Diablo 3 PvP unlikely to become an eSport

The long-awaited player versus player update for Diablo 3 won't herald its arrival as an eSport, Blizzard boss Mike Morhaime has said.

Despite Blizzard's major expansion into the eSports scene with StarCraft, it's not planning a similar push for the action RPG, Morhaime said at a press conference at the Battle.net World Championship finals in Shanghai last week, as transcribed by TeamLiquid.

"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," the executive said.

Morhaime said StarCraft 2 was designed from the start with eSports in mind, making it ideal, and although World of Warcraft was not, it has certain "elelments" which make it work well. Diablo 3, it seems, is another story - but that doesn't mean Blizzard will ignore its potential as a community event.

"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," Morhaime continued.

"In order to do that, you really need to get everything right and you have to have the depth of strategy, you have to look at making sure that the strategies that are successful are balanced, and fun, and entertaining to watch, and all those things. So we're not so sure that that's where we should be focusing for Diablo. There are a lot of other elements of Diablo that are a lot more important."

Diablo 3's PvP side was promised months ago, and a few hints at it were included in patch 1.1, but the publisher has gone silent on the update in the interim. Game director Jay Wilson mentioned on Twitter that a news update is due soon.

The full press conference is viewable below, courtesy of Gamespot.

Thanks, PCGamer.