What are peoples thoughts on games requiring always online? How does it affect your enjoyment of those games?
I'm currently playing Diablo IV (and having a blast with it) but finding one small gripe which I only think is going to get worse and probably stop me playing it completely in the long run.
My girlfriend is currently pregnant. This means in 6 months time we'll have a newborn. With this in mind I'm expecting to only be able to grab a few minutes at a time to game and even when I think I'll have longer I may end up jumping off at short notice. This means I'll almost certainly come to rely on games which I can pause. Unfortunately this isn't possible with Diablo IV since it requires an always online connection even though I'm essentially playing it as a single player game.
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.
Obviously you have to take a corporation at it's word, but Valve has said that in the event they're going to take Steam down, they have a button to push to make it so your games will stop trying to phone home.