It sucks, plain and simple. Single-player games should never require internet access, and if the game has a multiplayer component, it should be a separate mode that leaves the single-player mode working even when there is no internet connectivity.

It’s just basic fucking common sense… except that it conflicts with financial interests and greed.

I hate it.

Usually I'm online but what if I'm not, or what if they have server problems, or what if in 5 years they feel done with the game and remove the servers. If I pay for a game, I want to be able to play that game on my terms

It just leads to a worse player experience now, and limited likely an inability to play later

Honestly fuck always online games. Piracy prevention methods at the cost of the paying customer. Absolute ridiculous that you cant play things you own offline

If it's single player game, having an always online component is straight up dumb. Fuck anybody who does this.

If the game is single player, there's no reason for it to force you to be connected to the internet. It's annoying and it shouldn't be the norm

Honestly? I used to not care. I usually have internet connectivity and have at least one backup method of getting online.

But now my father is psuedo-homeless and there's so many games he's missed out on because his Van/RV didn't get enough cell signal to work.

After that I understood the problem in a far deeper way.

Games were accessible to me as a kid, not because I could afford them, but because I could just pop in my neighbors CD (and enter their CD key if needed) and be off to the races! If I were to grow up poor now, it would be miserable.

Always-online "single player" games, huge downloads, and if you happen to avoid all that you STILL need to check in online occassionally to use your own Steam Library.

I mean, if 15 year old me existed today, I'd still be pirating things but it would be through a network of friends with Blu-ray burners and good internet connections.

These days, I try to buy on GOG only, and only their non-DRM titles. Then I can throw them onto a samsung t5 and sneaker net it to my dad without worrying if Steam/Origin/Blizzard/Epic will get in the way.

It’s a case of the game industry creating a problem to sell the solution in my opinion. They insist that they need fo force increasingly ridiculous monetisation onto us because they need to maintain the servers, but the reason they need servers to maintain in the first place is because they made their functionally single player game phone home unnecessarily every ten seconds. The irony being that if I’d just pirated the game I wouldn’t have to deal with that.

Singleplayer games have no reason to require an internet connection to be able to play the game.

If it's a strictly multiplayer game, fine.

If not, that's just DRM, and it should die in a fire.

If a single player game requires online connection im not buying it.

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 would never buy such games in the first place. If a singleplayer game doesn't have an offline mode I'm not interested.

There seem to be two Diablo IV games.

One is a single player or co-op offline RPG where you're running around killing monsters and collecting loot so that you personally can save the world. Seeing other players running around just breaks the illusion.

The other is some online multi-player thing where you can run around and team up with other people in the quest to min-max your build, where you pay stupid amounts of money to make your character look the same as all the other people who paid for the same skin.

I like the first game, have no interest in the second, and I resent where the mechanics designed for the second game interfere with the first.

Such a bad idea.

Internet goes? Can't play

Power goes? Can't play

Travelling? Can't play

Servers go down? Can't play

Servers are shutdown? Can't play

Not being able to pause a single player games is so silly, its such a good feature especially for situations like yours.

I pirate any single player games that require always online and its just a better experience, the game doesn't pause when the internet goes and I don't have to worry about servers being shutdown

I'm sure Blizzard and EA are looking at the way Netflix is forcing its users to only watch content in their own household and dying to implement that into their games too

If it's single player games, there should be ZERO reasons to have it requiring online connectivity 24/7. No buy for me. There will be times where your internet goes offline for ISP related issues or Xbox Live or PSN experiencing server issues. How am I going to play those games?

I'm not a fan at all. it gives a limit life to games, and ones that could be played Singleplayer definitely shouldn't have it.

I honestly don't really like it even when implemented well. It's even what caused me to uninstall Just Cause 3. As fun of a game it was, I hated being constantly harassed by Square Enix telling me to connect to their servers or that there was some kind of error in connecting to said servers. I just want to play the damn game.

I find games to be less fun the more time I'm spending not actually playing said game and dealing with some menu option or another, and always online games seem to be the worst offenders in this category.

They are particularly annoying on the Steam Deck and other handhelds where not being online is common.

Anyway, I dislike it in general but like you I've put up with it in some cases (see the Hitman series).

If it's not a multiplayer game then it shouldn't need to be online.

Like I play Hitman a lot and occasionally the game pauses because it loses connection to the server even though it's single-player. It's usually able to reconnect but its still a bit annoying. And I am playing with 500mb internet and an ethernet connection, so the issue is on their side.

So yeah, I really don't see why it's necessary or why it's become such a trend.

Emulation is my favorite way to play for this reason. I have the full game and I can play it in any way I choose when I choose and with the steam deck where I choose. I hate the preoder bullshit where they ship a broken mess and are patching it for a cycle or two and then they shut off the servers...

I boycott ubisoft for this and ea because they are a shitty company. Thankfully we have projects like pretendo and xlink Kai to restore the old networks and they work with emulators

If a game is always online I expect it to be f2p, since then that's a situation where a game disappearing if the company decides to pull it doesn't bother me. It's not even likely that piracy would be able to save an always online game the way abandoned games that never got DRM removed can be.

