Diablo III To Feature Anal DRM As Well

Barely an hour ago I spoke about how idiotic it was of Ubisoft to implement DRM that required players to be online 24/7 and now we have Blizzard following suite with Diablo III. The beta of this long awaited isometric action RPG should kick off soon and according to IGN, you’ll be required to be connected to the internet at all times to play the game. Should your net spaz out or die, you’ll be booted to the Main Menu just like in an MMO. This obviously means you cannot play Diablo III offline. Bummer!

The doctor is about to operate

IGN got in touch with Rob Pardo, executive producer of Diablo III about this DRM and he says it was implemented to prevent cheating. Here’s his explanation, “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.’

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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 and 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.”

So not cool Blizzard, so not cool.