Well, the PVP blog we’ve been waiting for has been posted and it was definitely not what we were hoping it would be (this seems to be trend with PVP). Jay teased us tweeting that the PVP blog post would be up “shortly†then soon changed his tune stating it would be delayed. I really wonder if the post he thought he was originally going to write was what has now been published, or if things really escalated that quick to warrant this response. Whatever the case, here is the blog post in its entirety.
“Hey everyone,
The development team has been working really hard on the features, content, and systems for PvP in Diablo III and I wanted to take some time to give an update on where we’re at.
Of course, our goal has been to release our Team Deathmatch mode as soon as possible, but we don’t want to put anything out there before it’s ready. Right now, Team Deathmatch isn’t yet where we want it to be, so I want to provide some insight into where we are at in the development process.
For us it comes to a few issues, one of which is depth. Simply fighting each other with no other objectives or choices to make gets old relatively quickly. We’ve brought a lot of people in to try out Team Deathmatch and, while some found it entertaining, most of our testers didn’t feel like it was something they’d want to do beyond a few hours. Without more varied objectives, or very lucrative rewards, few saw our current iteration as something they’d want spend a lot of time in.
Another is class balance. Like Diablo II, Diablo III was designed to be a PvE-first kind of game, where we never compromised on player abilities in the name of future PvP balance. We want to be able to carry over as many of the crazy runes, items, and skills as possible, with their crazy effects, and alter them as little as possible. In a casual PvP mode, something equivalent to a WoW Battleground, this would be fine, but Team Deathmatch felt very hardcore, and it put a laser focus on class balance in a way that we didn’t think would be good for the game as a whole.
Certainly, we’ve gotten a lot of benefits from the development of Team Deathmatch, especially in the areas of controls and combat model tuning, but at this point we don’t believe it’s the experience we feel it needs to be in order to ship, so we will be shelving it for now and exploring other options.
