Diablo III: Good News & Bad News
 

As the title suggests, there's good news and bad news for fans of Diablo III. We'll start off with the bad news. When it finally ships, Diablo III won't include player vs player arenas. Blizzard hopes to patch PvP back into the game sometime after it ships, but for now it's out. PvP isn't generally considered a core part of the Diablo experience, but there are a lot of dedicated adherents, and they'll be none too happy about this news.

Now onto the good news. PvP is being dropped because the core single player/co-op content is "just about complete." No release dates were announced, but since this is official word that the core content is so close to completion we may get one sooner rather than later. So if you've been jonesing for your D3 fix, your wait may soon be over.

Sources - Diablo 3 blog; RPS

Cynically: "When it's done" is now "When the parts that make money are done"!

I'm sure this will disappoint some people, but I won't touch PvP until I max out a character and finish the highest difficulty level, so they can take some extra time for that.

Is this kind of how quake 2 didn't come with multiplayer originally?

I never liked PvP in Diablo, so I don't care that much. I'm also not that big a fan of the dungeon-crawler anymore as the itch it scratched (character progression) is taken care of in genres with better gameplay IMO.

My brother is a huge dungeon-crawler fan though, so I expect I'll be playing and enjoying it. I'm just nearly as excited as the rest of the world.

I'm astonished by how many people (Kids in MMOs I've played recently) think D3 is an MMO.

Diablo had PvP?

I don't care about the PVP either. Hopefully we see this before October, but I bet that will be the release month.

I want ears but they can wait.

Long before October I think. Actually, I think we'll see it before May. (Or early in May)

Yeah, but I always considered it something of a joke. Not a big deal at all to see it gone.

I'm in no rush to play it. I'll be waiting until they patch in PvP and hopefully the game is at a discount.

No snide comments about how they might be patching it in as another 3rd of a game? For shame!

I hated the PvP in Diablo 2, because people would just (if you played a certain way) come in to your world to grief you. Dunno how it'll be in D3, but it was the worst feature of D2, and a main reason I never played on any ladders.

This is all good news.

As long as they don't try to charge me extra for it. I'm already buying two $60 copies.

Sounds to me like the normal PvP is actually still in it, but that the arenas will not be in it.

What all of this is showing me is that i have to stop reading Diablo 3 stories. No, I should have stopped 6 months ago when I first decided it was a good idea.

I just can't, I want it too much and no amount of perceived bad news can lower my enthusiasm.

Mass Effect 3 will help this week, but what will i do next week?

I'll take this if it means the game is released sooner rather than later.

Wait, this isn't about Torchlight 2. What the heck? :p

Thinking late May or June.

Give me this game already!

PVP was never balanced in D2 anyway, I think they have a huge task ahead of them to balance it in D3.

To be honest, I loled, but I also didn't think much of PvP in the old Diablos either. Too dependent on gear farming and too much cheating. It was basically rape or be raped and little else. The few people I've met who loved it were usually the handful of cheating arseholes doing the raping.

there's lots of stellar stuff on the horizon for this fall...

they really should aim for an early / mid summer release, even people looking for something to kill time who aren't dioablophiles would probably jump all over it...because we all know it's going to be a damn fine game.

Summer is typically the slow time for game releases though, mostly because it's the time for big movie releases. That said, Diablo has a hardcore (very, very hardcore) fanbase who will buy it anyway but since it's much less casual than WoW, I don't see it selling well at that time. Realistically, I'm thinking September or October and absolutely not before July (it's still not feature complete from the sounds of it then you have final QA and manufacturing the game and the extra stuff that comes with a CE)

Actually I think it's going to sell amazingly well. Most of the WoW fanbase seems quite interested in Diablo 3, which in itself guarantees a massive hit. Add to that 10 years of anticipation from the Diablo 2 fans and you have yourself a winner.

As for this news...it's not really news. They've always been clear about PvP being way down on their list of priorities and a vocal minority amongst the community isn't going to change that. 95% of Diablo fans will be more than happy to wait for the free PvP patch and most probably won't even play it when it hits.
I personally only dabbled with PvP in Diablo 2. It was pretty fun though and more tactical than people give it credit for. Still, I was never that interested in Diablo 3 PvP. Blizzard have flat out said that they won't be going out of their way to balance it at the expense of the PvE game, so it's never going to be a truly competitive arena.

I never really got why anyone would want to play a PVP game using the diablo control scheme, as it seems terribly suited to fighting single fast moving targets that have low HP but high output... which is a description of every class, even the Barbarian puts out way more damage than they can take.

Even though I wouldn't mind if Blizzard DOTA used Diablo 3 as a base.

The PvP was actually pretty fun. You had your cheaters, but there were plenty of fun fights.

It got much better with 2v2's and 3v3's.

Not balanced by any means, but fun and extreme fast paced. As said before, matches were decided in split seconds unless you were a full shield spec'd Paladin.

Matches decided in split seconds sounds decidedly boring.

The lead designer has mentioned multiple times that is a tacked on mode that is not suitable for an e-sport, as winning will be more dependent on the make-up of the team as opposed to builds and balance. The builds are specifically made for the campaign and not tweaked for PvP. This is more than likely why they are willing to release it without the mode. I would assume it has more to do with technical stuff and assets as opposed to tweaking the builds.

Like I said, this is good news because they know they have a polished campaign and are probably trying to meet a hard date at the expense of a lesser mode.

It was actually more akin to Starcraft 2, in the sense that you misclicked and were screwed. I would say they were only decided in split seconds if you were slow, or both charged each other.

I used to teleport around trying to freeze the fuckers chasing me, had some good fun in PVP, although I rarely engaged in it.

PvE is where it's at in Diablo for me.

May 15th it looks like.