BlizzCon 2009: Diablo 3 not yet ruled out for consoles

by Kevin Kelly on Aug 21st 2009 6:20PM

Blizzard COO Paul Sams mentioned at BlizzCon that they haven't yet ruled out Diablo 3 for consoles. "We've met with the major manufacturers, and they've made some pretty compelling arguments," Sams said. We can safely assume he means Sony and Microsoft, because it's nearly impossible to imagine this game running on the Wii.

Sure, it's what Blizzard says about all of its projects as they relate to consoles and yet, here we are, with nary a Blizzard console game in sight. But Sams did reiterate Blizz's interest saying that we will be seeing its games on consoles in the future. "Whether that's three years from now, five years, I can't say," Sams noted. "But I have no doubt that we'll be making games for consoles."

Tags: Blizzard, Blizzcon-2009, Diablo-3, Microsoft, Paul-Sams, Xbox-360

Reader Comments (54)

Hell
Fucking
Yeah

Yeah right that is.

I will believe it when I see it!

Everybody has their price, including Blizzard. Show them the money so I can get my Diablo III on.

It's about time!

I'm fine with that if they port if after completion.
I don't want it dumbed down for the sake of console controls.

Diablo... dumbed down?

I... don't think that's possible. The game is literally being designed to be used with just a mouse.

Yeah, it's tough to dumb down a game that is pretty much a one button click fest.

Although for some classes and skills, not having a mouse pointer could cause some issues- like teleport skills for example.

From what I've seen of the Diablo3 UI, a console port wouldn't require much dumbing down. Sticks for movement and aiming, face buttons for hot-key abilities, triggers for left and right mouse button abilities, bumpers for swapping right click power and map, and start button for bringing up inventory/stats/talents.

I agree that the main problems with Diablo on a controller are:

1. Impossible to do pin-point teleports, corpse explosions, trap-like skills (any skill that requires its destination or center point be accurately defined
2. Hard to aim projectile weapons at specific enemies

Otherwise, it's doable

Diablo at least needs a semi online MMO feel...
Like gather a group of friends, and bring up to 8 friends into your game, everyone retaining their own armor and weapons... and do dungeon runs together...

Diablo II did exactly that nearly a decade ago. Diablo III will certainly be fully integrated with the new battlenet.

Starcraft Ghost... reconfirmed?

But 4 srs... Ignoring the SNES days, have we ever had a good game from Blizzard on the consoles? Not really.
Diablo and Warcraft II were pretty lackluster ports (especially the later).

I love Blizzard, and own everything they've released, but... I'm not holding my breath on this one.
Better to have expectations be too low, and be pleasantly surprised, than them too high, and be dissapointed.

Well they always said they stopped work on it because they wanted to instead remake it for the next console generation.

Wasn't Diablo 1 released for the Playstation?

I guess PC gamers will have to live with losing exclusives to consoles, I cannot mind too much as long as the PC still gets the games in the first place and doesn't lose games altogether to consoles. We're still getting ports of games that were thought to be console-exclusive like Street Fighter 4. You give some, you get some.

I agree. PC exclusive usually means low budget, which usually means poor game/bug testing. I have no qualms playing a console port on PC so long as they bothered to put in anti-aliasing and if I'm lucky, some higher-res textures.

Even then, the wonderful PC modding scene can add those two in and other benefits as well. I admire the work modders have done on high resolution textures for Fallout 3 for instance and I love the blur mod for GTA4 and hear modders have made or are making anti-aliasing for it, when Rockstar didn't put it into the game.

"We can safely assume he means Sony and Microsoft, because it's nearly impossible to imagine this game running on the Wii."

I have zero interest in the Wii, I would much rather choose a 360 or PS3 over it but how is it nearly impossible to imagine it running on the Wii? Anything is possible, sacrifices may have to be made but that sentence seems a bit inflammatory no?

Yeah, I agree.

lol at "because it's nearly impossible to imagine this game running on the Wii"

At first I thought so too, especially with Blizzard's track record of middle of the road graphics in order to run on the maximum number of machines.

On the other hand, WoW is at this point a very underwhelming game from a graphics standpoint and it still requires a good amount of RAM to run smoothly.

While D3 won't really challenge the PS3 or 360 GPU's, as an open world game, it will challenge their 512MB of RAM and therefore would probably bring the Wii to its knees.

