Blizzard says no team deathmatch for Diablo III for now

Jay Wilson - Game Director for Diablo III - has posted an update to the Diablo III blog detailing Blizzard's plans for PVP. In short, people who were looking forward to the planned Arena style team deathmatch are out of luck, as the team have decided TDM isn't a good fit for the game - so they are going back to the drawing board with it.




In the blog post, Jay explains that TDM was scrapped because it felt unnecessary without some sort of motivation and because Diablo III was built for PVE primarily - the different classes just aren't balanced for PVP combat. Instead they are going to try out various other modes which give players more interesting objectives and make the various classes useful in unique ways.

Meanwhile dueling, which was originally planned to exist in the game on release, will be added with patch 1.0.7 'sometime after the new year.' Dueling had been delayed from the launch due to Blizzard focusing on the TDM... the TDM they have now scrapped. Would we have had dueling from the beginning if they'd never bothered with TDM? We may never know. Are you still playing Diablo III, or will you jump back in when dueling is added? Let us know in the comments below!