Diablo III may be, once and for all, coming to consoles. Cue gasps from the PC community.
Now, I’m going to file this one under all but confirmed because it’s not actually confirmed yet, but a fan on twitter asked if Diablo III was coming to consoles. Community manager “Bashiok” confirmed the console port and said that Josh Mosqueira was the project lead on it.
Now it’s rather uncommon for a community manager to confirm a game’s existence before the company makes the official announcement, but it seems legit for now.
Ars Technica did some digging in Mosqueira’s LinkedIn profile and found that he has been a lead game designer at Blizzard since last May. Beforehand, he had worked on Far Cry 3 for Ubisoft and a few games for Relic such as Company of Heroes.
If this is indeed true. It makes perfect sense. While Blizzard’s other games such as Starcraft II and World of Warcraft don’t make sense on consoles, Diablo III is a perfect fit. Torchlight’s release on Xbox Live Arcade last year proved that a loot heavy dungeon crawler could work wonders on a console.
The only doubt is Diablo III’s auction house that allows players to sell and buy equipment for real world money. Microsoft and Sony both have tight control over their platforms to make sure they get a little piece of the pie through any transactions made through their service. An open service like Blizzard’s auction house would have to be axed or monitored heavily if it were to be released on consoles.
Now if only we can get Blizzard to make a new Lost Vikings for consoles, the entire world would be at peace.
As an extra bonus, here’s the incriminating twitter conversation that started it all:
@Bashiok can you confirm or deny Diablo 3 coming to consoles? Thanks.
@TaNGoIX Yup. Josh Mosqueira is lead designer for the Diablo console project.