Diablo III Tech Is Moddable, Auction Houses Make that Impossible

Diablo III might be one of the biggest launches for 2012 but Blizzard's decision, linked to the Auction House mechanics, of eliminating any modding possibilities, led to disappointment for some of the long term fans of the series.

Talking to GameFront at the Blizzcon event, Julian Love, who is the technical artist working on Diablo III, has stated, “There’s no direct intent to say that we don’t want D3 to be moddable. And, to be honest with you, the technology itself, on just a fundamental level, makes this the most moddable version of Diablo there’s ever been.”

He went on to say, “However, we have these other goals that supersede modding: we want to provide a safe and secure experience for players to play in and trade items in, and in order to do that, we had to make the game online play only. Once we made that decision, that effectively eliminated the possibility of having moddable games, since you’re going to have to connect to our service in order to play. So that’s a slight consequence of our online-only decision.”

Love added that with both the original Diablo and its sequel the developers never tried to make the games modable but the player base managed to find ways of getting new content into the game and of tweaking the original Blizzard formula.

It's likely that despite the fact that Diablo III is supposed to be un-moddable the fan base will discover how it can modify game files in order to modify aspects of the game experience, despite the fact that Blizzard frowns upon such practices.

The beta testing phase for Diablo III, which included the Skeleton King quest, began during September and a launch is expected at some point in early 2012.

It will offer Auction Houses driven by both real world money and in-game currency.