In a blog post detailing how the Diablo: Resurrected group considered adapting the game to D2R Items consoles designer Robert Gallerani explained how decisions made regarding the game's playability on consoles was a deliberate effort to concentrate "on the console audience, which is a different one than the PC game's audience." As a lot of console gamers have more experience playing games like Diablo, Blizzard needed to create Diablo more accessible for console gamers.

One of the ways Diablo: Resurrected on consoles accomplishes this is by taking an inspiration from Diablo's game regarding how it handles mapping and displaying abilities.

"In the very first Diablo, a player had two buttons: right and left mouse click," Gallerini writes. "To access a myriad of diverse abilities, players make use of hotkeys to rapidly remap both of these buttons. When using the controller, this was altered to not change the map, rather, to let buttons directly enable the abilities. Then, we will show these capabilities similarly to Diablo, in a tray in the lower portion within the display."

When it comes to moving, Diablo on consoles controls very differently from its PC counterpart. On PC players simply click a location, and the game effectively directs the player's character to the desired location. However, for consoles Blizzard would like players to have direct control of their character's movement using the thumbstick.

Blizzard accomplished this by turning off the game's pathfinding for consoles. This allows players to move in a way "the game would have cheap D2R Ladder Items never led you before." This allows it far easier to avoid attackers.