Blizzard on Subscription, Diablo 3 Modding

By Nick Breckon, Oct 10, 2008 5:58pm PDT Diablo III director Jay Wilson said today that the company does not have a great desire to charge a subscription fee for the upcoming revision of its multiplayer client However, the developer did note that Blizzard will likely monetize unknown features of the game.

"We are going to monetize features so that we get to make them," said Wilson. "We kind of have to."

Wilson noted that whatever the content would be, it would have an appropriate value to users.

Fans of map hacking and other Diablo II modifications have little to look forward to with the sequel, as Wilson shot down any talk of mod support.

"We don't have a lot of plans to do that. It would make our lives so much harder" he said, adding that despite the fact that he and many other designers got their start in modding, the team takes a strong stance on the hacking of their games.

Wilson also used the panel to reemphasize the trading aspect of Diablo III, saying that no items outside of specific quest rewards will be bound to players.

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27 Threads | 105 Comments

  • This is not world of warcraft and will not play as world of warcraft as stated in the video footage. Please understand this.

    Next who cares how much money Blizzard makes? Is this going to impact ones gameplay? No.

    As for as an anti piracy interface, what of it? One purchasing this game is contributing money towards this anti piracy interface and will then you will use it. They stated during live coverage that Diablo III will have no monthly fee for you to enjoy multiplayer or single player.

    I do not see a problem with micro transactions D3 will have much lower competitiveness in gameplay. As gone are the click fest for items as gone are the spam of potions and hoarding of stat points into vitality and moving to a checkpoint save system. If a user wishes to purchase armors/weapons/runes/sex change utilizing micro transactions then wonderful they may use the money they have earned to do so, this will not affect the multiplayer story play through. As no one is forcing any other user to play with users making micro transactions.

    You will only get items for your character class so what is the problem of prohibiting armor to specific classes as you will not see these armors unless a player in your game drops one only after picking it up.
    This is not world of warcraft.

  • So long as I don't have to pay a monthly subscription to play Diablo 3 online with my friends and it doesn't get a tiered subscription service like Hellgate: London, I don't care. That shit is fucking stupid. One of the best things about Diablo and Guild Wars is that, once the games are bought, I can jump online and play at any time with the same things in my account as when I left them.

    And come the fuck on, Blizzard. If ArenaNet can do it with Guild Wars, and they're a start-up that used Guild Wars as their first game, then why the fuck can't you with the absurd amount of moneyhats that was raked in through World of Warcraft? I understand no product should operate on the principle of losing money but, at some point, it becomes absurd. Even EA, that supposedly despised publisher of the world (wrongly so at this point, I believe), seems to be paying its revenue from its most popular games forward by releasing free and substantial downloadable content for gamers on marketplaces like Xbox Live which, as far as I know, really look down on large amounts of content being released to the Marketplace without a price tag attached.

    I don't mind the Starcraft thing because, really, it'd be nice to see it released sooner rather than later. I don't mind the mod stuff because, at least for Diablo 3, I wouldn't use it anyway. The subscription stuff, though, annoys me.