With a changing PC market and the popularity of console gaming as high as it will ever be, it seems that the time is right for Blizzard to finally make that leap back into that particular hardware section.
With Diablo 3 slated for a 2012 release, Blizzard has been looking at options to bring their third game onto the Xbox and PS3, assembling a team slowly and growing their ranks one skilled person at a time, with Diablo 3 game director Jay Wilson commenting that Blizzard has never before invested in a console port of one of their upcoming titles to such a degree.
“We have a really great team”, Wilson told Game Informer. “We are starting to fill the team out with new hires and some core members of the Diablo 3 team”. While Blizzard is actively exploring the idea of bringing Diablo 3 to consoles, they’ve been quite coy about officially confirming such a project.
“We are still in active exploring mode; we haven’t officially announced a product”, Wilson said. “We say that because we like our product announcements to be a big deal. We haven’t been as secretive about this one because our biggest barrier is actually getting a console team”.
“People don’t believe us when we say we’re going to make a console game. I understand why they don’t believe us, because we’ve tried this before. We’ve also never invested in it to the degree that we’re doing now, and we’ve never had a product that we felt was appropriate for it”.
As for making Diablo 3 a straight port of the PC title, don’t bank on it, as Wilson wants to rather rebuild the title for the console instead.”We don’t want to port it. We want to build it for console. There’s a key difference”.
“Our goal is to make a game that feels like it’s natively made for a console. If we make it, we want it to feel like a Blizzard game and that we built it for that platform from the ground up”.
Sounds like a solid plan of action so far, and as much as we want to see Diablo 3 be released on Xbox or PS3, there are going to be some significant hurdles to clear in order to make such a game even remotely playable on a console.
Last Updated: November 21, 2011
