During Blizzcon this year, Julian Love, lead technical artist for Diablo 3 had a lot to say in an interview about the user generated content ability of game. He said that Diablo 3 is the most moddable version yet, but they cannot allow mods.
“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 said.
While this is baffling to an extent, he didn’t specify any solid reasons to back up his statement. However, he did mention that, it’s due to security, which we all know is a bunch of crap. He also tried to justify the reason for the persistent internet connection that Diablo 3 requires.
“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.”
He further tried to justify why they don’t allow modding.
“I’ll say that there’s never really been an intention with past Diablo games to make them moddable, either; it’s just that people found a way to make it happen. It’s not necessarily something we went out of our way to support.”
Considering the franchise has such a strong lineage on the PC, it is really disappointing that Blizzard chose to do this. Modding brings a dynamism to the game that can be mostly found on the PC platform and not anywhere else. Taking this away seems like a ridiculous design.
Persistent internet connection in the name of security is another scam that most developers do. It’s fine if you want to provide a safe and secure marketplace but at the expense of legitimate consumers? Hell no.
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Thanks, Gamefront.