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Diablo 3 on Nintendo Switch previously experimented with touch controls

Diablo 3 Senior Producer Pete Stilwell takes some time to talk to Shacknews about Diablo 3, its development, the various challenges, and why touch controls were not meant to be.

Ozzie Mejia

September 7, 2018 3:10 PM

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One of the most unexpected announcements of the year was Blizzard bringing Diablo III to Nintendo Switch. While Diablo III has been around for several years, it's still wild to hear that a first-tier Blizzard property is coming back to a modern Nintendo platform. To learn more about this transition, Shacknews spoke to Senior Producer Pete Stilwell.

Among the topics that Stilwell touched on were the development time, the help that Blizzard received from Killer Instinct developer Iron Galaxy (who also helped bring Skyrim to Switch), the game's specs, and the Switch's various standout features. Stilwell was asked about touch controls, but it looks like that's not in the cards.

"We did experiment with touch, but decided not to go with it," Stilwell told Shacknews. "When we had done the work to bring the game to console, touch wasn't a thing. So it's really well-designed to run with the thumb sticks and the buttons, so we stuck with that. But if you take a Joy-Con off and are just using a single Joy-Con, which we do support, you use flick to roll, because you don't have a second thumb stick."

Diablo III: The Eternal Collection is set to release on Nintendo Switch sometime during the holiday season and will contain everything from the base game, Reaper of Souls, and Rise of the Necromancer. For more, be sure to subscribe to Shacknews and GamerHub.TV on YouTube.

Ozzie Mejia

Senior Editor

Ozzie has been playing video games since picking up his first NES controller at age 5. He has been into games ever since, only briefly stepping away during his college years. But he was pulled back in after spending years in QA circles for both THQ and Activision, mostly spending time helping to push forward the Guitar Hero series at its peak. Ozzie has become a big fan of platformers, puzzle games, shooters, and RPGs, just to name a few genres, but he’s also a huge sucker for anything with a good, compelling narrative behind it. Because what are video games if you can't enjoy a good story with a fresh Cherry Coke?