I probably hate it less than most people but it doesn't excuse bad design. Warframe, for instance, requires you to always be online - but if your instance is set to Solo, you can pause the game.
this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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So I have a very specific dog in this fight. I am currently working on an RTS game for the recoil engine. One of my big requirements is the ability for direct hosting without the need of a central server. My biggest argument for this is the fact that if the server ever goes down or I get hit by a truck or anything like that, people can still directly host games.
Also I don't think lan parties should require a trip to a third party server just in order to have games with each other. I feel sometimes like I'm the only person who remembers back in the old days when we had giant lan parties and in a lot of cases there wasn't even really much in the way of internet access to them.
In my personal opinion, I feel like games as a service have done end users a disservice. There are so many games that I would love to go back and play but I can't because the servers don't exist or the developers made it so difficult to host your own servers that you need to jump through a million modding hoops just to make it so that you can actually play a game online with others.
What is really bad though is single player games that require an online connection. Witafits?
I really dislike it, but it won't stop me from buying a game. I was recently without internet and went to play a game on my Steam Deck and was surprised to find a game I had been playing required access.
What bugs me most about it is that it seems like everything these days is tilted towards the companies. If a game doesn't require the internet, the only reason it's there is to collect data on what you're doing and maybe to help enforce DRM. It's bad enough that I can only rent games from Steam (although bless Valve for making gaming on Linux so good), now I can't even play the games I "own" if I don't have a pipe back to the company? Ugh.
Obviously you have to take a corporation at it's word, but Valve has said that in the event they're going to take Steam down, they have a button to push to make it so your games will stop trying to phone home.
An always online requirement is just another form of DRM. If a game has DRM, I simply don't buy it.
In the case of Diablo IV, I really think it needs to do more to earn its always online status. I’m hoping that future updates and things will bring more MMO-like features as I think it would be a perfect fit
Absolutely detest them. I still consistently play old games because they're a blast and make me remember when I was a kid. That won't happen for my kids with their games, as the servers will be long gone and close to zero companies are going to spend more time updating the game to not need a server. I'm an old man yelling at my lawn, but games went from trying to entertain to trying to suck every cent they can out of you.
One of my biggest enjoyments is hacking games up as well. You can learn about coding (set ammo to -1 - is it unlimited, 0, or game crashing). Sometimes it's fun to be a god after a stressful day. Sometimes my kids play with me and I don't want to have to tell them no, worry about them dying every couple seconds and getting frustrated, or having to drop it altogether.
I just want to buy a damn game and play it how it entertains me the most - not have to deal with server errors, not have to deal with 12 year olds screaming, not have to deal with people who have far more time than I do being 1000x better.
One of my biggest enjoyments is hacking games up as well. You can learn about coding (set ammo to -1 - is it unlimited, 0, or game crashing).
This is a big problem for electrical engineers too... The current/next generation won't be able to open things up and actually see how things work... They'll be too dense to make sense of anything.
So growing up my uncle taught me all about computers. We built them together (early 90s, so DOS days - not even MS-DOS), built the drivers together, etc. Ended up being a pretty significant hobby for me even now.
Going to college, I thought that since tons of my generation were going into computers, we'd flood the market, pay would crash, and every subsequent generation would have tons of people too, so companies would hire the young college kids.
Now, I realize I screwed up. People older than me have no idea about computers. People younger than me have no idea about computers. They use them all the time, but almost have even less understanding of how they actually function than older people. My guess is that older generations had to make everything work, so they have a bit of knowledge to use to figure out new things. Younger generations have had everything catered to them, so they haven't ever had to figure a single thing out. If it doesn't make perfect sense to them immediately, they leave.
Just yesterday I couldn't figure out how to find a profile I followed on Instagram. There was a fresh out of college kid I work with that kind of chuckled and made a (good natured, but naively insulting) remark that basically insinuated I was too old to get tech. I couldn't take it, so I told her that I was actually using the first phone I hadn't put a custom OS on and how a couple Xmas' ago, I had built an unRAID server because I was sick of my computer bogging down with all the extra stuff I had it do. They hadn't even heard of a command line before.
So long winded rambling aside, it makes me sad that no one knows, or even wants to know, how things work anymore. They seem to want it served to them and the slightest amount of work will make them move on. Every generation says the kids are horrible, etc, so I'm hoping it's just that and we'll still have a generation of scientists and engineers.
