Blizzard: Diablo 3's PvP "A Tricky Question to Answer"

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.

  • Estix
    Most of the fun of Diablo 2, for me, was in how wildly insane and un-balanced it was: attacks doing 100000 damage, having basically infinite health or 99.999% dodge/block/what-have-you.

    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.
    Reply
  • sykozis
    Basically what they're saying is, they don't actually want to implement a feature that was promised because it will break from what they think the game should be.....even if that feature is what captured a LOT of sales....
    Reply
  • amoralman
    Where's a class-action lawsuit when you need one...
    Reply
  • bejabbers
    Don't care. I stopped playing D3 a long time ago. The game is no where near as fun as D2 was, and that's the reason it even sold as well as it did. Shouldn't have tried to retrofit WoW mechanics into Diablo.
    Reply
  • Bezzell
    "The only players that D3 has left are bots farming gold. They don't need PVP", Should have been his answer.
    Reply
  • kinggraves
    Not every game -needs- to be multiplayer. Introducing PvP means characters must then be "balanced" fairly, which as another poster said means you can't be overpowered even in the single player. Why can't we just have good single player games anymore? They are right, how do you functionally take a game based around killing hordes of mobs and turn those same mechanics into 1v1? The problem is the game was built around PvP being a possibility so that attempt at multiplayer balance is already present, to not have the feature at this point really is unacceptable. They gimped the game for a feature they never delivered.
    Reply
  • tului
    11423301 said:
    Not every game -needs- to be multiplayer. Introducing PvP means characters must then be "balanced" fairly, which as another poster said means you can't be overpowered even in the single player. Why can't we just have good single player games anymore? They are right, how do you functionally take a game based around killing hordes of mobs and turn those same mechanics into 1v1? The problem is the game was built around PvP being a possibility so that attempt at multiplayer balance is already present, to not have the feature at this point really is unacceptable. They gimped the game for a feature they never delivered.
    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.
    Reply
  • bryonhowley
    At this point I do not really care what they add or do not add. Since they made it on line only I will never buy the game period. Until they make a offline single player option it is a game I will never own.
    Reply
  • cats_Paw
    This game was such a waste. Good thing i Didnt bother with it.
    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.
    Reply
  • Chairman Ray
    If what we have seen so far meets their quality standards, and the pvp doesn't, it really says a lot about how bad the pvp really is.
    Reply