses alone. In my house. What the shi't is this

No offline mode, what the f'ucking hell.

I don't want to be forced to play World of Diablo 3. It's retarded. I just want to pummel the s'hit out of enemies and bosses alone. In my house. What the shi't is this

Create game -> Password -> Private game -> Solo to victory.

Create game -> Password -> Private game -> Solo to victory.

It's still a retarded system

It's still a retarded system

Yeah, I won't doubt that. Unneeded extra stuff just to play "offline" :|

No offline mode, what the f'ucking hell.

I don't want to be forced to play World of Diablo 3. It's retarded. I just want to pummel the s'hit out of enemies and bosses alone. In my house. What the shi't is this

SC2 is the same thing, to play the campaign, you have to be online, if you play the campaign w/o logging on bnet, it wont give you the achieves and other pomegranates.

I don't like the real money AH... im debating with myself if i will buy it or not... I really want to play the demon hunter :|

It's been semi-confirmed (Haven't found the official source yet) that there IS a "Single player" mode, but you have to be connected to the internet at all times for the reasons as mentioned by Nomad.
As someone said, "It will work the same way as Starcraft 2. You can play 'offline', but you won't have access to some features (e.g. achievements, Auction House)."

According to Rob Pardo, executive producer of Diablo III, this was done mainly to combat the style of hacking present in previous versions of Diablo. "In both Diablo and especially in Diablo II, I think the intuition for a lot of people when they're playing the game is 'I want to make my character offline away from that scary battle net environment. And then once I have this powerful character, I'll jump online.' But the problem with that concept is we can't really detect if they're cheating. They might have the capability to hack their character, things like that, so at that point we can't really allow that character to be in the battle net environment. Then they're going to have to restart their character, which is exactly what happened in Diablo II, which was really unfortunate."

"Your character will be online on battle net the moment you start playing," said Pardo. "You can play a solo experience like you would in Diablo II, it's just your character is on Blizzard's servers and authenticated." This character can then hop into multiplayer games and trade items with others through battle net.

Also it's worth checking this out, it goes into depth about the AH system for D3. Hopefully it'll ease on some of the rage.
http://www.diablofans.com/topic/26397-th...explained/

It's simply because Blizzard doesn't want anyone to pirate games soo they force people to use Battle.net.

It's simply because Blizzard doesn't want anyone to pirate games soo they force people to use Battle.net.

Better than the DRM protection from ubisoft, that if you lose internet connection for 1 sec, you lose your progression.



wonder if that campaign mean the "offline mode" like SC2

Better than the DRM protection from ubisoft, that if you lose internet connection for 1 sec, you lose your progression.



wonder if that campaign mean the "offline mode" like SC2

Probably means quests vs arena.


I'm surprised no one has commented on the removal of skill points either. Speccing is suddenly all about Skill Runes. sigh.
Hopefully, no offline just means they insist you have a connection to get achievements and nothing else.

Probably means quests vs arena.


I'm surprised no one has commented on the removal of skill points either. Speccing is suddenly all about Skill Runes. sigh.
Hopefully, no offline just means they insist you have a connection to get achievements and nothing else.

yeah i heard about it, on D3 live, you will be able to have like 6 active and 3 passive? skills at time, and you can modifies these skills using runes, but at any time you can change your active and passive skills for another one.

>Diablo 2
>>16 active skills, any passive
>Diablo 3
>>6 active skills, 3 passive

k.

>Diablo 2
>>16 active skills, any passive
>Diablo 3
>>6 active skills, 3 passive

k.

...how many active skills did you use in D2? 3, 4, tops? Some builds used one, not counting stuff like Teleport from Enigma.

The new system removes point hoarding, which was stupid. The only thing it's missing at the moment is something to cement your skill and rune selections. It's kind of dumb if you can just go back to town and switch all your skills without even paying for a respec. That's what removes the feeling of character customization.

...how many active skills did you use in D2? 3, 4, tops? Some builds used one, not counting stuff like Teleport from Enigma.

