So, I'm not going to lie. I'm impressed with the way the PC gaming community is handling Blizzard's announcement that Diablo III is going to see a console port. PC gaming is like the suburbs of video gaming, a small and familiar enclave that values tradition and stability. In this metaphor, console players would be playing the role of sinister immigrants beating at the gates of a perfect and exclusive utopia.

You can imagine my excitement realizing I would have to crawl through comments and message boards, looking to gauge what I assumed would be the inevitable screeching backlash. Perhaps something approaching an incalculably vast chorus of screaming that would haunt my dreams for a month. But there wasn't a backlash. At least not much of one.

It's hard to know whether to chalk that up to a sudden and unexplained trend of acceptance in the PC community, or a gradual evaporation of Blizzard's PC gaming street cred. My money is on the latter. More than anything, comments like, “Meh, I'll just get Torchlight II instead” seem to represent the mean average responses.

In fact, Blizzard porting Diablo III is probably a great idea. The Diablo games are often categorized as hack and slashers, but this isn't entirely accurate. Part of the reason for Diablo I & II's explosive success was that they were essentially Blizzard's love letter to the dynamically generated roguelikes of the DOS era; an era still fresh in the minds of Diablo's core demographic when the last game in the series was released well over a decade ago. But that demographic is getting old, and so are Diablo's controls. In fact, Diablo's controls have always been clunky and imprecise. It was a problem we could ignore in 1996 before analog thumbsticks and the Havoc engine. But not now.

The success of Torchlight and Bastion on both PC and XBLA is an important shift for gaming. It is telling for two reasons. First, they show that there is no reason an action RPG similar to Diablo can't be played on a console. But more importantly, second, their success is a grim auger for Blizzard's sales. Diablo III's long development time and Blizzard's missteps have squandered the company's once monolithic credibility among the PC market. The relative apathy leveled in response to the Diablo III port news is evidence enough. Meanwhile, companies like Supergiant and Runic have won over a number of Diablo's traditional fans while at the same time establishing firm beachheads among console fans, a market Blizzard has been previously unwilling to court. Not to mention they've done it for a fraction of the money, time, and manpower.

I look forward to playing Diablo III on the Xbox 360. I want to battleaxe through the color-coded forces from the comfort of my couch. Blizzard's earlier failed forays into the console market notwithstanding, I expect a company with so much time, money, and expertise to be capable of port Diablo III without incident. Which is good for them, because with Torchlight 2 out this year and Lineage Eternal not long after, the Diablo franchise is facing perhaps the stiffest competition it has ever seen.

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