Game Director Jay Wilson announced on the official Blizzard Entertainment site that Diablo III will be shipping sans its competitive multiplayer component:

As we’re counting down the days until we’re ready to announce a release date for Diablo III, we’ve come to realize that the PvP game and systems aren’t yet living up to our standards. Today, we wanted to let you know that we’ve made the difficult decision to hold back the PvP Arena system and release it in a patch following the game’s launch. After a lot of consideration and discussion, we ultimately felt that delaying the whole game purely for PvP would just be punishing to everyone who’s waiting to enjoy the campaign and core solo/co-op content, all of which is just about complete.

While we work on making sure PvP lives up to its full potential, we hope you’ll find some consolation in the fact that soon, you’ll be having a blast leveling characters, finding items, learning the classes, and perfecting builds…and that when the Arenas do arrive, you’ll be all the better prepared for battle.

When the PvP patch is ultimately ready, it will add multiple Arena maps with themed locations and layouts, PvP-centric achievements, and a matchmaking system that will help you and your team get into fairly matched games quickly and easily. We’ll also be adding a personal progression system that will reward you for successfully bashing in the other team’s skulls.

We know a lot of you are looking forward to PvP, and we’ll be focusing our post-launch efforts on making sure the Arenas are as brutal, bloody, fast-paced, and awesome as we know they can be. In the meantime, we’re in the process of putting the finishing touches on what we think is a truly epic campaign and co-op experience for launch.

We’ll have a lot more info to share on the PvP system in the future, and we look forward to the moment we can get the game into your hands.

The announcement is a bit surprising, as Blizzard Entertainment has long been known for lengthy development processes and a hard “When it’s done” company line on release dates. But with Diablo III, which has been in the works–in some shape or form–for roughly a decade now, the developer/publisher has started cutting corners to push the game out sometime this year. First the entire companion pet system and Scroll of Reforging were extinguished, and now the player-versus-player aspect.

PvP has been a vital part of the Diablo experience since the very first game, so needless to say fans are not particularly happy about its last-minute exclusion from the highly anticipated sequel. A few choice quotes from the hundreds of comments on Wilson’s blog post:

TooHighToDie:

Seriously? What have you guys been doing at the Blizz HQ? Getting wasted every day?

Borix:

I keep wondering myself.. I’m finding it harder and harder to defend the company I once loved every day.

The only thing we have to hold us over to the release of Kung Fu Pokemon Pandaland and D3 is Tier 13 which was either designed by interns or highly talented devs who hate us.

Hawk:

Cutting content is never a good thing. Remember when this game was all set to release in 2011?

Well guess what? They are cutting key features of the game and we don’t even have a release date yet. And we are in the third month of 2012.

I guarantee you that you will not see pvp arenas implemented in a patch shortly after release. Look at Blizzards track record of releasing new content. It always takes longer than they say it will and it is always less content than they said they would deliver.

Diablo III fan art via 周博超 (暢歌)