Classic WoW is fine, WotLK on the other hand..

The game still holds up because it's cartoony. But the problem is on the higher settings Northrend will kill even a Crysis-maxing PC just because of how badly optimised it is, without even looking much better to show for the performance hit.

@Spartacus: You're confusing memory and storage. The Wii has 512 MB of storage space, and only 88 MB of RAM. It also has a 3 MB GPU buffer. For comparison the 360 has 512 MB of RAM, while the PS3 has 256 MB of RAM and 256 MB of VRAM. Consoles do require a lot less RAM than a computer since they don't have overhead from the operating system to deal with.

That said, I see no reason why a graphically paired-down version of D3 couldn't run on Wii. It doesn't take that much memory to store level data, the issue is in the graphics. I doubt that Blizzard would do that though.

That's good news. Lets just hope this doesn't resort to them stripping features or going through radical design changes just to appease the console owners.

That would be sweet

From the computer room to the living room. Either way, I'm going to be losing a whole lot of sleep over the same reason.

Would be sweet. Starcraft on Virtual Console and Warcraft 2 and Diablo on PSN would awesome too.

Woopsie, forgot to add "be" in the sentence. Ah well, you get my point...

I love Diablo so much I'd likely buy it for both PC and console.

Picard says: "Make it so!"

Anyone truly excited will get it for PC regardless. The way the game is designed you won't get the same feel without a mouse and keyboard.

It would be a tough choice for me.

On the one hand, it IS a PC game and it would be weird for me to play a Diablo game without destroying the left mouse button.

On the other hand, my only PC atm is my nearly four year old laptop (dual core 2.6GHz, 2GB RAM, geforce 7800 GTX) and I need more gamerpoints, lol. If they offer "rewardables" for the 360, that would sway me even more. Can you imagine your avatar sporting Diablo gear?!

Very interesting indeed.

I mean, I'm going to buy it on the PC. But I might also buy it for the PS3?

I think the control scheme could be adapted well to a controller. Hopefully the buttons are capable of button binding, because I already know how I'd want it to play out. But it sounds intriguing!

Sacred 2 (a shameless D2 knockoff) was ported to ps3 and 360 this year. Despite some glaring flaws in the game, the controller mapping is actually quite good.

Everyone seems to be forgetting the PS3 has keyboard and mouse support...

Yeah, but Blizzard would be shooting themselves in the foot if they went that route. They'll have to optimize for the pad first, then possibly allow M+KB support.

cool

YES!!!! fuck it I'm ready to sign off another 6 months of my life to a Diablo game!!!

That would be sweet! Diablo 2 was one of my favorite games, so much so that like many others I have played it many times through over the years. I bet Diablo 3 could be done well on the console, like sacred 2 and Two Worlds (yes, I actually liked two worlds).

Ps3 for games and blu-ray, Computers for porn, X-box...? red ring of death I guess!

Fanboy comments for downvotes?

He's got a point actually. Why no porn on consoles?

Well, you can watch porn on consoles and surf the tubes for it as well... For me, game and animated porn just looks wrong, but to each their own I guess.

I'll stick to the PC for this one. Channels for trading and other things are much better handled with a keyboard.

I don't know, the PS3 has keyboard support and the chat pad on the 360 is pretty useful.

Not disagreeing with you, but I don't think it would be a deal buster for me just on that account as there are ways around it.

Keyboards work on both the PS3 and 360, but voice chat is dominant and widely used by most 360 players, which is a lot easier. Saves having to stop what you're doing to type.

Sacred 2 does the Diablo style gameplay pretty well on the consoles using the controller.
I would love to see Diablo on the consoles!!

Baldur's Gate and Champions of Norrath (apologies if spelt incorrectly) worked fine on PS2, can't think why Diablo wouldn't on PS3.

It would be nice to see it come consoles. But all i am asking for it first to come to pc and then to consoles. Don't let it be released at the same time. If they do it take even more time to get the dam game out. Honestly if it takes them anthor year 2011 i am just done with blizzard over all.

if they like moeny they will.

Well they better hurry up and figure out if they're gonna do it, cause I don't want to waste money on a new computer if they're just going to release it on consoles.

| 1 | 2 | Most Recent | Next 50 Comments

Sorry, you must be logged in to leave a comment.

