By: Eddie Makuch
Blizzard has never made a game better suited for consoles than Diablo III, Blizzard COO Paul Sams told GameSpot during BlizzCon last weekend. As such, he said bringing the dungeon crawler to consoles is not “milking” the franchise, but is rather a logical extension of the series.
“What brought us back to console is the game that we chose,” Sams said. “It really lends itself to being on console and being in the living room. You think about our RTSes and what the control scheme is for an RTS…doing that on a controller in the living room, it’s kind of hard to imagine how that would be awesome, at least in my opinion. When you think about an action RPG, a hack and slash type of experience, like Diablo, gosh I think there is no game we’ve ever made that was better for a console experience.”
Most of Blizzard Entertainment’s games, including entries in the StarCraft and Warcraft franchises, have only been released on PC. This does not mean, however, that Blizzard was actively avoiding consoles, Sams said.
“I think for a long time people believed that we were just a PC company and we just wanted to make PC games and that was it. Really it wasn’t that. It was that the games we were making, we didn’t feel would be as great an experience on those other platforms. And we didn’t want to force it,” Sams said. “You get only so many opportunities with building trust or damaging trust with the players. And we felt like that can happen on what platforms you choose.”
“If you’re trying to milk a product by putting it on more platforms when it’s not right, well then that’s a brand withdrawal, that’s a trust withdrawal with those players,” he added. “And so that’s what it’s all about for us, making the best games that we can possibly come up with, that we want to play, and then putting them on the right boxes, or I should say right platforms to really make them sing.”
Diablo III was released originally as a PC-exclusive in May 2012, before coming to Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in September. The game has sold over 14 million copies to date and a PlayStation 4 version–the Ultimate Evil Edition–is due out in 2014.
Source: GameSpot