The game lacks the core elements for competitive play

Nov 27, 2012 08:45 GMT  ·  By

The fact that developer Blizzard is working on a Player versus Player update for Diablo 3 does not mean that the action role-playing game will ever get all the elements required to make it a staple of eSports tournaments.

During the Battle.net World Championship, which took place in Shanghai, Mike Morhaime, the leader of Blizzard, stated, according to Team Liquid, that, “We don’t have plans to make Diablo 3 an eSport. Diablo 3 was never really designed to be an eSport, and not every game necessarily needs to be an eSport.”

He added, “There are certainly competitive things that we’ll be able to do with Diablo, and I think that at future Blizzcons we might set up different ways for people to compete at the game, but that’s very different from creating a professional tournament structure around something like that.”

It seems that the core structure of Diablo 3 does not allow for full eSports support and Morhaime compared the game with that of Starcraft 2, which was created from the ground up with support for large scale competitions in mind.

Blizzard sees other elements of Diablo 3 as more important than eSport support and says that gamers will get more updates and content soon, including the PvP mechanics.

Diablo 3 was launched during the spring 2012 and the development team is already working on an expansion which might be launched as early as next year.

The game was criticized on launch by some longtime fans, but Blizzard has since then offered a number of updates designed to improve the overall game experience.

The developer is working closely with the eSports community to make sure that Heart of the Swarm, the next installment in the Starcraft II saga, is interesting to the player base as soon as it launched in spring 2013.