Diablo 3 to play on consoles?

Diablo 3 is running on consoles according to a Blizzard announcement today, but don’t tell anyone yet.

You can’t tell anyone because, even though the PC best-seller is running on consoles, it hasn’t been given the stamp of approval as an “official project”, Blizzard executive Rob Pardo told Polygon.

“We’re still kind of exploring it. We’ve got builds up and running on it. We’re hoping to get it far enough along where we can make it an official project, but we’re not quite ready to release stuff about it, but it’s looking pretty cool.”

Console ports of the game have been rumoured publicly since the PC release, but as yet nothing has been confirmed; this seems like a good sign the project may well go ahead.

Lead designer Jay Wilson also confirmed the console idea had not been forgotten, and said the game will continue to grow and expand.

“The whole team is essentially working on the next big Diablo thing. A lot of that stuff will show up next year at some point.”

Despite extremely strong sales at launch that made it the fastest-selling PC game ever, Diablo 3’s popularity has since died down.

Blizzard have pinned a great deal of hope to an upcoming expansion in an attempt to regain that popularity, but no time schedule is known yet for the release of that expansion.

Signs are good for new content to come soon though, especially seeing as there hasn’t been a patch since October – perhaps the expansion will come sooner than most of us thought?

In either case, we probably won’t be playing Diablo 3 for the console anytime soon.