The fact that Diablo 3 is online only with no offline mode caused quite a debate when it was announced on 1 August and Jay was probed again by PCGamer on the issue. When asked what a player should do if their wiring is faulty in the house (we think they mean a bad connection) Jay responded with:
[BLUE]“Erm… upgrade the wiring in his house?” suggests Wilson. “I mean, in this day and age the notion that there’s this a whole vast majority of players out there that don’t have online connectivity – this doesn’t really fly any more.”[/BLUE]
I don’t think the connectivity issue at home was what upset gamers, but the fact the game was no longer portable when travelling or moving around without some sort of wi-fi connectivity, which we all know is flakey at best when it comes to public wi-fi. Jay goes on to give a reason for no offline mode:
[BLUE]“There’s two basic problems with us doing that,” said Wilson. “One is players default immediately to that. So, they basically unintentionally opt out of all the cooperative experience, all the trading experience, and the core of Diablo is a circle-trading game. So for us we’ve always viewed it as an online game – the game’s not really being played right if it’s not online, so when we have that specific question of why are we allowing it? Because that’s the best experience, why would you want it any other way?”
“You’ve got to make choices about what you want to do, and sometimes those choices are going to make some people unhappy, but if you feel like it’s what is the right thing to do to making a better product then you have to do it,”[/BLUE]
Jay discusses the lack of an offline mode further in the news post.