As the Diablo III beta nears, Blizzard announced its anticipated action-role-playing game will require you to be online at all times to play. The characters you can create in Diablo III, up to a limit of 10, will be stored on Blizzard's servers, and therefore require a constant internet connection to access. This applies to all modes of the game, from co-op to player-versus-player to solo play.
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.
This system functions essentially like an MMO, where if your connection is interrupted during a game you'll be dropped back out to the login screen. It differs from what Blizzard did with StarCraft II because though the Wings of Liberty required an initial online activation, the campaign could still be played in an offline mode.
What do think of Blizzard's announcement? Does the online-only aspect bother you, or are you connected to the web all the time anyway?
