Blizzard explains Diablo 3's always-online requirement

While Blizzard is discontinuing the controversial auction house in Diablo 3 with the upcoming expansion pack, the company has revealed that the game will maintain its current requirement to be constantly online while playing. Lead Designer Kevin Martens told Rock Paper Shotgun during an interview that Diablo 3 wasn’t meant to be played offline.

Martens explains that back when Diablo 2 was the big thing, he studied player behaviour for a living. Specifically, Martens wanted to prevent situations like in Diablo 2 where players couldn’t use their single player characters in online mode. The solution to this was to make the next game require a constant Internet connection.

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“The game is most fun when you can play with other people,” said Martens. “To be ghettoed off to the side and not part of the real game, we didn’t want that to happen. This is an online game. We want people to play together. All of that predates the auction house. That was the wrong choice to allow people to play offline, and we still stand by that. And we think Internet access is widespread. If someone has no Internet access, then yeah, Diablo 3 is not the game for them.”

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Martens stated that removing the online requirement from Diablo 3 would fundamentally change the game Blizzard set out to make. “We didn’t make that game. That’s the straight-up answer. We did not make that game, and we’re not going to turn this game into that game. We have the online mode because we learned a lot over the many, many years that Diablo 2 was in development.”