Gaming

If the game actually does something useful with that connection, I don´t have a problem with it. Examples:

• MSFS does the processing of the terrain and it´s details off site. Also things like live weather and traffic obviously need a connection.
• Souls games allow you to leave messages and read messages from other players. Also you can help or attack other players in their game, which is super useful and fun.

However, sometimes the always on is just a way for the devs to battle piracy. In which case its hurting the actual gaming experience.

I´m not familiar with Diablo 4 to be honest. So, in my understanding, the fact that it need an internet connection alone can´t be the reason for not being able to pause the game, right? There must be some real time interaction going on between your "world" and the worlds of others.

EDIT: Hm, I read up on it for a second and it seems like there is a portal that you can use to teleport to a safe place? A town? Supposedly you can even do that from within a dungeon AND even teleport back to the same place?

Doesn't matter to me one way or another, and it doesn't affect my purchasing decisions.

Last month, construction workers did something in our street. I didn't have Landline Internet for a whole week. Always Online is pretty horrible for single player games.

Always-online singleplayer is bullshit, and we all know it.

This means I’ll almost certainly come to rely on games which I can pause. Unfortunately this isn’t possible with Diablo IV since it requires an always online connection even though I’m essentially playing it as a single player game.

There's a difference between always-online SP and essentially one-person MP games though.

It sucks that they did it that way, but at least it makes slightly more sense there.

I try to avoid games with always online as much as possible but sometimes you don't have choice. If you want to play Diablo IV there's not much else you could do. But at least Diablo has some form of multiplayer. If you have a solely single player experience with always online, it's just bullshit. The DRM is only punishing players that pay for the game. If you insist to implement this kind of DRM then please go ahead but then you also have to run the servers forever. If you don't then why should I buy your game?

Man, I miss the days of offline multiplayer. Split-screens, one person hogging WASD and the other the arrow keys.

Shit, I'm old.

I refuse to buy always-online games. Not being able to pause is just dumb (and probably could be fixed if Blizzard would still give a damn). But not being able to mod the game is a deal-breaker for me, an ARPG that can't be modded is not worth my time.

It obviously only bothers me for single player games. Sometimes my internet is down when I wanna play. There is no good reason for why I have to be online to play a single player game. Sometimes my internet is fine but the game servers are down. Or overloaded. Or the publisher just took them down permanently or whatever.

I tried playing the beta for diablo 4 and the game had network lag. I know diablo 4 is technically a multiplayer game. But I always played diablo alone and I'm not interested in the multiplayer aspect. Sometimes I would get kicked from the server for whatever reason. That sucked. made me not buy the game.

I don't like always online games.
Some years ago a friend asked me to play Diablo 3 together, so I bought it and tried it in singleplayer to get familiar with it, since that was the first time playing a Diablo game.
I got very hard lag - in a singleplayer session and lost the connection to the server several times.
It was such an awful experience that I couldn't bring myself to play it online anymore.

I dont like always online games, since I have had connection issues for a long time before I moved which made it almost impossible to play multiplayer games for me. And now my W-LAN card on my computer died without the option to use LAN. I am already glad that I can still access Denuvo "protected" games since those need to send some stuff to Denuvos sometimes.