#oneaday Day 848: I Can’t Get Angry About Diablo III

I know I have a track record of Getting Angry About Shit, particularly when it comes to things like DLC, DRM and other three-letter acronyms. But I’m finding it rather difficult to get riled up over the issues surrounding Diablo III.

For the uninitiated, Diablo III is the latest game from World of Warcraft creators Blizzard, who are part of Activision. Activision used to be gaming’s resident Empire Of Evil, but that mantle has since passed to EA, and Activision are now simply Those Guys Who Killed Bizarre Creations, Pump Out Call Of Duty Every Year And Have Something To Do With Blizzard. But that’s beside the point.

The point is that Diablo III was always going to be a massive seller and an immensely popular title. It’s the long-anticipated third entry in a series with a long history, and one which a lot of players have been looking forward to for a long time.

It’s also one which a lot of people are getting extremely angry about, largely due to what they describe as its “always-on Internet DRM”. Said “DRM” has had difficulties today due to overloading, leaving many players unable to log in and play the game.

Here’s how the system works. To play Diablo III, you have to log in to Blizzard’s online service Battle.net. Once logged in, you can then play the game. You have to stay connected in order to play, even if you’re playing solo. The benefits of playing in this kind of “always on” environment include the fact you can always see when your Diablo-playing friends are online, that you can jump in and out of each other’s cooperative multiplayer games, and that you can make use of the game’s auction house facility to trade items.

Some people are getting very upset about this — particularly the fact that you can’t play single player offline. And while that may seem a bit silly, I can’t help but thinking a lot of people are looking at this from the wrong angle — the “gamers are getting screwed” angle. This is perhaps understandable, given the amount of time gamers spend getting screwed nowadays, but I really find it difficult to agree with the people getting riled about this.

Here’s the thing, though: Diablo has pretty much always been designed as an online game to play with either friends or random strangers online. The classes are designed in such a way that it’s both desirable and fun to group up with other people and tackle the game’s challenges cooperatively. You can play solo, sure, but the game has always been designed with online in mind. With this latest iteration, including the auction house and other mechanics, Diablo is now closer in execution to a massively-multiplayer online title than a single-player dungeon crawler like Torchlight. Sure, it doesn’t charge a subscription fee or feature a truly massively-multiplayer open world to explore, but the game has been designed specifically to be an online title. People don’t complain about World of Warcraft, Guild Wars or the like having to be always online — what, really, is different here?

I think the issue is that Blizzard hasn’t appropriately set people’s expectations for the game being an online-only title. We have no problem with games like the aforementioned requiring us to stay online in order to play, despite the fact you can play them solo. (In the case of Guild Wars, you can even team up with computer-controlled partner characters if you really can’t stomach playing with real people.) So what, really, is different about Diablo III? Is it simply that the previous games had a discrete “Single Player” option that didn’t require you to be online? (I haven’t finished installing the new game yet so at the time of writing don’t know if this is still the case.)

The other issue is that people believe Blizzard, being the company who runs the world’s biggest massively-multiplayer online game, World of Warcraft, should have anticipated demand and made sure their servers were up to the job of dealing with the thousands (millions?) of people who were likely to be wanting to log in at the same time. This I sort of agree with, though there is no genuinely reliable way of predicting quite how much demand there is going to be for any given title. Blizzard underestimated demand, and it’s caused problems — much like has happened with the launch of many other online-only games. That doesn’t make this a “disaster” or a “debacle” or anything like that; it makes it an occurrence that we’ve seen before. An occurrence we should have figured out a solution for by now, yes, but one we shouldn’t really be surprised about any more.

Within a matter of days, the whole issue will be completely forgotten about as everyone starts playing and enjoying the game, which kind of makes the whole RAGE!!! thing seem rather pointless, really.

But I guess you could say the same thing about any sort of “controversy” — including the Mass Effect 3 issues I wrote about a while back.

The fact is, though, this is an issue I find it very difficult to get riled up and upset about. So far as I’m concerned, Diablo III is an online game, almost an MMO, therefore I accept the fact that an unavoidable part of its existence is downtime, during which you cannot play. It’s not as if I’m short of other stuff to try when that happens — and getting angry really won’t solve anything. I accept that others’ views may differ on this subject if Twitter today is anything to go by, but that’s how I feel personally.

If you’re getting upset, go play something else. Or, in the words of my good friend Jeff, GO OUTSIDE.