Nearly a year after Blizzard declared that the game mode was not meeting expectations, lead designer Kevin Martens has offered an update of sorts as to why PvP has yet to see the light of day.
Though Blizzard has released Diablo 3 on consoles and is inching closer to completing the Reaper of Souls expansion, the long-delayed PvP mode still appears to be a long way off.
“The reason why it’s difficult to do PvP, is that we made a vast PvE game,” Martens tells AusGamers. “The core fantasy for us was ‘I want to kill lots of monsters in lots of awesome ways.’ You can’t kill lots of players in those awesome ways, or lots of players will get ticked off because they have the exact same fantasy as you, and they want to kill you in vast ways, so essentially, the game is automatically changing.”
Martens adds that each character varies in terms of power and gear and that the Diablo team hasn’t had the experience of balancing players against other players. Because overpowered characters often lead to quick deaths, the team determined that the PvP mode as it was structured was simply not fun.
Martens also rules out the idea of selecting pre-made characters. “People say ‘well, why not make pre-made characters? Give me two different Barbs I can chose from, and that’s my PvP Barb,’ but that’s not your PvP Barb, that’s some random one. If your gear doesn’t matter, and this game is about killing monsters and getting loot, what we’re actually making is a different game.”
That’s not to say that Blizzard has given up on the idea of PvP entirely. Martens says that the team is still working on a PvP mode that utilizes player-built heroes.
