Russ Frushtick in Interviews escribió: 

Blizzard VP 'Surprised' Over Fan Reaction To 'Diablo 3' Online Requirements

Earlier this week, details about the upcoming "Diablo 3" beta were released to the public. One of revelations that got the most attention was the fact that both the beta and the final version of "Diablo 3" would require a constant internet connection to play.

During an interview at last week's press event, Alex Mayberry, senior producer on "Diablo 3," discussed the required connection. "You can play by yourself but your character is going to be saved on our servers. You have to authenticate through our servers to be able to play the game. I think it's not just 'Diablo 3' but with our games as a whole we're tying everything into Battle.net these days...We can provide a much a much more stable, connected, safer experience than we could if we let people play off-line."

This was before the internet went berserk over the news that they'd need an internet connection. This posting on Reddit, for example, has more than 2,700 comments, most of them pretty sour on the idea of being forced to play online.

Given the reaction, it seemed only fair to go back to Blizzard and have them go a bit deeper with regards to why they made the decision to keep "Diablo 3" online only. Yesterday I spoke with Robert Bridenbecker, the Vice President of Online Technologies at Blizzard to get their side of the story.

"I'm actually kind of surprised in terms of there even being a question in today's age around online play and the requirement around that," said Bridenbecker. "We've been doing online gameplay for 15 years now…and with 'World of WarCraft' and our roots in Battle.net and now with 'Diablo 3,' it really is just the nature of how things are going, the nature of the industry. When you look at everything you get by having that persistent connection on the servers, you cannot ignore the power and the draw of that."

One of the reasons the online-only decision upset fans was because it was believed limiting piracy was the rationale. Other companies, like Ubisoft and Capcom, have implemented strict digital rights management (DRM) rules about keeping even single-player games connected online. Was this the case for Blizzard? Bridenbecker says not at all.

    "Internally I don't think [DRM] ever actually came up when we talked about how we want connections to operate. Things that came up were always around the feature-set, the sanctity of the actual game systems like your characters. You're guaranteeing that there are no hacks, no dupes. All of these things were points of discussion, but the whole copy protection, piracy thing, that's not really entering into why we want to do it. I'm a huge purveyor of online sites and from my standpoint, I don't look at DRM solutions and go, 'Wow, those are awesome.' I look at those and say, 'Wow, those kind of suck.' But if there's a compelling reason for you to have that online connectivity that enhances the gameplay, that doesn't suck. That's awesome."

So if piracy and DRM never came into the decision, why not just offer an offline mode for those that want to use it? "Let's say we want to create an offline capacity," he explained. "You're introducing a separate user flow, a separate path that players are going to go down. And, at the end of the day, how many people are going to want to do that?"