Blizzard has announced today that it will be removing Diablo III’s auction house on March 18th. According to production director, John Hight, the Auction House system ultimately undermines Diablo’s core game play at this point, and that is something that Blizzard does not feel comfortable with. Therefore, the team is ditching away that particular system and is already working on Loot 2.0.
Now the big question is whether Blizzard is working on an offline mode for the PC version of Diablo III. Wouldn’t an offline mode be great, especially since the console versions of the game support such a feature? Well that isn’t going to happen anytime soon.
As RPS reported, Blizzard has no plans on bringing this requested feature to Diablo III PC.
“We do not have plans to implement an offline mode. While the always-online requirement made the auction house possible, the auction house was never the driving factor in our decision to make the PC version of Diablo III require an Internet connection. The game was built from the ground up to take full advantage of Battle.net, which provides a number of important benefits, including persistent server-side character saves, a seamless PC multiplayer experience, cheat prevention, and Real ID and BattleTag social features.”
So there you have it everyone. Auction House is out, always-online requirement remains intact.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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