Blizzard may now have successfully gotten rid of the previously implemented Diablo 3 Auction House, but that doesn’t mean that the changes stop here. According to reports, Blizzard is not considering the possibility of the PC version of the game running offline.
Recently, in a statement provided to RockPaperShotgun, Blizzard confirmed that the Auction House wasn’t the only reason why Blizzard felt it was time to make security even tighter. And that it could only be achieved by making Diablo 3 an always-online title.
“We do not have plans to implement an offline mode. While the always-online requirement made the auction house possible, the auction house was never the driving factor in our decision to make the PC version of Diablo III require an Internet connection,” the Blizzard post stated.
“The game was built from the ground up to take full advantage of Battle.net, which provides a number of important benefits, including persistent server-side character saves, a seamless PC multiplayer experience, cheat prevention, and Real ID and BattleTag social features.”
This means that all of you who have been wanting to play Diablo 3 offline will be left wanting. As usual, players will need to be connected to the internet to play Diablo 3 on PC.
While it is Blizzard’s desire to enable a strong multiplayer environment, “I don’t think that precludes them from giving people the option to play as they please – especially when the current requirement makes it downright impossible to play in many situations and environments.”
On a similar note, the Diablo 3 Auction House will cease to exist starting March 2014. While the Auction House feature has proved to be quite a success for Blizzard, it has never been overtly popular.
“I think it had detrimental effects on gameplay throughout,” original Diablo designer Steig Hedlund recently told PCGamer.
“They did want to reserve a certain tier of loot for the auction house, and therefore it wasn’t dropping in the game with the kind of frequency that people were looking for it.”
