[_delirium]

Approaching the question from the opposite direction, it's also clear if you have any familiarity with the kinds of per-player CPU budgets that server-side games allocate. The norms for games like WoW aren't anywhere near enough to run even something close to the last-gen Sim City simulations, even though that's a 10-year-old game. Unless EA decided to allocate unprecedented levels of per-player server-side CPU, it's unlikely they're doing any significant percentage of the simulation on the server side.

[weareconvo]

You guys are all raising good points, but, at a higher level, did anyone really believe EA to begin with?

[chaz]

When Diablo 1 and 2 were launched, the single player was 100% client-side. As a result, there was rampant cheating. Jump online with your character, and you had an unfair advantage because of your infinite gold, stacked character and rare inventory.

Diablo 3 went always-online to help solve this problem. Loot discovery, inventory, and fighting outcomes are entirely controlled server-side. While it's possible that they could have forced separate online-only and offline characters, it's reasonable for them to have decided online-only for all characters and not duplicate the logic and engineering. Not to mention DRM.

With Sim City, it's conceivable that they went this way as well.

[gt565k]

Nope nope nope.

I'm sorry but you are wrong here. Diablo 2, while it had online realms where you could bring your single player character, most people chose to play on the battle.net realms where all character info was stored online.

The servers where you could bring your single player character were just a show off for people who used character / item editing programs to create insanely stacked gear and characters, and like I said no one really played on those.

The reason Blizzard went online only with Diablo 3 and SC2, was because the Diablo 2's battle.net was reverse engineered, and there was an abundance of servers that could be played on with a fake CD Key all over the world. I remember specifically in Eastern Europe, we had quite a few servers and obviously with the average monthly salary being like less than $200, no one could afford to buy a PC game. Even LAN centers had cracked versions of all of the games and hosted their own servers.

see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bnetd

Anyway, my point is that you cannot have locally stored game information that can be imported in an online realm and have a direct impact. People will edit that information to create whatever they want. But if a game requires you to be online, it must be an online game period. If a game can be played offline, there is no reason whatsoever for it to have to force you to use online authentication in order to play in a local environment.

[rmrfrmrf]

> The reason Blizzard went online only with Diablo 3 and SC2, was because the Diablo 2's battle.net was reverse engineered, and there was an abundance of servers that could be played on with a fake CD Key all over the world.

I don't think that's the only reason. Diablo II is plagued with bots and duping. While the balance between client-server data on the Battle.net closed realms is much better than it was with Diablo (where you could just edit your character data locally to increase gold/upgrade inventory online), Diablo II still has the problems of 1) loading the entire level map into memory at once, giving bots the opportunity to path their way to POIs with no effort and 2) reconciling local inventory with the server's inventory after lag spikes and server crashes, which is hypothesized to be the main method dupers use.

But, as could be expected, both botting and duping happen on D3 anyway. And, to your point, during the D3 beta period, there were several devs that were able to reverse-engineer the D3 protocol anyway and create a local server. shrug

[wuest]

In addition to your point, Diablo 3 also introduced a real-money auction system, which necessitated a need for far deeper control over inventory etc. Online-only for such a system is a fairly obvious choice.

[cdmoyer]

I think that there were a lot of players that were frustrated when they made a character offline, and then got invited to play with a friend on battle.net and had to start from scratch. I assume that frustration was part of the reason (among others) that they made all characters online/battle.net characters.

[chaz]

Thanks for clarifying.

[mncolinlee]

Single player cheating a.k.a "God Mode" was considered a feature for early versions of SimCity. Multiplayer requires a network connection either way. As long as multiplayer is optional, cheating issues should not be an impediment to single player.

There are gamers who prefer to play with unlimited resources and complete control of the situation. Many prefer a sandbox where other gamers cannot mess with their experience. Are you telling me Maxis is in the business of getting between the consumer and their game? That's a losing business proposition if it's true.

[Retric]

I assumed they where talking about the 'world' economy and if that's the case it may be both true and irrelevant.

Ex: ~20,000 player city's are uploaded into a model. They do a simple calculation based on excess energy, pollution, ect. The result's of that are fed back down and then they run the model again adjusting for new city's and client city updates. Now even if 10mhz per city is used your talking about a 200GHz worth of processing which is far more than an i7 but shared and mostly irrelevant in single player as you could just as easily fake the global numbers.