Today in old news I should have posted about a week ago: Diablo will be making its console debut with Diablo III in “early 2012″ (the quotes are for the unlikeliness of that statement.
But wait a minute, this news has a little more depth behind it than you may find at first glance.
Blizzard has not released a console game since 2000′s Starcraft port to the, wait for it, Nintendo 64. Also that port was pretty terrible. It had no online multiplayer (obviously) and shortened cutscense and let’s not forget the worst part: you had to play a complex RTS on a friggin’ N64 controller. But I digress. One could say the experience left a bad taste in Blizzard’s mouth.
Fast forward to 2 years later, when Blizzard announces their third-person console game Starcraft: Ghost. The game looked terrific, it featured a female terran ghost unit who would infiltrate enemy bases Sam Fischer-style and go head-to-head with zerg and protoss, maybe even terran alike. After years of delays, a surprising amount of books written to promote the game and being quiet on the whole matter, Blizzard finally announced that they had scrapped the project. The character in the game later found herself a cameo in 2010′s Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty.
So with such a bad track record, maybe its not so surprising that its taken this long for Blizzard to get another console game out the door. Let’s hope they get something right this time.
For critics of the very thought of putting out a Diablo game on the console: you should go play Diablo’s near-clone Torchlight, which is now available on the Xbox Live Arcade. Another hack-and-slash developed originally for PC and later ported to console, its actually pretty damn good and plays well….so there.