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- Oct 21, 2002
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Tags: Blizzard Entertainment; Diablo III
Surprise! It seems like Blizzard Entertainment is still experiencing trouble in their Diablo III department. This time, they have axed the Team Deathmatch PvP feature promised at launch. This feature, as I understand it, was a major draw for many buyers and judging from comments at Diablo 3 fansites, they are now pissed off.
Here is Blizzard's reasoning behind this:
So what are these options they are exploring? What sort of PvP features can people expect in the future? Blizzard won't say. They promise to release dueling in an upcoming patch, however:
You can read the full update in a blog post written by Jay "Fuck That Loser" Wilson.
Surprise! It seems like Blizzard Entertainment is still experiencing trouble in their Diablo III department. This time, they have axed the Team Deathmatch PvP feature promised at launch. This feature, as I understand it, was a major draw for many buyers and judging from comments at Diablo 3 fansites, they are now pissed off.
Here is Blizzard's reasoning behind this:
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.
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.
So what are these options they are exploring? What sort of PvP features can people expect in the future? Blizzard won't say. They promise to release dueling in an upcoming patch, however:
[...] You’ve been asking us for dueling for a while, so we're going to add it to the game soon. Dueling is currently scheduled to release with patch 1.0.7, which is set to hit sometime after the new year. (We'll be providing details about that feature very soon, so stay tuned.)
You can read the full update in a blog post written by Jay "Fuck That Loser" Wilson.