MMORPG titan Blizzard has announced new information about the developer’s highly anticipated Diablo III title, and it’s sent the gaming community reeling. There are some big changes coming to the third major installment of a franchise that’s been hugely popular since its 1996 birth.
First, players can now officially buy and sell in-game items for real money. Diablo III‘s auction house will include both in-game and real life currency counterparts. Interestingly, all of the items in the auction houses will be listed by players who found them while playing; Blizzard won’t list any extra items which may give more stability to the auction economy. Blizzard plans on charging a “nominal” listing fee, although the exact price has yet to be decided, as well as taking another small cut when the item is sold. Both charges will be the same for any listing, not percentage based. Players can either deposit their money into their Blizzard account or cash out with third-party services for an additional fee.
Partly influenced by the new auction house, Blizzard has decided to only allow Diablo III to be played online. While this has proved shocking to some, Blizzard argues that it’s the only way they can be sure that people aren’t cheating. With real money on the line, it wouldn’t do to allow someone to level up extremely quickly by cheating offline before signing into Blizzard’s servers. The option to let players have separate offline and online characters was nixed by Blizzard, who deemed that players were unlikely to want to put in the effort to level up two characters. While that reasoning might be suspect, forcing players to only play online does eliminate one problem: piracy. Blizzard will now be able to authenticate every user who plays the game, which may mean a push to online-only gaming becomes more popular.
Finally, Blizzard has expressly prohibited game mods. Both the Diablo franchise and Blizzard games in general have a history of allowing modding, from custom auction house searches in World of Warcraft to advanced editing abilities that can fundamentally alter gameplay in StarCraft 2. With no offline option, there’s no place for gameplay experimentation, and Blizzard won’t allow potential advantages in the auction house with automated searches.
Photo via PC Gamer
I remember in my D2 days, there were thousands of D2 item listing on EBAY. I think incorporating this in game will help both buyers and sellers while preserving the transaction. Also players will always have the option of not paying and earning their items in game. It’s a win win.
The only other thing is, I am disappointed that the Auction House is not available to Hardcore players. A solution to this is to create a “Hardcore Server” where all characters are “Hardcore Mode” and whenever your character dies, your new character can claim the your dead characters items at an Alter.
You know, normally I hate any company trying to lock down control of its products this tightly, but I’ll be honest: Rampant cheating, item duping and hacks ruined the last online Diablo experience. This time around I’m glad they’re grabbing the reigns.
Sounds no different than games you download and play through Steam. The new Dawn of War games pretty much require that you have an internet connection to play too. I don’t know if that’s a Games for Windows thing or a Steam thing.
Using real money for in-game items is just stupid. It’s just plain greedy. I can picture the corporate suits looking at the cashflow from World of Warcraft and going “how can we get monthly cashflow coming in for Diablo too?”.
Great, fine, who cares, whatever… just release it.
Agreed. I’m tired of waiting too.