Game maker Blizzard recently caused a stir in the gaming community when it revealed that its forthcoming dungeon crawl game Diablo III would require a persistent online connection, even though the game touts a single-player mode. A Blizzard executive says they’re doing this to reduce the likelihood of cheaters exploiting the system, not because of Digital Rights Management (DRM).

Diablo III is the highly-anticipated sequel to a game series originally introduced in the mid-90s. Coming to the Mac and Windows, Diablo III will feature both single-player and multiplayer gaming modes via Blizzard’s Battle.net online service.

Diablo III isn’t an massively multiplayer online game like Blizzard’s enormously popular World of Warcraft, however, so when news that a persistent Internet connection would be required, some gamers and industry pundits saw Blizzard’s move as a potential way to reduce piracy – a more proactive system of DRM. In an interview with MTV Multiplayer, Blizzard’s vice president of Online Technologies, Robert Bridenbecker, disputes that assertion.

“Things that came up were always around the feature-set, the sanctity of the actual game systems like your characters. You’re guaranteeing that there are no hacks, no dupes. All of these things were points of discussion, but the whole copy protection, piracy thing, that’s not really entering into why we want to do it,” said Bridenbecker.

Bridenbecker noted that characters which were created and used offline would not be able to be used online, forcing Diablo III players to start over from the beginning. “Let’s just keep everything clean,” he added.

[via IndustryGamers]