Diablo 3 game director: mod support would "add a couple of years" development time

Diablo 3

Speaking with Jay Wilson at Gamescom, we've already heard bad news for anyone with poor internet connections and thrifty habits, though plenty of good ones for people who want to head online with friends and crack skulls until the cows come home. But what about tweaking and adding your own stamp to the game with a few mods? You're out of luck, at least officially...

"None of the Diablo games have ever supported mods and primarily because being able to do modding along with high fidelity art that is also randomly generated is a really, really big challenge. And when we started the project we went 'Well, if we're going to do mods, we're going to add a couple of years onto the product.'"

I know people look at Blizzard and say “Well, you guys are so big and have so much money you can do EVERYTHING for your games, right?” and the answer is no, we can't. There's so many things that we would like to do, that...time and resources; they're real for us as well, so that was one of the things where we said 'You know what? Diablo's never supported mods.'"

Of course, it's never supported broadband connections or real-money transactions either...

Regardless of this, we'd be stunned not to see any mods hooking into the game in various ways, but be careful. Diablo's fiery wrath may have nothing on a server watching out for any naughtily extra code.