The new system removes point hoarding, which was stupid. The only thing it's missing at the moment is something to cement your skill and rune selections. It's kind of dumb if you can just go back to town and switch all your skills without even paying for a respec. That's what removes the feeling of character customization.

I can name more than a dozen builds that require over 10 active skills. Playing a summonmancer well (which, I was crowned #1 summoner for 2 years straight on east and plowed over west/europe's community with a welfare character, so take that with a grain a salt as I was not a normal summoner) required precasting of summons obviously, but during duels I constantly recast golem with namelock to slow the other person tremendously, not to mention screwing up melee's targeting system to all hell. My Bone Spirit still did around 2K, which isn't much but helps for long drawn out battles, however, the main skills I cycled between were bone wall/prison, amp, lower res, decrip, tap, confuse (instant massacre of any other class summoning, whether they be using item skills or class skills), maiden, and I swear dim vision is the most underrated curse in that game, it saved my ass so many times I can't even believe it. Dim Vision basically removes any chance of the other person namelocking you unless they are using a script, in which case I just start being BM and destroy them anyway. Hdins using gmod were always the most fun to listen to after they lost.
Even disregarding summoner though, I used almost every skill in the focus tree on every character I built to some extent, besides trapper, since fire+light traps don't work together.

Then again, this is from a person who played D2 for 9 years and created 3 level 99s on ladders (when 99 took about 45,000 baal runs)/over 20 99s pre 1.10, so my experience with the game is probably a little bit different than most.

>Diablo 2
>>16 active skills, any passive
>Diablo 3
>>6 active skills, 3 passive

k.

that's what kotaku reported after playing the beta for 4 hours on blizzard HQ, they said on the beta, you can only have 3 active skills and 2 passive, but it will change in the live. D3 will be all about rune modification.

EDIT:
http://kotaku.com/5826453/diablo-iii-mod...ot-allowed

Q: Will Diablo III include support for bots and/or mods?

A: No, for a variety of gameplay and security reasons, we will not be supporting bots or mods in Diablo III, and they'll be expressly prohibited by our terms of use for the game.

http://kotaku.com/5825582/diablo-iii

Blizzard has done away with the talent trees and skill points of games past, giving players new active and passive skills every level or so. Players may only employ a set number of skills at a time, up to a maximum of six active skills and up to three passive skills. They can be swapped in and out at any time, opening up the option for experimentation and flexibility. In the beta version I played, I had the option to use just two active skills at once. After reaching level 10, I had unlocked one more active skill and the ability to use a passive skill.

Those skills can be complemented with Runes, special stones that can be socketed into a skill to boost or alter its abilities. Blizzard illustrated this by designing a "Melee Wizard," changing the fragile Wizard class—which typically keeps enemies at arm's length—into a deadly close-range build. Into the Wizard's Spectral Blade skill was socketed a rune that added a healing attribute to each hand-to-hand attack. The Diamond Skin defense skill was boosted by reflecting damage back at the Wizard's attacker. Frost Nova, a freezing area of effect skill, was runed to create a chilling cloud that damaged enemies over time. Explosive Blast, also socketed with a rune, turned a fiery explosion spell into an instant killer. Arcane Orb, normally a projectile attack, was altered by a rune that caused those projectiles to orbit the Wizard, making it even deadlier up close.

>no mods
welp, this game dies in less than half the time D2 made it. Game mods for D2 are INCREDIBLE. Eastern Sun and especially Kingdom of Tenai are good enough to be full length spinoffs.

WHat the heck, Online all the time...I will not be buying D3 now. D3 was one of the games I was most looking forward to, now it is dead to me.

WHat the heck, Online all the time...I will not be buying D3 now. D3 was one of the games I was most looking forward to, now it is dead to me.

Just because mods are illegal doesn't mean they won't still happen. Single player mode will probably be modded in within a month by the lovely people over at phrozenkeep, they are even more dedicated than the FO3/Oblivion/Morrowind modmakers when it comes to the Diablo series.