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I don’t love it, but I’ve found that it’s been less intrusive than I thought. Generally only feel it when the internet goes out. That said, I’ve got fairly good fiber internet, so I’m a bit privileged in this regard. We used to have absolutely horrendous rural internet and it sucked.
It made me stop buying games and consoles in the first place.
You have to be online, the game has to be downloaded on the system, there will be bugs and it has to be patched.
Just let me buy a game and play it. I may sound like an old fart but I really enjoyed the days that I could go to a store, buy a game and play it immediately on my console.
Especially the fact that bugs are literally shipped like features now and you just have to accept that your game of 80-90 dollars is ridden with bugs, yeah fuck off really.
I think when it makes sense it's fine, but I would only really say that for multiplayer games, if it's a single player game there is a really unfortunate reality, which is that pirating it will result in a better gameplay experience.
Hate it with a passion
With Starlink and an obstructed view of the sky, I really hate online only games because they get interrupted whenever a satellite goes behind a tree. I’ve basically had to use my phone’s hotspot to play games like hitman or multiplayer games like deep rock. It doesn’t use a ton of data once you’ve downloaded the games assets and have everything up to date. I tend to avoid online only games unless they are heavily discounted.
On another note, I have a 5 month old and the Steam Deck has been a godsend. The ability to pause a game and suspend the deck has saved my ass quite a few times and allowed me to get in some quick game sessions. I’m able to play maybe 20-30 minutes sessions during naps or when I’m in the toilet. I mostly stick with single player offline games these days. I have such a large backlog of steam games that have been a blast going back and completing. Also, emudeck has kept me flush with some nostalgic retro games. Even though I have a ps5 and a gaming PC, I almost exclusively use the deck these days. Good luck and congratulations!
Doesn't matter to me one way or another, and it doesn't affect my purchasing decisions.
Hate it as I have a Steam Deck so I just wouldn’t play it if it needed an online connection as I play a lot when travelling.
Happened when I was away with some mates and we tried to play FIFA which needed an initial online connection to Origin. Was infuriating trying to get it work with bad mobile connection
Imagine playing FIFA after knowing all the crap they've done.
Yeh that's fairs, haven't played seriously on FIFA for years now, only ever play when with some of my mates. Don't get how people shell out >£50 each year for a game that is basically the same year on year
@Parellius I prefer games that I can play offline if I need to, but I have been a Diablo fan for over 20 years. Of course I purchased Diablo 4.
I like it. I like to know that people likely haven’t hacked their chars. I’ve never had my crashing or rubber banding. It’s been seamless and while an offline version would be fine for me, that would never be the real game and you should never be allowed online.
Concerning gaming with a newborn, you should also look for games that you can play with one hand, so you can hold the baby with the other. Europa Universalis 4 is a great game if you've got a kid who will only fall sleep while being held.
I almost exclusively play single-player games. I'm not sure I own one that is always online, since I pretty much always have WiFi on and wouldn't notice the difference, but I don't see why any of my games would have to be always online.
My firewall is configured to block all programs by default. If a game refuses to open or function without internet and I can't find any workarounds it gets angry looks from me and I let it through. I get anxious when playing anything multiplayer so doing so saves me from having to interact with people if I accidentally trigger a multiplayer event or something. Also generally makes games launch faster.
Ironically I think GTAV did a pretty decent job of this - you can pause at any time during the single player, however I don't remember if it requires a connection to play single player mode.
Imo if a game has a single player mode, being online for it should never be a requirement.
I don’t remember if it requires a connection to play single player mode.
It doesn't!
beauty
Is there an offline crack yet? I would have assumed piratws would have for sure gotten that done
D3 still doesn't have an offline crack to my knowledge because the crack isn't going to be simple. In most games, a DRM crack is typically as simple as editing a single instruction to jump over whatever code is trying to call the DRM feature.
But D3 and D4 are different. Essentially, a lot of game logic just isn't available to the client and stored on the server, so any hack will need to replace that. Console versions of D3 actually do have that code available, but now it's a non-trivial matter of porting that code back to the PC...
This will probably never happen unless the source code gets leaked.
I just can't justify purchasing a game where one day someone is going to flip a switch and permanently remove my ability to play it. I'm still playing catch up with games from the 1980s.
I would hope that in case of D3 they would patch offline mode to it and after that shut down the servers.
If they do that then I'll consider getting the game. But I wouldn't hold by breath. If they're wanting to shut down the server then they're probably not going to want to keep hosting a server for the patch either.