I find it hilarious that one small feature 'kills all appeal of the game'. How pathetic.
I'm not the one that said that the always-online killed it for me, but I am one of the people that dislikes it quite a bit. And no, it's not the only reason I'm not super excited about getting the game.
In general I don't like the direction they've been taking it. It's
much more arcade now.
You get health and mana just by running over glowing orbs.
Your character no longer really has any development, since you can swap out pretty much everything whenever you want.
The focus is even more on "How many hundreds of small enemies can you kill per minute? Let's find out!!". The gothic feel of the original game is pretty much gone completely.
Now, they've added in this 'always-online' bit. Why do I dislike that? After all, I've got a good reliable connection at home.
Well, for one, I play games on my laptop pretty often. I'm not always somewhere with a decent internet connection at all when I'm on my laptop. So, no playing this game for me whenever I'm somewhere else. Yes, I can play a different game during that time, but that's hardly an incentive to buy Diablo III, now is it?
Not only that, but being always online means that if I want to do any modding of the game, I'm pretty much going to have to get a cracked copy of it. I can't go in and change things to be the way I want them to be. Which I did extensively in Diablo II and had a lot more fun playing that way. Plus, I enjoy modding and often end up modding a game more than playing it. But I probably won't be doing that with this game.
I realize most people don't mod, and even those who simply enjoy playing mods may not care too much. But for me, that's a big deal. I get bored of games, and mods really help extend the life of a game for me. If it can't be modded, then I know that I'm much less likely to go back and play the game once I've finished it. Unless they've done something amazing with this game, I doubt it'll have all that much replay value for me. 5 Classes is nice, but if Diablo II is any indication I'll only bother finishing the core game with one or two, and the rest of the classes will get played a small amount and then dropped.
Is an always-on connection "one small reason that kills the game" for me? No. But it's another reason in my list of "Why not to buy the game".
I might still get it. My friends might get it and show it to me and I'll decide that it'll be worth the price to play through once. But I'm a lot less interested now than I was when the game was first announced.