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Posted by Chris Scott Barr on Dec 27, 2012

Blizzard Cancels Diablo III Team Deathmatch Mode

If you’ve been eagerly awaiting the next big thing in Diablo III, Team Deathmatch, I’ve got some bad news for you. Despite working on it for months, Blizzard has decided to give it the axe. It would seem that despite their best efforts, no one really cared about it during testing.

For us it comes to a few issues, one of which is depth.  Simply fighting each other with no other objectives or choices to make gets old relatively quickly.  We’ve brought a lot of people in to try out Team Deathmatch and, while some found it entertaining, most of our testers didn’t feel like it was something they’d want to do beyond a few hours. Without more varied objectives, or very lucrative rewards, few saw our current iteration as something they’d want spend a lot of time in.

Certainly, we’ve gotten a lot of benefits from the development of Team Deathmatch, especially in the areas of controls and combat model tuning, but at this point we don’t believe it’s the experience we feel it needs to be in order to ship, so we will be shelving it for now and exploring other options.

The Team Deathmatch mode was announced months ago, which makes you wonder why it took this long for them to figure out that there just wasn’t enough depth to the mode to make it worth investing in. I mean, if you’ve already spent this much time working on it, wouldn’t it be better to just polish up what you’ve done, for the people who were actually excited for it? I mean, isn’t that what ultimately happened with Diablo III? (I kid…mostly)

On the bright side, they did confirm that dueling would be included in 1.0.7, which will be dropping sometime after the new year. They are also looking for something that they can put in instead of Team Deathmatch, but honestly, is anyone really going to care if they spend another 6-8 months to come up with some small new mode of gameplay? It seems like the masses have already moved on from this game, so I’m having a hard time seeing where it’s a worthwhile investment to keep dumping time and money into it.

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