Blizzard has announced that their forthcoming hack and slash RPG sequel, Diablo III, will require a constant internet connection to play, even in single player mode.

Senior producer Alex Mayberry confirmed early this morning that without an internet connection, it will be impossible to play the game in any form. The reason given, is that Diablo III will introduce a new auction house which will allow players to buy and sell items for real money.

Therefore, a constant connection to Blizzard’s servers was deemed necessary in order to prevent cheaters from acquiring valuable items unfairly, and then selling them online.

“It’s the trend that we’ve been moving towards,” Mayberry says. “Obviously StarCraft 2 did it, WoW authenticates also. It’s kind of the way things are, these days. The world of gaming is not the same as it was when Diablo 2 came out.”

PC Gamer double checked just to make sure Blizzard’s position would not be misunderstood. “There’s no offline play, you have to be connected to the internet,” said a Blizzard employee.

When asked why Blizzard did not create a separate offline instance of the game in which players could not buy and sell items, executive producer Rob Pardo said “We thought about this quite a bit,” going on to explain “one of the things that we felt was really import was that if you did play offline, if we allowed for that experience, you’d start a character, you’d get him all the way to level 20 or level 30 or level 40 or what have you, and then at that point you might decide to want to venture onto Battle.net. But you’d have to start a character from scratch, because there’d be no way for us to guarantee no cheats were involved, if we let you play on the client and then take that character online.”

“Now, that doesn’t mean you can’t play a game by yourself – of course you can. You can go into and start any game that you want, you’ll just be connected to the Battle.net servers, and we can authenticate your character.”

Mayberry also confirmed to PC Gamer that piracy is one of the reasons the game will require an always on internet connection, although we can almost guaranty that a cracked version of the game will be available online within days of its release, and it won’t require a constant internet connection.

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