Blizzard: Diablo 3's PvP "A Tricky Question to Answer"
Blizzard is still tooling around with Diablo III's PvP mode.
Diablo III fans waiting patiently for Blizzard to introduce Player vs. Player into the popular PC game may have to wait indefinitely. When Blizzard revealed the upcoming Reaper of Souls expansion pack earlier this week, the PvP feature wasn't mentioned, but rather Loot Runs and Nephalem Trials. Now game director Josh Mosqueira is indicating that there are three major hurdles that need to be overcome before the highly-requested feature will see the light of day.
When asked about PvP this week during Gamescom, Mosqueira said it's a tricky question to answer. However he first pointed out the issue centering on the team dedicated to PvP development: it's rather small, and the rest of the Diablo III gang is currently banging out the Reaper of Souls expansion pack. Thus, the progression of PvP functionality is understandably slow until more developers can be assigned to the project.
Unfortunately, the next hurdle resides within the game's core design itself. "In Diablo, the core mechanics are really built around one character fighting scores of monsters, right? There’s a lot of control, a lot of AOE, and some of that stuff starts to not necessarily break down, but it starts to fray at the edges when you’re actually now focused on two people, or four people,” Mosqueira said.
The third hurdle centers on when PvP should be enabled. The Diablo III team is currently debating on whether this feature should be unlocked once the characters has knocked Diablo out of the High Heavens, or opened up to all characters at all levels.
Will PvP become another canceled gameplay mode? Former game director Jay Wilson revealed back in January that the highly-anticipated team deathmatch mode would not be added to Diablo III due to the feature falling short of the team's expectations. More to the point, throwing players into an arena to kill each other just didn't provide enough of a long-lasting appeal.
"Most of our testers didn’t feel like it was something they’d want to do beyond a few hours," he said. "Without more varied objectives, or very lucrative rewards, few saw our current iteration as something they’d want spend a lot of time in."
"Certainly, we've gotten a lot of benefits from the development of Team Deathmatch, especially in the areas of controls and combat model tuning, but at this point we don't believe it's the experience we feel it needs to be in order to ship, so we will be shelving it for now and exploring other options," he added.
Wilson said that Diablo III was designed to be a PvE-first kind of game, where the team never compromised on player abilities in the name of future PvP balance. However in a casual PvP mode similar to WoW Battleground, the team would be able to carry over most of the runes, items and skills – along with their "crazy" effects -- with very little modification. Team Deathmatch just felt too hardcore.
I like that they're trying to make it sane and fair, but I don't think that was what made it fun in the first place.
They could just add the PvP mode, tell the people bitching about getting PvP "here it is". Then add an additional "click that you understand" stating that PvP isn't part of their vision for the game, they're not gonna balance around it, so take what you get and shut up.
PvP in a game where you can buy things for real money? That sounds boring as hell.
In 3 days everyone would be using the same character with the same build and the same spells/skills.
No wonder PvP never came out.
If it doesn't "fray" doing 1v1 against most (all) of the major bosses, WHY would it break down vs a player? Sure, players may have a wider variety of skills/spells/defenses than a typical boss, but you'll have the same OP kind of stuff too. Just because you both insta-nuke each other (or in 20 seconds depending if they simply nerf damage to other players), doesn't mean there aren't people who would fully enjoy that sort of crap.
I bought D3 and found it doesn't have anything to offer beyond free-to-play (FTP) RPGs. I also found most newer games to be so far beyond D3 (even the FTPs) there's no point in playing D3.
To me, D3 is a game that should be an XBOX Live arcade title or something simple enough to run on a phone/tablet.
I think I just was looking for the nostalgia of the old days when I picked it up. I quit playing after a couple days.
You sure got downvoted for liking D3. I myself have played it enough that I got my $60 worth of entertainment plus enough D3 cash to purchase SC2, HoTS and a night of getting drunk. Still playing to get my DH geared up.
Bliz needs to add open World PvP server option ASAP! Another D3 issue is that it is very anti-social by design. Jay Wilson was a moron!