Saturday, October 22, 2011

Blizzard talks console controls for Diablo 3


Blizzard's Diablo 3 developers are on the main stage at BlizzCon 2011 right now, and game director Jay Wilson spoke a little bit about the potential console version of the game. Nothing has changed -- there is no officially announced console version.

But Wilson did confirm that Blizzard has hired a team to work on it, and that the company has been iterating on console controls. "The movement actually feels better on the controller," Wilson said, in response to a fan's question. "Targeting is the issue." Most of the schemes the team has come up for choosing what to attack and loot require a reticule, "which we really don't want to do," Wilson said. "Monster distribution and AI also feels a little bit different than it does on the PC version." And Blizzard won't even say that there's a console version coming "because we don't want to announce something until we're sure." Obviously the team is working on it, and obviously Diablo 3 on a console would be extremely popular -- the first game did officially come to the original PlayStation all those years ago. But as Wilson says, the team wants to assure that "if it goes on a console, it doesn't compromise the PC game in any way, and it feels like it was built for the console."