Breaking News

The most popular posts
in the last 7 days

Vita 'UMD Passport' won't be offered in US 219 comments
Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning review: A tempting fate 152 comments
David Jaffe leaves Eat Sleep Play, layoffs hit developer [Update] 107 comments
Don't call it a remake: Final Fantasy X is a 'remaster,' to be clear 95 comments
Battleship movie adapted into FPS by Double Helix 93 comments

BlizzCon 2009: Diablo 3 not yet ruled out for consoles

Reader Comments (54)

Posted: Aug 21st 2009 6:23PM 01 said

Posted: Aug 21st 2009 8:09PM mirage said

Posted: Aug 22nd 2009 2:31AM Xemplar said

Posted: Aug 21st 2009 6:25PM Ashkental said

Posted: Aug 21st 2009 6:26PM Anthology said

Posted: Aug 21st 2009 6:27PM HydrophobicFish PSN ID Hydrophob said

Posted: Aug 21st 2009 6:58PM SpartacusMagnus said

Posted: Aug 21st 2009 7:41PM (Unverified) said

Posted: Aug 22nd 2009 1:51PM WiNGSPANTT from TopTierTacticsco said

Posted: Aug 21st 2009 6:27PM Radical Dylan said

Posted: Aug 21st 2009 7:01PM SpartacusMagnus said

Posted: Aug 21st 2009 6:27PM HydrophobicFish PSN ID Hydrophob said

Posted: Aug 22nd 2009 2:25AM iHavePants said

Posted: Aug 21st 2009 6:28PM RKN said

Posted: Aug 21st 2009 10:55PM Haggard said

Posted: Aug 22nd 2009 1:20AM RKN said

Posted: Aug 21st 2009 6:30PM RKN said

Posted: Aug 21st 2009 6:35PM treqie said

Posted: Aug 21st 2009 7:04PM itskrislol said

Posted: Aug 21st 2009 7:08PM SpartacusMagnus said

Posted: Aug 21st 2009 10:57PM Haggard said

Posted: Aug 21st 2009 11:06PM quiggy said

Posted: Aug 21st 2009 6:32PM Discotheque said

Posted: Aug 21st 2009 6:33PM Cthorn said

Posted: Aug 21st 2009 6:34PM Yan said

Posted: Aug 21st 2009 6:39PM SCV said

Posted: Aug 21st 2009 6:40PM SCV said

Posted: Aug 21st 2009 6:40PM Vidikron said

Posted: Aug 21st 2009 6:40PM 343 Guilty Fart said

Posted: Aug 21st 2009 6:44PM Deschain said

Posted: Aug 21st 2009 7:15PM SpartacusMagnus said

Posted: Aug 21st 2009 6:47PM (Unverified) said

Posted: Aug 22nd 2009 3:56PM (Unverified) said

Posted: Aug 21st 2009 6:52PM (Unverified) said

Posted: Aug 21st 2009 7:18PM SpartacusMagnus said

Posted: Aug 21st 2009 6:56PM Spartiate12 said

Posted: Aug 21st 2009 6:57PM (Unverified) said

Posted: Aug 21st 2009 6:57PM logicmeme said

Posted: Aug 21st 2009 6:59PM B1 said

Posted: Aug 21st 2009 10:58PM Haggard said

Posted: Aug 22nd 2009 9:20AM chipimix said

Posted: Aug 22nd 2009 11:32AM 01 said

Posted: Aug 21st 2009 7:17PM Jacksons said

Posted: Aug 21st 2009 7:20PM SpartacusMagnus said

Posted: Aug 22nd 2009 6:15AM Snowblind said

Posted: Aug 21st 2009 7:23PM Professor Lario said

Posted: Aug 22nd 2009 1:41PM (Unverified) said

Posted: Aug 21st 2009 10:00PM (Unverified) said

Posted: Aug 21st 2009 9:15PM dishwasher said

Posted: Aug 21st 2009 10:57PM (Unverified) said

Info

Description

MSRP

Release Date

Genre

Developer

Publisher

Rating

Breaking News

Double Fine Kickstarter passes $1 million in under 24 hours, breaking yet another record

Featured Stories

Ghost Recon: Future Soldier brings information warfare to the front

Rhythm Heaven Fever review: Crazy into you

Remedy not done with Alan Wake

The most popular postsin the last 7 days

Engadget

TUAW

Massively

WoW

The most popular posts
in the last 7 days