Diablo 3: no plans to take PC version offline

With the real money auction house making an exit, you'd think there'd be room for Diablo 3 to introduce an offline mode on Mac and PC. And you'd be wrong.

In a statement published on Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Blizzard said the Auction House wasn't the only reason Blizzard felt it had to keep security tight by making Diablo 3 an always-online affair.

“We do not have plans to implement an offline mode. While the always-online requirement made the auction house possible, the auction house was never the driving factor in our decision to make the PC version of Diablo 3 require an Internet connection," a representative wrote.

"The game was built from the ground up to take full advantage of Battle.net, which provides a number of important benefits, including persistent server-side character saves, a seamless PC multiplayer experience, cheat prevention, and Real ID and BattleTag social features.”

Diablo 3's auction house will be pulled in March 2014. It's been extremely successful, but never very popular; original Diablo designer Steig Hedlun said it had "detrimental effects" on gameplay, and recently Blizzard itself has been making noises about how it undermines the game's systems.

As of earlier this month, the dungeon crawler is available on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, where it does have an offline mode, and local co-op for four players. It's also coming to PS4 in 2014.