'Diablo 3' Could Appear on Consoles

October 13th, 2008, 19:28 Posted By: wraggster

There's yet to be any official confirmation that the upcoming Diablo 3 will be released on anything other than the PC, but according to recent comments made by Blizzard president Mike Morhaime, it certainly seems like they're strongly considering console versions of the highly anticipated sequel at some point in the future.

"Every game we have the discussion about which platforms make the most sense," said Morhaime in an interview with Shacknews at BlizzCon. "As Diablo 3 takes shape, I think we'll do an evaluation. I think there is a pretty good argument to be made that that type of game might work very well on consoles. There might be some technical limitations though that we might need to get past."

Backing up Morhaime's comments were those made by Diablo 3 director Jay Wilson, who also thinks console versions of Diablo 3 could work well. "We haven't really decided to take the [console] plunge," Wilson said. "We've really come to the conclusion that [Diablo 3] is probably the best fit because the control scheme is actually not that incompatible. So if we were to make that decision, Diablo would be the natural choice."

What Blizzard won't do, however, is do a quick and dirty port. "If we did it, we would want to do a really high quality version -- we wouldn't just want to do a port," Wilson said. "We would never make that decision if we thought we had to compromise the overall quality...we could probably do it at any time, we could release the game and then decide we wanted to do an Xbox 360 version or a PlayStation 3 version."

Seeing a console version of Diablo 3 down the line wouldn't be unprecedented -- the original Diablo eventually received a port on the PlayStation, and there have been countless action RPGs in the Diablo mold released on consoles as well (Phantasy Star Online comes to mind). And that was back in the Dark Ages when online gameplay on consoles was mostly unheard of.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2704,2332390,00.asp

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