"We don’t want Diablo III to be moddable," says Blizzard

Blizzard's said mods will not be supported in Dibalo III not only because of the persistent internet connection requirement, but also because the firm doesn't want it to be moddable.

Speaking with GameFront at BlizzCon over the weekend, the RPG's technical artist, Julian Love, said the developer has other goals in place for the title which will "supersede modding."

"There’s no direct intent to say that we don’t want D3 to be moddable," Love admitted. "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.

"I’ll say that there’s never really been an intention with past Diablo games to make them moddable, either; it’s just that people found a way to make it happen. It’s not necessarily something we went out of our way to support."

Beta testing for D3 started last month, and the game is expected to be released in early 2012.