Diablo III is the Most Moddable Diablo but Mods Are Not Allowed

In a bit of news that is certain to re-ignite again the debate over Blizzard choice to go with an always-online scheme with their highly anticipated Diablo III, GamerFront has published a notable snippet of an interview they recently had with lead technical artist Julian Love, in which he states that the title’s technology makes it “the most moddable version of Diablo there’s ever been”, despite Blizzard not allowing mods for the title.

GameFront: While there will be no official mod tools for Diablo 3, does Blizzard condone D3 mods?

Julian Love: There’s no direct intent to say that we don’t want D3 to be moddable. And, to be honest with you, the technology itself, on just a fundamental level, makes this the most moddable version of Diablo there’s ever been.

However, we have these other goals that supersede modding; we want to provide a safe and secure experience for players to play in and trade items in, and in order to do that, we had to make the game online play only. Once we made that decision, that effectively eliminated the possibility of having moddable games, since you’re going to have to connect to our service in order to play. So that’s a slight consequence of our online-only decision.