You’d expect that when Diablo III eventually launches (Soon!), it would have just about every feature and game-mode you’d expect – but you’d be wrong.
After at least 5 years in the oven, Diablo III won’t ship with Player vs Player multiplayer.
“As we’re counting down the days until we’re ready to announce a release date for Diablo III, we’ve come to realize that the PvP game and systems aren’t yet living up to our standards,” says Jay Wilson, the game’s director on the official website. “Today, we wanted to let you know that we’ve made the difficult decision to hold back the PvP Arena system and “release it in a patch following the game’s launch. After a lot of consideration and discussion, we ultimately felt that delaying the whole game purely for PvP would just be punishing to everyone who’s waiting to enjoy the campaign and core solo/co-op content, all of which is just about complete.”
PvP will instead be patched in post released- though no specific time-frame has been given – not that there’s an established time-frame for the game’s release anyway.
“When the PvP patch is ultimately ready, it will add multiple Arena maps with themed locations and layouts, PvP-centric achievements, and a matchmaking system that will help you and your team get into fairly matched games quickly and easily,” Wilson says.
Those of you who’ve been waiting forever: do you think the sacrifice of PvP is worth it, for the sake of the game’s release – or do you figure that since you’ve waited so long, a few more months (or years!) wouldn’t matter? wilson says the team is close to finishing the game – which means they haven’t even started the crunch-time bug finding and polishing. You might want to look in to playing the beta, then.
Last Updated: March 12, 2012
