{"id":54992,"date":"2018-10-12T17:28:00","date_gmt":"2018-10-12T17:28:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamasutra.com\/view\/news\/328532"},"modified":"2018-10-12T17:28:00","modified_gmt":"2018-10-12T17:28:00","slug":"report-blizzard-considering-bringing-cross-platform-play-to-diablo-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2018\/10\/12\/report-blizzard-considering-bringing-cross-platform-play-to-diablo-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Report: Blizzard considering bringing cross-platform play to Diablo 3"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Starting with the impending Switch debut of <em>Diablo 3<\/em>, Blizzard Entertainment may be joining the ranks of developers considering cross-platform play.<\/p>\n<p>Although there is no official announcement yet, Blizzard is reportedly in talks with Sony and Microsoft to enable cross-platform\u00a0play across competing consoles.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;It\u2019s a question of when, not if,&#8221; a Blizzard Entertainment representative told <a href=\"https:\/\/www.businessinsider.com.au\/diablo-3-cross-platform-2018-10?r=US&amp;IR=T\">Business Insider Australia<\/a> during a gameplay demo of\u00a0<em>Diablo 3<\/em> earlier this\u00a0week.<\/p>\n<p>Such a decision would make sense, considering how the\u00a0<em>Diablo 3\u00a0<\/em>player-base has\u00a0spread across seven consoles since the game was originally published in\u00a02015.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Cross-platform play has been a feature many publishers and developers are implementing, with Microsoft introducing the ability for Xbox One users\u00a0to interact with other players across different platforms in<a href=\"http:\/\/www.gamasutra.com\/view\/news\/299830\/Minecraft_gets_crossplatform_boost_with_Better_Together_update.php\">\u00a0<em>Minecraft\u00a0<\/em>last year<\/a>\u00a0with the &#8216;Better Together&#8217; update.<\/p>\n<p>However,\u00a0<em>Minecraft\u00a0<\/em>players weren&#8217;t able to play with PlayStation 4 users. Sony has built up the reputation for being fairly resistant to cross-platform play, most recently after players were\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.gamasutra.com\/view\/news\/319945\/Playing_Fortnite_on_PS4_blocks_players_from_logging_in_on_Switch.php\">blocked from accessing the Switch<\/a>\u00a0version, seemingly because their account had already been associated with the <a href=\"http:\/\/after being blocked from accessing the Switch version of the popular battle royale effort, seemingly because their account had already been associated with the PlayStation 4 version of the game.\">PlayStation 4 version of the game.<\/a>\u00a0After initially refusing to budge, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.gamasutra.com\/view\/news\/327349\/Sony_finally_agrees_to_PlayStation_4_crossplatform_play.php\">Sony has finally\u00a0agreed<\/a> to support cross-play\u00a0between consoles\u00a0on the PlayStation 4, marking a major shift for the console maker.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><strong>Update:\u00a0<\/strong>After this Business Insider Australia quote made the rounds today, a Blizzard rep told Gamasutra via email, &#8220;While we love the idea of bringing our players together across platforms, we do not have any plans to implement cross-platform gameplay for <em>Diablo <\/em>at this time.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Starting with the impending Switch debut of Diablo 3, Blizzard Entertainment may be joining the ranks of developers considering cross-platform play. Although there is no official announcement yet, Blizzard is reportedly in talks with Sony and Microsoft to enable cross-platform\u00a0play across competing consoles. &#8220;It\u2019s a question of when, not if,&#8221; a Blizzard Entertainment representative told [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":54993,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-54992","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54992","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54992"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54992\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/54993"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54992"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54992"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54992"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}