5 Reasons 'Diablo III' Represents Gaming's Annoying Future

5 "Ready to Play Your Single-Player Game Alone? Please Log In."

When that bar turned green and the "Play" button lit up, my dong rose like 20 tiny Amish guys were pulling on it with ropes. I clicked "play" and then "I agree" on not one, but three "User Agreement" screens. That's when the first smoke alarm went off in my head.

Wait, I have to sign a contract to play the game that I just paid for? Do I need to get a lawyer? Can I do something in the game that could get me into legal trouble? I mean, I don't plan on playing public games or anything -- just me in my computer room, killing evil and screaming curse words until I lose my voice.

But I convinced myself it was nothing to get worked up about. It's just there to save their asses in case some random jackoff finds a way to make money off of them via lawsuit. Fine. I got through them all and was immediately taken to a screen that pulled the alarms from the back of my mind directly to the front, and cranked up the volume to "nuclear attack" levels.

For the six of you who just discovered the Internet today, that's a login screen. It's commonly associated with multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft and ... whatever other multiplayer games exist. Except there's a problem: Diablo III isn't a traditional MMO. You don't sign in to the game and immediately find yourself surrounded by a hundred other players shouting racial and homophobic slurs. You are in your own world. By yourself. Single player.

It is a single-player game with multiplayer options, just like all the other Diablo games. If you choose to play with your friends, you can. If you choose to join public games, you can. Otherwise, you're on your own -- and contrary to what MMO fanatics believe, this is the way millions of gamers prefer it.

But for the second time, I had to take a breath and remind myself that it's nothing to get worked up about. We've been fucking the gaming industry since the very first video game was invented. They put up with piracy for decades, and so far nothing has worked to stop it. This is just what they've come to, and if signing in to their servers helps prevent theft, then I'm all for it. The more money they make, the more resources they have to put back into expansions and content. Fine.

4 "Now Customize Your Single-Player Character as You Please ... Wait, Not Like That."

I logged in and created my first character: a monk named Fuckhole.

Oh, come on! Really? You can't give me the option to name them whatever I want and then just ban me from entering public games? You can't give me the freedom to make a mage named Assfuck Cockthrob on the game that I never plan on playing with other people as long as I live?

OK, it's not the end of the world, but making computers utter profanities against their will is the reason I got into video games in the first place. In the Reagan era I played arcade games purely so I could get the high score and enter my initials on the leaderboard as "ASS." I replayed an entire RPG because I knew that there was one specific point where the female love interest would have to say the line, "Father, I want you to meet my new boyfriend, CUNTBLASTER." How have the decades resulted in less freedom to be childish?

But fine, this time I'll resort to stupid puns.

OK, so I decided that I wasn't going to bitch about it. They're clearly trying to prevent piracy while masking it with a "social" setting that's barely there in the first place. I've been giving this game a liberal amount of leeway, and if it's as good as they say, then it's a necessary evil that I'm willing to live with. Even though I have so few friends, I never have to worry about accidentally exposing my perverted, juvenile name to the guys who absolutely expect that sort of thing from me ... and who do it themselves.

I wasn't disappointed. I signed in and decided that my character had a personality flaw that made him think that death was hilarious. Which became even funnier to me when a friend came online and immediately appeared in my game, catching me in mid role-play -- with myself.

That's when I found out that there's an option enabled by default that allows anyone you are friends with through your Battle.net account to join your game at any point without asking. And not just through this specific game. The friend who showed up was someone I added back when I played World of Warcraft. And since both games are made by Blizzard, and both utilize the Battle.net account system, he's automatically on my friends list on my single-player game. So we killed some stuff for a while, and I kind of felt bad about getting mad over that whole "Fuckhole" incident. Hell, I'm friends with my oldest son through that system. Not that he'd be shocked about my stupid anal sex name, but I'm sure it would cause an unwanted conversation with my ex-wife. You get the point.

The more I played, the more I realized that my cynicism was for nothing. I was just being a whiny child, complaining about change. The game is impossibly fun, and if all I had to do was succumb to a simple social network, then I was --

3 "Sorry, You Can't Play Your Single-Player Game Because Our Computer Is Broken."

Wait, what? Why is my screen going black? Is it some surprise cut scene? Maybe some Easter egg that triggers when you laugh at gravestones? I tensed in anticipation.

Nope, I got booted back to the start menu. Well, shit. No biggie -- that happens from time to time when you're playing something that's hosted on a remote server. I'll just sign back in and pick up where I left off.

I sighed, clicked the "OK" button and attempted to sign in six more times. This is also common with disconnects, and I tried to cool my slowly heating blood by reminding myself that when you get booted, your character is still active on their servers until their software recognizes that you're no longer connected and kicks you out on their end. A mousy voice in the back of my head started whispering a soft chant of "Single-player game." I signed in for the seventh time.

