Changes

The developers want more and easier mutiplayer gaming in Diablo 3 and they have repeatedly mentioned their desire to create quick and easy (even automated) games that group like-level characters. Diablo III Game Director [[Jay Wilson]] spoke on this from Blizzcon 2009. [http://pc.ign.com/articles/101/1017305p1.html]

Jay Wilson: We're not quite at that stage. [Talking about B.net D3 features.] Some of our big hooks are really good matchmaking, there was some poor matchmaking in Diablo 2, it was kind of esoteric and hard to use. We want a platform that puts you right next to someone else who's into the same thing as you, at the same level. We want you to be able to open up that friends list and say, oh, my friend Steve's killing Diablo, join! And you're right there next to them. We want players to be able to play together very, very easily. That's going to be a lot of work.

It's not in the game, so this is not a promise, but I can tell you that my desire for that is that you just be able to hit Escape, menu comes up, and you can say, I want to redo what we just did. I want to replay this part of the game, restart my game essentially, with all the same people. And I just get a confirmation thing, hey, you want to? If they say yes, we go, and if they say no, they stay in that same game.

That sort of easy partying system was in the game by the start of the beta, and all the players in a game can easily create a new one together. There are also mechanisms to allow anyone on your [[Friends List]] to instantly join your game, and ways to chat to a Friend who is not in the game with you, or even to Friends who are playing other games over Battle.net.