While Blizzard has pretty much introduced Battle.net to most of its games, they never really made it a requirement for gamers to stay connected, at least until StarCraft 2 where it became a requirement. The feature then made its way onto Diablo 3 which was pretty controversial since prior to Diablo 3, gamers would be able to play offline in Diablo 2, or play with friends via TCP/IP instead of Battle.net, meaning that their experience would not be at the mercy of Blizzard’s servers. Unfortunately if you were hoping that Blizzard would eventually listen and give in to the demands of their players for an offline mode, you’d be out of luck.
This is according the game’s lead designer, Kevin Martens and art director, Christian Lichtner during an interview with Rock Paper Shotgun. According to Martens, one of the reasons they made the game have an always-on requirement was so that gamers could play with each other. He cited an example in Diablo 2 where offline characters and multiplayer characters were separate, so if a gamer wanted to hop into a game with friends, he/she would have to start all over. “The game is most fun when you can play with other people. To be ghetto-ed off to the side and not part of the real game, we didn’t want that to happen.” What do you guys think? Is this a legit reason?