Blizzard says Nintendo was “pumped” about Diablo III on Switch
Having Diablo III on Switch was something that Blizzard and Nintendo were both mutually interested in. The team at Blizzard wanted to make it happen after playing the system so much, and the Big N was apparently “pumped” to see it happen.
Blizzard associate producer Matthew Cederquist told Game Informer:
“The Switch came out and we were all playing it. Some of us were playing Mario and some of us were playing Zelda, and we were kind of thinking to ourselves, ‘We’ve got a pretty good game for this.’ We all travel a lot and we were sitting on a plane and thinking, ‘We’ve got the perfect game for the Switch.’ So we brought the pitch to Nintendo and they said, ‘What have you guys been waiting for?’ They were pumped. They were as excited as us.”
Senior producer Pete Stilwell had a few words about bringing Diablo III to Switch as well:
“We did most of the work a few years ago when we moved the game to PlayStation, so, by-and-large, thousands of hours have already been spent getting this right for console. Where we did spend time playtesting and iterating on the game was with the joy-cons. Individual joy-cons have fewer buttons, so we replaced the second joystick’s roll with the joy-con’s flick.”
Stilwell was also asked again about the possibility of other Blizzard games on Switch given that the company is finally on a Nintendo platform again. In response, he said:
“We’re focused on D3. That’s where we’re at. One thing that I think is really awesome about Blizzard is that each team is very autonomous and gets to play in their part of the pool and decide what they want to do. Sometimes that means other teams don’t have that much transparency. Our team is really excited about the Switch and what we’ve accomplished on it, but we can’t speak for other teams.”
