Blizzard have announced that they aren’t being lazy with the PS3 and PS4 ports of Diablo 3 from the PC version, they are taking things seriously and making big changes to make the game more suitable for consoles.
In a lengthy interview with OPM Blizzards’ Matthew Burger gave a few solid examples of how they adapting the game to play on consoles:
“What we didn’t want to do was emulate a PC game on the console. So, for instance, you can’t plug in a USB keyboard and mouse and play Diablo 3 on PS3. It was really built for the controller. We put a lot work into how we laid out the abilities and the camera. It wouldn’t feel right.”
“In the PC version you don’t have evade, on the console version if use your right stick you can evade left, right, back and forward. In this type of game having a dodge roll is fairly traditional on the console so we wanted to make sure we had that. It also helped solve some of the differences between PC and console,” the designer said.
“On the PC if you click somewhere you’re character automatically goes there, on the console version, direct control, you have to actually manually go there. If you’re surrounded by enemies that might be a little more difficult, a little bit more tricky, so evade actually allows you to balance that out.
“Something we’ve done a little bit of work on is our boss fights – the presentation, some of the mechanics [have been changed] to bring them more in line with console boss fights which have a lot of tradition. So we’ve obviously kept an eye on how console games are and we mirrored that,” he added, somewhat mysteriously.”
This is fantastic news, I didn’t get a chance to play Diablo 3 on the PC so the fact that it is coming to the PS3 is great, it’s also brilliant to hear that they are taking this port seriously. Diablo can be a complicated game with lots of things going on at once and that isn’t normally great in a console environment so the fact that they understand this and are making vital changes is very important.
There’s no date set yet for the PS3 and PS4 version so I guess we’ll have to wait for now, hopefully by the end of this year we will have this game in our hands. If only I had a good enough PC to have played this originally… oh well, maybe in time for Diablo 4.
