When Diablo III was officially announced at Blizzard’s 2008 Worldwide Invitational last week, it was stated that the long-awaited sequel was in development exclusively for the PC — to the surprise of absolutely no one. Well, maybe some people were surprised, as Blizzard COO Paul Sams was immediately questioned if we could expect to see a console port at some point down the line. Sams was quick to shoot the idea down, stating that Blizzard has no intention to “compromise … the game experience.”
While Blizzard may not have any plans to bring the hell spawn-slaying action RPG to consoles, that hasn’t stopped vice president of game design Rob Pardo from dangling a tiny slimmer of hope in front of console gamers.
“I think it’s theoretically possible. It would have some control changes that I think you’d have to make… But it’s probably, of our major franchises, the one that’s most console friendly, for sure.”
“You’d need to think about a lot of the point-and-click spells, like point to area-of-effect, or things like line-damage in this direction,” Pardo said. “Target selection is something you’re going to lose on console, you’re really going to be able to do targeting direction, but not specific targeting. Out of StarCraft, Warcraft or WOW, Diablo would be the easiest game to translate. But it would still take a bit of work.”
So Blizzard could bring Diablo III to consoles, but they just don’t want to. Seeing as how they’ve only been developing PC games for the past thirteen years, I can certainly understand the urge to stick with what’s familiar, but then, I have a PC that can play Diablo III. Are those of you that lack said gaming PC disappointed by this news?
[Via Eurogamer]