Never got into Torchlight 2. I just don’t really care for sprawling land maps since Lut Gholein made D2 crap just like whatever the sand area is D3 makes it crap. The constant dungeon descent is more focused and just more fun for me. I would utterly love if they remade Diablo 1 in the Diablo 2 engine with all the D2 classes and drops etc. In the later games I’m generally always bored on the map hoping the next area is a dungeon.
I guess I just like going down.
*holds hand up for a high five that will never come*
Eurogamer's Zoe did a rundown of the online features.
She sounds about as positive about them as I am. Buying a new Actiblizz game in 2022/23 requires a certain amount of nose-holding anyway, but if they don't allow private worlds where I won't see xxn00bf\/ck3rzxx running around, then it makes the choice significantly easier, because I abhor forced-public-multiplayer environments. In a game like Diablo, where they make such a fuss over the atmosphere and tone, it's completely ruinous.
I'd accept it if there was the option for a private server. Why they won't do that is beyond me.
Resources. That would require a separate set of infrastructure and ultimately this game isn't being designed to be played like that. Pretty much from the start they have said this is going to be a shared world game akin to stuff like Destiny and even some MMOs.
And yet Blizzard insist it can be played entirely as a single player game. Technologically there’s no plausible reason which means they couldn’t allow local servers that verify things like loot, etc, with an online server, much like Diablo 3 did. It’s a design choice, and I think it’s a poor one.
If you’re online you can see the super rad stuff people payed extra for which makes you want it and want to pay extra. Why would you not want to be able to see the catalogue of crap virally fed to you? You haven’t filled your battlepass? Loser! Your mates all have but if you slip us a few bucks we’ll boost up your levels and you can be cool too!
If you’re offline you won’t engage in that which is 100% the reason, not a chance it’s technical.
A man who could tell more truth and eat fewer pies.
I don't mind the constant connectivity requirement, as an old school Diablo 2 diehard it's not exactly a new thing to be always online whilst playing, as anyone heavily invested in the original would almost certainly be playing on Battle.Net to take part in runs and have access to the ladder runes and whatnot. Even in 2001, I never made a single player offline character.
I am dead set against a shared open world though. That's not what I want from a Diablo game, period. I want large maps to explore in isolation to churn through enemies at my own leisure and soak up the atmospheric sense of dread the aesthetic piles on. I don't want some dodgy pseudo MMO experience where I have to be constantly exposed to other players. I prefer to choose when I want to engage with the multiplayer element.
