Summer Glau
Now of course when a less popular company like, for example, Ubisoft, tries that sort of thing, the backlash is immediate and vocal and pretty much unanimous. But of course this is Diablo 3, and so naturally the apologists and sanctimonious, self-satisfied, smug shit-head multiplayer fucks come crawling out of the woodwork to make excuses and patronise anyone who dares to question the edicts of the almighty Blizzard. These are the people who only ever cared about the MP aspects of the game, which were obviously going to require an internet connection, so it makes no difference to them and they are incapable of understanding why people who aren't them, and who perhaps have their own preferences and priorities which may not include multiplayer gameplay, might be disgruntled. Suddenly the people who have the nerve to question these design decisions are simply suffering from acute nerd-rage, they are making mountains out of mole-hills and should "deal with it". They should vote with their wallet, and meanwhile those visionary individuals who wholeheartedly support Blizzard's courageous and progressive proposals will be busy enjoying the game while you miss out.
It's terribly easy to adopt that point of view when you are entirely unaffected by the issue at hand. And it's terribly easy to swallow anything without question when you have a company's cock rammed that far down your throat.
Blizzard for their part have apparently been "surprised" by the negative reactions. But that shouldn't come as a shock; this is a company which has been previously surprised by negative reactions to their plans to force their forum users to operate under real names. Blizzard are easily surprised, it seems. But then they operate in their rarefied world apart from the rest of the games industry, with a loyal legion of sycophants to fellate them while they roll around in the WoW subscriptions collected from millions of Chinese gold farmers.
Ultimately I don't even care. I was never into Diablo "back in the day", and by the time I was introduced to Diablo 2 it was already painfully dated and clunky. Without the benefit of the ever-popular rose-tinted specs of nostalgia it doesn't really stand up to modern scrutiny. Nevertheless I would have been interested in trying a contemporary sequel, although being as I am in possession of perfectly adequate genitalia I have no interest at all in the multiplayer, co-op or otherwise. I find it curious how obsessed many people are with the MP side of Diablo 2 when it had a perfectly serviceable single player campaign, aside from the flaws pursuant to the game's vintage. Unfortunately it seems that Blizzard are making a very conscious effort to move D3 towards a "primarily" MP experience, at which point what tenuous shadow of interest I might have possessed proceeds to dissipate entirely.
And let's not pretend that the always-on requirement is entirely for the benefit of the gamers. Let's not pretend that it will make the MP experience some sort of utopia of fairness and order and will prevent those devious individuals who might want to bring it down from implementing all manner of bots and exploits and hacks. How successful has that policy been for WoW? It's about DRM (not just in terms of piracy, but in the broader sense of managing how you use the software), and it's about additional monetisation of mandatory online features (the real money auction house, for example).
Meanwhile the fanboys can continue to pat themselves on the back for keeping the faith, and convince themselves that they will be enjoying something special and rare that the naysayers will be missing out on. Only we won't be missing out on anything except the bullshit posturing of a bunch of self-important fuckwits pissing away their lives trying to make the numbers on their screens higher than those of the idiot they're playing against. And all the while playing the special bonus mini-game of trying to one-up each other's encyclopaedic knowledge of obscure character builds in the chat window. How will I ever survive without that?
