Motivations behind region restrictions in games

by kapowaz, Tuesday, March 26, 2013, 07:58 (4046 days ago) @ ZackDark

Region-specific locks exist in MMOs for a few non-trivial reasons. First of all there is the language barrier: most MMOs involve a lot of communication, and if you can't communicate then it's going to affect the experience. Then there's timezones: if a game places particular importance on collaboration, then it's no good if your community aren't online simultaneously. This is — curiously enough — why World of Warcraft players in South Africa use the EU realms. Then there's latency. A US-based player could, if they so desired, get hold of an EU copy of World of Warcraft and play on the EU realms, but the experience would suck: latency would be so high that it'd affect the gameplay.

We can't say right now exactly what sort of player communication Destiny will support, but it's fairly likely it'll support voice chat. Just how important that will be for gameplay remains to be seen: as with MMOs, it could end up being an integral part of collaborative gameplay. If that's the case, it's unlikely you'll be playing with people who don't speak your language. Maybe this will be solved by letting players state their preferred language as a preference, or maybe it'll be enforced through region restrictions. I suspect that Microsoft and Sony will have as much say in this as Bungie/Activision, though.

From the kind of things Bungie have said (their keenness to differentiate Destiny from other MMOs) I doubt that the collaboration will need to be anywhere near on the scale of (say) a 25-man raid in WoW, so I don't think timezone-related region issues will come into play. If the majority of multiplayer is emergent and matchmaking-based, there's no need to care where a player is geographically so long as they fulfill the requirements of being online (duh) and having low enough latency. Likewise, the issues with latency are pretty much a solved problem using matchmaking (cheaters with faked high latency aside), so I doubt that reason will come into play.

My predictions based on all this are that Destiny won't be region locked, but instead will permit online play with anyone you have in your friends list, or with random players who meet matchmaking criteria, including language and latency. Of course, none of this has anything to do with DRM…