Blizzard suffered a massive DDoS denial of service attack last weekend that put the stability of the Battle.net platform on the ropes. The attack affected several of its games, most notably Diablo IV and its players were unable to play for many hours. And it’s not the first thing that happened (for various reasons) since the launch, so in the last hours of the request oa Diablo IV offline for one player.

The vast majority of players who battle in the world of Sanctuary – less time than we would like – think that Diablo IV is the best title in the saga and beyond, one of the best role-playing games and action video games released in the world. past years. My partner Isidro Ros has already commented on this in this special, and although we have quite different tastes in games, we agree on this one.

Of course, the game isn’t perfect, and the problem we’re concerned with in this post is the obligation to play under a permanent Internet connection. We honestly don’t believe it’s possible to go back, but here’s the information and criticism for the outage that left thousands of players out of the game for over 12 hours on Sunday.

And it’s not the first time. There were several opportunities in the first days after the launch waiting hours to access the servers in the face of an avalanche of players who wanted to join. There were also situations of excessive latency and other maintenance periods that, although considered necessary, prevented the best experience.

Diablo IV offline?

I personally would like to but I don’t see any way the game design itself would allow that. Diablo IV is not a typical multiplayer game, but after the prologue you will have access to a very interesting co-op mode for playing with family or friends. It must be said that the game supports the feature Cross Play on all available platforms.

But there is more to it. The single-player campaign requires the playable portion of the main plot and main game modes to be connected to Blizzard’s servers. In addition, the game has an MMO-like shared world and special areas within the campaign itself where you have to fight with the rest of the players in the mode. retail price. The game also offers events at certain times and zones, where dozens of players fight together against a lot of demons in battles that you have a lot of fun and that would be impossible to defeat alone.

In addition, simply being in the world with another player offers huge experience bonuses, and even more if you form groups of them, for example, of different classes, to achieve maximum abilities. Not to mention that the generation of some areas and dungeons is done using what is known in computing as “procedural generation”, creating data using algorithms involving randomness.

We mean it all the original game design itself necessarily needs to be connected to the Internet and onto Blizzard’s servers to achieve the experience it claims to offer, and offline Diablo IV is not possible under current conditions. Maintaining and improving a game like this is a mandatory and necessary update, even if they do affect playability at times. And on the other hand, no one is immune from computer attacks as pernicious as denial-of-service attacks, which can take down the best-prepared groups of servers.

Another thing is that we demand more from Blizzard. You have to look at the criticism and improve. It cannot be forgotten that the game costs a lot, at least 70 euros for the basic version, and quite a few users say that with the millions that the manufacturer earns, it should offer a perfect service and not spend 12 hours without being able to play. While we understand the technical difficulties, it is difficult to refute this argument.

What do you think? Are you playing Diablo IV? Do you consider the connection and latency issues that occasionally arise while enjoying a game design that seeks co-op even in single player mode to be the lesser evil?