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.
What are other people's thoughts?
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Absolutely detest them. I still consistently play old games because they're a blast and make me remember when I was a kid. That won't happen for my kids with their games, as the servers will be long gone and close to zero companies are going to spend more time updating the game to not need a server. I'm an old man yelling at my lawn, but games went from trying to entertain to trying to suck every cent they can out of you.
One of my biggest enjoyments is hacking games up as well. You can learn about coding (set ammo to -1 - is it unlimited, 0, or game crashing). Sometimes it's fun to be a god after a stressful day. Sometimes my kids play with me and I don't want to have to tell them no, worry about them dying every couple seconds and getting frustrated, or having to drop it altogether.
I just want to buy a damn game and play it how it entertains me the most - not have to deal with server errors, not have to deal with 12 year olds screaming, not have to deal with people who have far more time than I do being 1000x better.
This is a big problem for electrical engineers too... The current/next generation won't be able to open things up and actually see how things work... They'll be too dense to make sense of anything.
So growing up my uncle taught me all about computers. We built them together (early 90s, so DOS days - not even MS-DOS), built the drivers together, etc. Ended up being a pretty significant hobby for me even now.
Going to college, I thought that since tons of my generation were going into computers, we'd flood the market, pay would crash, and every subsequent generation would have tons of people too, so companies would hire the young college kids.
Now, I realize I screwed up. People older than me have no idea about computers. People younger than me have no idea about computers. They use them all the time, but almost have even less understanding of how they actually function than older people. My guess is that older generations had to make everything work, so they have a bit of knowledge to use to figure out new things. Younger generations have had everything catered to them, so they haven't ever had to figure a single thing out. If it doesn't make perfect sense to them immediately, they leave.
Just yesterday I couldn't figure out how to find a profile I followed on Instagram. There was a fresh out of college kid I work with that kind of chuckled and made a (good natured, but naively insulting) remark that basically insinuated I was too old to get tech. I couldn't take it, so I told her that I was actually using the first phone I hadn't put a custom OS on and how a couple Xmas' ago, I had built an unRAID server because I was sick of my computer bogging down with all the extra stuff I had it do. They hadn't even heard of a command line before.
So long winded rambling aside, it makes me sad that no one knows, or even wants to know, how things work anymore. They seem to want it served to them and the slightest amount of work will make them move on. Every generation says the kids are horrible, etc, so I'm hoping it's just that and we'll still have a generation of scientists and engineers.
Oh yeah... It's not even close.
"You don't understand tech" as they show you how the UI of a very particular website works... As if that's an understanding of switching, routing, networking, sysadmin, virtualization, Operating systems, apache(nginx or alternatives...), php (or similar), html, databases... etc... The list is massive... but yes sweet child! I don't understand technology! Meanwhile that list of technologies needed to make that specific UI "Technology" work is black boxes to them.
It's very odd... I might have shitty memory as a 30+year old now... but I really don't recall being that obtuse about stuff when I was younger.