The Diablo IV closed beta started and ended last weekend, with the proper open beta set to kick off this Friday. It’s been a success for the most part, with a few server hiccups here and there, but for now, general impressions seem to be pretty positive.
In an interview with Eurogamer, Diablo IV General Manager Rod Fergusson went into a little bit more detail about the beta’s performance, and also offered an explanation as to why splitscreen co-op isn’t available in the PC version of the game and why it likely never will be.
According to Fergusson, shared screen co-op on PC is much harder to pull off because of account management, whereas consoles are just set up for that sort of thing.
“It’s a technology question. Trying to do shared-screen co-op on PC is much more challenging when it comes to account management and how you play together.
…trying to get two Battle.net accounts signed into the same PC at the same time… It’s a technology problem.
And the notion of two people sitting together at a desk: when you prioritise the problems you have to solve, solving for two people sitting at a desk, playing on the same PC, is lower priority when the majority of couch co-op that’s going to happen is going to be in front of a sixty-five-inch TV.”
When asked whether this issue was solvable, Fergusson stated that it might be a platform-solvable issue, but not necessarily a game-solvable issue without support from other aspects like the Battle.net client. With that in mind, it’s looking pretty unlikely that we’ll ever see splitscreen support in the PC version.
Diablo IV is set to be released for PC and consoles on June 6.
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