Gaming

Always online has pretty much always been a terrible idea except for where it's actually required (MMOs)

I absolutely refuse to buy any game that requires being online for single player. That is a line I will never cross.

I hate that "Games as a Service" are preventing the longevity of games. I worry about all of the incredible stories and experiences that these games provide being very quickly lost to time.

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 wouldn't buy such game. "Would" because so far none of the games that interests me required constant connection. I don't play multiplayer games to begin with so it's easy to avoid.

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

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.

Last month, construction workers did something in our street. I didn't have Landline Internet for a whole week. Always Online is pretty horrible for single player games.

@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

I really dislike it, but it won't stop me from buying a game. I was recently without internet and went to play a game on my Steam Deck and was surprised to find a game I had been playing required access.

What bugs me most about it is that it seems like everything these days is tilted towards the companies. If a game doesn't require the internet, the only reason it's there is to collect data on what you're doing and maybe to help enforce DRM. It's bad enough that I can only rent games from Steam (although bless Valve for making gaming on Linux so good), now I can't even play the games I "own" if I don't have a pipe back to the company? Ugh.

The always online is bad. The micro-transactions are worse. I'm tired of being told "But it's just cosmetic!" Yeah, well that used to come with the game too. "They need to be able to make more content!" Yeah, it's made over 666 million dollars. They can afford more content. "At least it's not..." That shouldn't exist either.

Games, and expansion packs. That's it. Day one MTX is insulting. "here's your game, pay to unlock more of it" should not be a thing we accept. At this point I half expect a back-slide to pay full price and then a sub to actually play the game. I can not wrap my head around why people defend it, I've stopped buying games with MTX entirely.

Diablo 2 resurrected is quite good, though. Nailed that one.

How am I supposed to play an always online video game on the plane

it requires an always online connection even though I’m essentially playing it as a single player game.

That is awful. What are their reasons for that?

I don't like it and try not to play games where it's a requirement. Especially in single player games.

I refuse to buy always-online games. Not being able to pause is just dumb (and probably could be fixed if Blizzard would still give a damn). But not being able to mod the game is a deal-breaker for me, an ARPG that can't be modded is not worth my time.

I don't like it. I play with a Steam Deck from my bed and the Wi-Fi connection is pretty bad from there. I easily loose connection every five minutes.

That means I can't play any games that require constan online connection, which is a bummer.

Nah. I don't have a reliable or constant connection. Constant online anything doesn't work.

The only reason to require an Internet connection for a game is if it's primarily multiplayer.

I fuckin hate it. Total bullshit

If a game has a single player mode without features that require internet, and isn't accessible without wifi, thats just lazy design imo.

I hate the "always online, always changing, sudo-mmo"- genre that's becoming the norm with certain publishers. Avoid anything GaaS-like unless it's something I feel the need to experience. In this case I just play Grim Dawn or some other great arpg whenever I get the itch for the genre! Lets me play multiplayer when I want to, and just play real singleplayer whenever I want to.

Always online games really bug me. For someone like myself that goes out to sea for several weeks as part of my job, I won't have connection during those time periods thus I can't play the game I played.

Additionally, if the company removes the servers that the game connects to once the game has been out for whatever they determine to be "long enough" the game becomes unplayable

I haven't seen an upside for always online games only downsides. Totally understand that games with an online multi-player component need that internet connection but there is no reason, that I have seen, that are single player games or have single player components need always online connection.

I don't buy always online games. Period.

I have accepted the fact that this would be the new normal since Diablo 3 and the infamous error 37. It was a problem back then when good internet is hard to come by. But at 2023, unless there's zero online elements in a particular game, I have no issue with always online requirement.

Good that we still have great titles from Nintendo eg. TotK

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.

I hate it I try to always avoid always online drm but sometimes it's really impossible, i'm gonna be honest and say that i got some issue with my steamdeck for them. (f u ubisoft btw) So if i find that a singleplayer game needs an always online drm i just don't buy it.

In case of Diablo IV in my opinion Blizzard has a good track record of keeping game servers online for years and years.

That being said, the game does have some weird server hopping mechanic that you can't turn off, meaning it seems to switch servers while you're playing, which isn't always as seamless as you'd hope it would be. Also, at least for me, it sometimes selects servers with >100ms latency, which is quite noticeable of course.

It made me stop buying games and consoles in the first place.

You have to be online, the game has to be downloaded on the system, there will be bugs and it has to be patched.

Just let me buy a game and play it. I may sound like an old fart but I really enjoyed the days that I could go to a store, buy a game and play it immediately on my console.

Especially the fact that bugs are literally shipped like features now and you just have to accept that your game of 80-90 dollars is ridden with bugs, yeah fuck off really.

Hate it as I have a Steam Deck so I just wouldn’t play it if it needed an online connection as I play a lot when travelling.

Happened when I was away with some mates and we tried to play FIFA which needed an initial online connection to Origin. Was infuriating trying to get it work with bad mobile connection

I didn't mind it until I lost my internet connection, but I think I prefer it over bad Denuvo implementation that makes the game a stuttery mess.

I dont like always online games, since I have had connection issues for a long time before I moved which made it almost impossible to play multiplayer games for me. And now my W-LAN card on my computer died without the option to use LAN. I am already glad that I can still access Denuvo "protected" games since those need to send some stuff to Denuvos sometimes.

I have avoided the Hitman series because of their always online requirement. One day I loaded it up only to be told I couldn't play their single player game because their servers were down for maintenance.

I'm not paying $60 for a single player game that I won't be able to play when the company has server issues.

The games I play usually don't support online at all lol. So a game being only online is kinda a deal breaker for me lol.

Same experience as you with D4. Fun game but the always-on requirement is a tad annoying. Not deal-breaking for me, but I have had my fair share of rubber-banding on my SteamDeck, especially with Bluetooth headphones connected. D2R worked well offline, why not have an offline mode here?

I try to avoid games with always online as much as possible but sometimes you don't have choice. If you want to play Diablo IV there's not much else you could do. But at least Diablo has some form of multiplayer. If you have a solely single player experience with always online, it's just bullshit. The DRM is only punishing players that pay for the game. If you insist to implement this kind of DRM then please go ahead but then you also have to run the servers forever. If you don't then why should I buy your game?

It has no place in single player games and turns me off from playing them. There's no real reason they exist other than removing the ability to use cheats (which should be allowed in single players games imo) to obtain items or boosts that are only available on their cash shop. It also ties in to the Game As a Service model which i've come to detest; usually because they have a constant stream of updates that tries to monopolize your free time, whereas i am the kind of player that can say "ok this is done".

Games that offer multiplayer in addition to single player, such as D4, should allow you to have a single player save that's offline, can be paused and anything goes.

Ironically I think GTAV did a pretty decent job of this - you can pause at any time during the single player, however I don't remember if it requires a connection to play single player mode.

Imo if a game has a single player mode, being online for it should never be a requirement.

Personally it's never effected me but it feels like a really dumb decision made by ignorant suits. The fact that pirates get a better product than paying customers is pretty sad.