Blizzard announced that there's no offline play for its hotly anticipated ARPG Diablo III.
You can't play the game at all without an internet connection. In other
words, it means you must connect to a server at all times even when you
are playing the single-player game. This is really shocking for those
hardcore console game fans.


"In both Diablo and especially in Diablo II, I
think the intuition for a lot of people when they're playing the game is
'I want to make my character offline away from that scary battle net
environment," Rob Pardo, Blizzard's executive producer for Diablo III,
claims. "And then once I have this powerful character, I'll jump
online.' But the problem with that concept is we can't really detect if
they're cheating. They might have the capability to hack their
character, things like that, so at that point we can't really allow that
character to be in the battle net environment. Then they're going to
have to restart their character, which is exactly what happened in Diablo II, which was really unfortunate."



"Your character will be online on battle net the moment you start
playing," he continued "You can play a solo experience like you would in
Diablo II, it's just your character is on Blizzard's servers and authenticated."


When was asked why not permit an offline mode and keep it separate
from the online game, executive producer Rob Pardo says, "We thought
about this quite a bit. One of the things that we felt was really import
was that if you did play offline, if we allowed for that experience,
you'd start a character, you’d get him all the way to level 20 or level
30 or level 40 or what have you, and then at that point you might decide
to want to venture onto Battle.net. But you'd have to start a character
from scratch, because there'd be no way for us to guarantee no cheats
were involved, if we let you play on the client and then take that
character online."


"Now, that doesn't mean you can't play a game by yourself – of course
you can. You can go into and start any game that you want, you'll just
be connected to the Battle.net servers, and we can authenticate your
character."

"It's the trend that we've been moving towards," senior producer Alex Mayberry says. "Obviously StarCraft
2 did it, WoW authenticates also. It's kind of the way things are,
these days. The world of gaming is not the same as it was when Diablo 2
came out."

Source: pcgamer ; gamepolitics