Diablo 3 to use Warden (anti-hacking software)

[Jed K]

Wired recently interviewed Rob Pardo who confirmed that Diablo 3 will feature the anti-hacking software from World of Warcraft known as Warden, except it will be adapted specifically for Diablo 3.

Quote:Wired: Speaking of it being online, with Diablo II and the first Diablo, really quickly after the game was released and, again, after every patch, there is this huge amount of people who hack the game, find ways to work around the system. What are you guys doing in Diablo III to prevent that? Obviously that makes playing less fun for people who aren’t cheating.

Pardo: With online games it’s definitely challenging to keep people from modifying the game, or hacking the game, but it’s something we take very seriously. It’s something that, you look at a lot of our efforts in our other games and -- we have a full-blown Hacks Team now at Blizzard -- we’ve developed our own kinda anti-hack software called “Warden” which we use in World of Warcraft to try to detect a whole variety of known hacks. We’ve put technology in all of our games to help with a whole variety of those sort of hacks and to detect those sort of things. We keep it pretty serious.

There’s nothing specific that we're doing just for Diablo III, it’s kinda more of a Blizzard effort to prevent cheating across the board.

Wired: Is it going to be the exact same “Warden” software in Diablo III as in World of Warcraft?

Pardo: It will be adapted, but it’s something that was made for all of our games.

Wired: Along with that, there’s a huge segment of the fanbase and a huge segment of the media who came down on EA recently when they released Spore and it had that ridiculous DRM system that only allowed you to put it on three computers. There was a huge uproar. Obviously you need some kind of DRM otherwise people would just blatantly pirate your game over and over again. What kind of solutions are you guys looking at for Diablo III?

Pardo: The thing that I think helps us, is that since our games have such a huge multiplayer component, Battle.net really is our most effective DRM.

If you wanna play online on Battle.net with other players you’re going to have to have a legitimate copy. That’s really kinda been the thing that’s always saved us from a lot of the PC piracy that I think hurts a lot of other single-player-only games.

The full interview can be read @ http://blog.wired.com/games/2008/10/qa-b...ds-ex.html

Personally, this news makes me very happy. Cheating in online games--whether it be duping/third-party programs/maphacks/etc.--is something I despise. I play 100% legit and, in an ideal world, would like to see everyone else do the same.

[Ramos Asura]

Good...

Its good to see they arent using the damn SecuROM....
That was the worst idea Ive ever heard of.
Yet if you go anywhere online you can find pirated copies w/ unlimited instals.