DIABLO III Needs Constant Online Connection to Play

By Matt Mann / August 1, 2011

Blizzard will be upsetting a few fans with this announcement - news emerged over the weekend that Diablo III will require you to constantly be connect to the internet for the game to work! This unfortunately applies to every mode in the game including solo play. Blizzard has designed the game so that creating characters need to be stored on their servers, of which there can be up to ten.

"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."

Personally I have always hated this DRM like system, mostly because my wireless internet connection is terrible; but also because of the inconvenience of it, especially with single player aspects of the game. Also I don't actually believe this will prevent cheating and piracy as much as Blizzard thinks it will. What do you guys think are pissed off about this announcement or are you happy it could prevent modding and cheating?