Single Player

Single Player is the primary focus for Diablo III. Not to encourage people to play alone, but to make sure that playing against the computer is the best possible experience, and that cooperation is a feature that enhances the single player experience, rather than anything else.

The average number of players on Battle.net for Diablo II is 1.2 players, so most players choose to play alone. Their experience is very important to Blizzard.

This is a big difference from games like StarCraft, where multiplayer is the first thing to be designed. Here is a quote from Jay Wilson: [1]

AG: I know that in StarCraft 2, a lot of the development was focused around multiplayer - a lot of the game design and the development being done was on multiplayer first. Is that something that you guys do with Diablo as well, or is a bit more focused on the single-player or a bit of a mix?

Jay: For us it's a little bit more focused on the singleplayer, it's not quite the same [as StarCraft]. I've played RTS' before and I've seen people do it both ways and I seem to prefer the method where you work on multiplayer first, because you're really establishing the core game mechanics.

For us, a lot of the core game has actually come out of singleplayer, but what we've done along the way, is we've always had cooperative play enabled. So people play cooperatively all the time. Any time anything does work for cooperative play we fix it right away. So any mechanics that don't work, any kind of balancing or tuning that needs to be done, we try to do it simultaneously for both – but we do focus on single-player more.