I choose not to play these games.

In my opinion all games that can be played solo should have an offline mode. Personally I have an excellent internet connection but I hate having to depend on servers to be able to play the game that I bought.

The thing about always online is that the servers often crap out, especially during launch or during major patches. That just annoys the hell out of me.

It depends on the game. Like if it's an online only game, then of course that makes sense. But a single player game, or even a game with a single player mode requiring always online is and will always be dumb.

Diablo 4 not being designed for offline solo play as well (like D2 and I think even D3 was) is annoying though.

Complete dealbreaker for me. You'll never actually own games with such models, as you are completely dependand on the publisher. Once they pull the plug, you can't play the game you paid for. Server probleem? Sorry, you can't play right now. Traveling? Sorry, can't play.

It is also generally bad for modding and the overall user experience. These kind of games often have DRM that don't allow for modding

As a new dad, that problem was solved by being too tired to game with the little free time anyway lol. Also emulators like yuzu work wonders here as you can just pause the emulator even if the game doesn't support it.

I went through the same phase several years back when my child was born, and you’re right—games where you can pause any time are the only kind worth playing for several years after a new child.

I flat out refuse to buy games that require a constant internet connection. It's annoying for multiplayer games but the need for always online with a single player game is ridiculous.

For games that don't need connectivity is a no-go to me. It's just some more programmed obsolescence garbage so when the company decides you have to buy the next game they can just forbid you playing the one you have. Sorry sir but if I can still play Tetris on my Gameboy why would I let you take that away from me.

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

Shit, I'm old.

My internet connection drops constantly because Cox is horrible at providing what I pay for so if a game has an always online DRM component it becomes unplayable frequently. I don’t like it for that reason, but I also don’t like it from a “the server will go offline at some point and then this is going to be unplayable forever after that” point of view.

Big no from me. I almost exclusively play single player games and tend go back to old games a lot. The always-online requirement is not just annoying in the now but a big problem for the longevity of games.

In the case of Diablo IV I'm also not sure if it was really meant to serve my interests rather than Blizzard's. The MMO-lite aspects feel like the excuse rather than the reason.

I only play Destiny 2 (always online) and Civilization 5 and 6 (only online for multiplayer). If a game is a live game like Destiny or Fortnite then I can understand it but not having an offline mode in a game like Diablo seems really dumb.

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 think it might be a good anti-piracy measure. But it's really sad for the accessibility of these games as a whole, especially when it is possible to play the game without any online features.

I'm a big fan of the Steam Deck and Nintendo Switch ability to simply turn into sleep mode, which allows me to pause very easily games. But I guess that's not possible with online games :/

Always-online has not affected me much. What you describe above about pausing is a coding issue, not an attribute of online play. To my knowledge, Watch Dogs 2 and Deep Rock Galactic work the same way: People can join your session at any random moment, but before they do, you can pause the game as normally.

I have a friend who lives in a dry cabin in Alaska. Only internet is a limited mobile hotspot. Games like Diablo 4 are pretty much off limits.

I understand that some games can really benefit from being always online, but I think it's important for games that can be played solo to have the offline option. The more choice the consumer has, the better.

I can't imagine that anyone actually likes being forced to be online in singleplayer games/modes, but I see the point when there is multiplayer involved. Diablo IV makes sense, but I strongly dislike the shift to the MMO-lite model that necessitates a permanent syncing instead of making it optional. I thought it was fine in Diablo III where you could pause as long as no one was in your lobby.

I suppose my stance on it is that, as long as multiplayer doesn't bleed into singleplayer, I'm okay with it - but I'm also fortunate to have a relatively stable connection. I much prefer games that don't lean into the online aspect at all, though.

Always online is garbage and I hate it.

I like Xbox for a lot of things, but travelling to the country side with an xbox that doesn't work because of a stable internet - even if all the games are downloaded and not online multiplayer? - dum

the potato technology nintendo-switch works better...

My internet access is through metered connections, so I find it quite agrivating to be forced to burn precious cap space on a game that could totally be local only.

@Parellius
I despise them. I only buy them if I'm going to play online with friends but I know at some point if I want to play solo I'm going to have to get a "less connected" version of them...

Now if I only need the solo experience, well...

Another issue arises now that handheld PC gaming is getting more and more popular. Those games will definitely ignore a big part of their potential customer base, and I assume suffer the consequences

Never was a fan of the change. I grew up before internet was common place in many households. Only thing you had to worry about was if the game cartridge had too much dust lol.

Always a bit of a turn off for me. Ross (guy that did Gordon's mind and game dungeon) has a pretty good series of videos about why online only games are bad because they can be killed. He really hates the idea of killing games, and I agree with him.

Not only can the game get killed, however, but it can be changed fundamentally in a bad way. Balance can be tweaked for the worse etc. And unlike single player games you can't revert back to a previous version.

I also hate that LAN play has been pretty much stripped from the PC game landscape. LAN parties during college were the shit.

If it’s a singleplayer then no, I don’t think there are any reasons to have singleplayers to be always online. It can have online features but shouldn’t be a requirement