Blizzard: Diablo 3 worlds lacking persistence, not MMO

When the rumors started unfolding for Diablo III, speculations ran rampant that the action RPG was to become a massively multiplayer project by Blizzard. The division was especially successful with World of Warcraft, so it would have been likely that they would bet their other franchise on the money-making market. But Blizzard knows what technically makes an MMO, and the Diablo 3 they’re cooking just won’t qualify. Get community manager Bashiok’s take at the full story.

Though last night was a flooding nightmare for browsers of the Battle.net forums, plenty of questions still managed to swarm forth since the almost bot-like spammer was culled. One of these questions investigated one of the earliest speculations into Diablo III: is it an MMO or not? The solid answer, says Bashiok, is no.

According to the community manager of Battle.net’s Diablo 3 Discussion Forums, a massively multiplayer online game would have to support hundreds of players in one instance, and those players would be lurking about a persistent world. That world may change after players log off, but it does not go away. Bashiok concluded,

While Battle.net can certainly support that many players at one time, the lack of a persistent world and restrictions on how many players can be within each “world” (game) would keep Diablo III from being categorized as an MMO.

That said, however, the CM was very dodgy on multiplayer specifics such as maximum player support. We know from Blizzard‘s World Wide Invitational panels that Diablo 3 will support groups of up to 5 or 6 players, though that doesn’t clarify the limit of players in one multiplayer session. Many believe the old Diablo 2 limit still stands, even while many hope it could go up to as much as 16 players. More updates as we get them.