A Team DeathMatch mode is something that has been on the mind of most players of the loot-friendly dungeon crawler RPG, Diablo 3, since it released for PC back in May.
A Team DeathMatch mode, which would pit players against players (PvP) in arena style fights, is currently up and running at developer Blizzard. Yet, it still hasn’t been made available to the general public.
A recent blog post from Blizzard employee Jay Wilson, at the official Diablo 3 website, has shed some light on the state of a Team DeathMatch mode for the general public.
To quote Mr. Wilson, “Our original intent with PvP for Diablo III was to provide more formal support for the dueling community that existed in Diablo II. We wanted to give players some kind of structure that would not only make it easier for you to duel with one another, but also allow you to have duels that were team-based. This is how our Team Deathmatch mode emerged, and it’s been instrumental in making a lot of improvements to Diablo III. But in continuing to develop this mode, playtest it, and put it in front of other developers within the company, we’ve found that it falls short of our expectations for a high-quality Blizzard experience.
Putting people into an arena and letting them hurl fireballs and swing crazy-ass swords at one another always has an element of fun to it. I imagine it’s no surprise to anyone reading this blog that people like battling each other in video games, so if you had the chance to play our Team Deathmatch at one of the BlizzCons where we featured it you might not understand why we’d say that we don’t feel the current mode is good enough.”
He then went to state why the mode hasn’t been released to gamers yet, “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.”
What do you think? Is this rather disheartening news for fans of the game? If you haven’t already picked up Diablo 3, will you be doing so? Sound off in the comments section below.
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