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Blizzard says that modding Diablo IV can result in a permanent account ban
(www.techspot.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Hey, I support you voting with your wallet then, and you should hold out for Starfield and GTA VI. Maybe play some Cyberpunk or NMS. Hogwarts Legacy too.
But if moddability is a prerequisite for you on full price games, you're probably due a lot of disappointment going forward as games continue to shift to GAS models (and honestly, if you've been beating this drum you've been real disappointed for the last decade anyways). Mods are a great experience for a single player game, but invite rampant cheating in competitive multiplayer games that need to be fair and balanced for all players. You're just not going to see moddability in multiplayer games. And one certainly doesn't have a right to interrupt or destroy other players' enjoyment of a game because they want to cheat.
To be clear, I am not arguing against modding being allowed in games. I ran a VERY heavily modified UI in World of Warcraft, and have had a blast with tons of mods in games like Skyrim and Minecraft. It's just not a hill I'll die on either. Not every game can or should be modded.
To be fair the way it worked in d2 was great. You had a closed battle.net which worked through official servers and an open battle.net where your local/twinked/hacked/whatever char could run rampant and play online with friends.
The modded versions of diablo 2 by replacing actual gamefiles is also still possible if you play it off line/local lan.
GaaS just sucks in that regard. A lot of great things came about by modding like in warcraft 3. Or even the superhero/Warcraft mods in counter strike 1.6
Or the max Payne Kung Fu and whatnot mods. I had hours of fun on that. It wasn't the way the developers intended it to be played. But who cares.
I mostly just play indie games at this point. Modding isn't a requirement for me, but why would I pay more for a game that doesn't do anything interesting. I've played pretty much every AAA game, because they haven't done anything new for so long. They may be prettier, but indie games are cheaper and normally better, and pretty much always less greedy and controlling.