Oh. Well, that's ... really? I mean, I understand why it's happening. It's launch day for a game that's being hosted on a set of servers designed to handle a certain load of players. After the initial rush of people settles down, there won't be nearly as many people playing the game at the same time. So it's not smart to buy enough servers to handle the entire player base all at once because you'd only need those for the first week. You set up enough to handle your average load so that when things do settle into a rhythm, you don't have a bunch of useless, idle machines sitting around, collecting dust and wasting money.

"For your single-player game that has no offline option." No, stupid voice! Stop that! Let's just exit the game and go in from scratch. Sometimes, it's just a simple bug that's fixed by going in fresh.

MOTHERFUCKER! This is bullshit! I just paid 64 goddamn dollars for a game that- No. You can't let the game turn you into that screaming sack of shit type of personality that permeates the Internet. You hate that person, and you won't become it.

From behind me, my fiance sighed and said, "Motherfucker! This is bullshit!"

2 "Sorry, You Can't Play Your Game Right Now. Somebody Else's Game Is Broken."

She had been booted from her game of World of Warcraft. At her login screen, she got this message:

I looked back at my Diablo III screen and burst into hysterical, borderline-insane laughter.

Their brand new game, totally unrelated in any way to their other established games (WoW and StarCraft II), had destroyed the ability for any of their players to play any of their games. Because they all required a login to play, and that login server was directly connected to their Battle.net system. So when one game crashes the server, even if you don't play it, your other completely separate game is fucked.

I had to see the player backlash for this. It was going to be awesome. So I pulled up the main site for Diablo III, and went into their forums. Or at least that was the intention.

At this point, I was 100 percent certain that if I decided to make a sandwich, my refrigerator would be replaced by floating text that read, "We're sorry for the inconvenience. Diablo III has encountered an error that temporarily removed all electrical appliances from your house. Please check back in a few minutes."

The only place left to find out any information was Twitter. And I couldn't imagine being the poor bastard who had to deal with that shitstorm:

That went on for dozens of posts. Informing people that the situation was being looked into, and that they had no idea when the servers would be back up. Trying to reassure people that they "hope it'll only be down for a few minutes" followed by a time stamp of "53m." Finding new and creative ways to say, "We have no idea, and we're sick of answering your stupid fucking questions," and make it sound professional.

When their site did come back online an hour later, it was a good sign, because it showed that at least some of their servers were now working. I tried to sign in again:

And again ...

And again ...

The whispering voice in my head was growing louder by the second. "Yep, it's got the option to play multiplayer. Option. As in 'You can choose to do this if you please.' Just like virtually every other modern game in existence. It's a single motherfucking player game, John. Give in and just explode. You know you want to explode."

1 "We Thank You for Your Patience. Also, This Is the Future of Gaming, Fucker."

I went back to their site and looked through what Blizzard fans refer to as "Blue Posts," which are messages left by administrators of the forums. People who are directly connected to Blizzard, and have information before anyone else. Their posts are written in bright blue to separate them out from all the others:

No! Goddammit, that's enough. We as consumers have gotten to the point that we just accept this bullshit as "normal launch-day bugs," when it should have never gotten to this point in the first place. I read through those forums, and you wouldn't believe the number of people defending Blizzard through this whole ordeal. Throwing out arguments like "It's going to happen. You can't expect the servers to handle that many people logging on all at once." And "Every MMO in existence has these problems on launch day."

And nobody is getting the core point: The single-player version of this game should have never been hosted on a remote server to begin with. I and millions of other people bought this game because we love the Diablo franchise, and we have been waiting for 12 years to jump back in and throw fireballs at evil. There is an absolutely enormous amount of us out there who couldn't give two flying fucks about an auction house or a chatroom or even the ability to play the game with our friends. We just want to play the goddamn thing.

We handed Blizzard 64 dollars and said, "I would like to be a monk named Fuckhole, please." And in return, they took our money first and responded second, "No, that name doesn't quite sit with us. Take out the cursing, and you can play. Well, for an hour or so, that is. Maybe. We'll see how it goes."

Sixty-four dollars is as much as some people make in an entire day. For them, handing that over to play a video game is not a minor event. All they want in return is to use the product they just fucking paid for. If any other company in the world sold you a product that didn't work, and then refused to hand over some sort of compensation in return, you wouldn't even need a lawyer. The judge would tell them straight up, "Give them a working product, or give them their money back, or go to fucking jail." But for whatever reason, the video game industry gets away with this now? Every time they have a problem with their servers, I can't play the game I already bought? In an era when people carry their entire music library around with them on their phones, I have less ownership and control of my video games than I had in 1979?

And make no mistake, we have every right to bitch. We don't want to hear condescending assholes telling us, "Calm down. It's just a game. Be patient." It's not just a game. It's the principle: We paid for it. We get to decide when to play it.

But ranting aside, the game came back up three hours later, and I had the time of my life with it. It's seriously one of the best games I've played in years -- not even Skyrim got me excited about gaming the way Diablo III has. It's just too bad that the model we've had to resort to in order to prevent piracy is exactly the model that's killing the genre of PC gaming. Oh, wait, did I say just "PC gaming"? I meant "all video games."

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