Diablo 3 on Playstation won’t be a simple port

Diablo 3 is headed to PS3! Yay! It’s a port! I’d rather gnaw my fingers off! That’s the general attitude with games ported to any platform these days. Because most of them are terrible when they make the transition, losing some of their magic along the way. And that’s something that Diablo 3 wants to avoid when they hit Playstation devices eventually.

“What we didn’t want to do was emulate a PC game on the console,” Blizzard’s Matthew Burger said to OPM.

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.

Burger also elaborated on the inventory system, which has also been completely redesigned for the console version. Players will be able to put shiny bits of metal on their heads quicker with just one click, as the layout for that system is now based on type and can be scrolled through by the relevant appendage instead of a grid.

Interestingly though, the one big change to the game, is mapped to a single button. For the first time, players can DOOOODGE!

“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” Burger explained.

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.

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.

Diablo 3 is currently on track for a Playstation 3 and 4 release, but neither of those versions has a specific release date pinned down yet. DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOODGE!

Last Updated: May 8, 2013