Next Diablo 3 class will make players hate Blizzard

Lead designer promises fans will love the new classes just as much as the old ones when the game is released though.

Fans will “hate” Blizzard when it announces the next Diablo III class, the developer has admitted.

The stark admission comes from Diablo III lead designer Jay Wilson, who in an interview with VideoGamer.com said that the developer “can’t make everybody happy” with the classes in the hotly anticipated dungeon crawler.

So far only two classes have been revealed for Diablo III, the Barbarian, which returns from Diablo II, and the Witch Doctor, a brand new class. Blizzard has already confirmed that no other classes from Diablo or Diablo II will make it into the third game.

Wilson told VideoGamer that the next class it announces will be “quite similar” to a previous class and promised that Blizzard will consider bringing back old classes in future expansions to the game.

He said: “All the barbarian players are delighted and all the necromancers hate us. I understand, I don’t begrudge them that. I would hate me too! But what I would say is that when we announce the next class, which is quite similar to a previous class, then all those players will hate us too. You can’t make everybody happy, but I think when the game finally come out players will find there’s a good class for them, one they will love as much as the ones that came before. And if they don’t, I absolutely promise that in the expansions we’ll consider bringing back old classes. We just don’t want to do it with the first release. We want to establish our identity.”

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DEBUNKED: Diablo III Not to be Released Before StarCraft II

Diablo 3 Color vs. Desaturated Movie

Thanks to the heroic video editing efforts of a guy calling himself Sozou, we may have reached the end of the D3 “too colorful” art controversy. The end, one way or the other. Sozou has taken the WWI gameplay movie, and reprocessed the entire dungeon section (the first 12 minutes) so it looks like those gritty, grainy screenshots players were turning out shortly after D3’s announcement. Darker, desaturated, no greens and blues, etc. The file is high quality, it plays at the full frame rate, and it switches between the original version and the desaturated, modified version regularly, so it’s ideal to compare the different visual styles..

Since the initial outcry, Blizzard’s designers have explained that the colorful, green/blue tinted D3 we see today is the third or fourth version of the art direction. They say they initially tried it in a darker, desaturated style, and found it unplayable. Monsters and other characters were hard to distinguish, the game became visually monotonous, and when they went back to more closely examine D2, they realized it was much more colorful in actuality than in their memories.

You may agree or not, but this is probably as close as we’re going get to seeing what D3 looked like in the earlier versions. Read more to see the video embedded, and with direct download links. We also conducted a short interview with the video’s creator…

Also on Sozou’s site, you can also check out a big page of desaturated stills from the movie, and a short, super high quality video comparison. It’s a 64meg .mov file with 10 seconds of action. The same 5 second clip is shown twice; once in the original color, and once in the desaturated style. He’s also posted the full movie on rapidshare.

Sozou’s official explanation, from his page:

To get more of his thoughts, we conducted a quick interview with the video’s creator:

Diii.net: How did you do it? (graphical tools, applied filters, etc)
Sozou: I used After Effects. Getting into what effects and such is going to take a while, but basically I desaturated different channels and added grain and vignette effect which gets more heavily darker and grainier to the edges than in the middle.

Diii.net: Have you followed the arguments Jay Wilson and other D3 teamsters have made, about why they rejected that dark, gritty look on early versions of the game? Agree/disagree?
Sozou: Well as of for the discussions that is going on; To get something clear, despite the outcome, the gameplay will be most important. that said, my thoughts of the early released footage from d3 team has been mixed feelings. I’m in no position to say whats right and wrong, i have big respect to the D3 team. But as fanboy to the Diablo world, I felt, like many others, that the colors were presented didn’t apply to that universe. specifically it’s the environment in the dungeon, Tone down the colors environment colors, I’m not saying make it gray or black. But keep the colors in character interactions, spells & skills. different dungeon environment should have a majority color applied. Cold = blue, warm = red etc, sewers=green.

Diii.net: One of the D3 team’s main arguments was that it was hard to tell the monsters from the characters from the background. I get that feeling on your version, especially at the beginning where the gray ghouls are hard to pick out against the dark gray stone. Your thoughts?
Sozou: Your char is the light. I believe the characters that are further away from the screen should be a bit harder to spot out. It adds a mystery feel to it, until you have the classic mouseover highlight effect. The ghouls at the beginning are almost the same color scheme as the environment. It enhances the dramatics of their appearance at that specific stage. I don’t feel it’s necessary to make the monsters more colorful contrast to the environment.

Another thought is that now we are in HD gaming, i often see games to digital perfect when they shouldn’t be. Grain it out make it more dirty, more rougher edges.

All this is pointing out how Diablo has been for two titles and I’m absolutely positive that the D3 team knows all of this , talked about it, and thought that it’s time to move to a more colorful Diablo dungeons, who knows. nevertheless, im excited as many others.

Diii.net: Did you try this technique on the second half of the movie, when they go outside? Or you don’t mind the colors and such when it’s outdoors?
Sozou: I haven’t color priority the second half, I feel that it works as it is. All my thoughts have been in the underground, dungeons, whatever you want to call it.

Thanks to Sozou for creating such an interesting conversation piece, and taking the time to answer our questions.

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Gamedaily: Diablo 3 Preview

Diablo III takes place two decades after the events of Diablo II, when you (the hero) defeated the three Prime Evils — Diablo, Mephisto and Baal. An unexpected casualty of your confrontation with Baal included the Archangel Tyrael, who destroyed the corrupted Worldstone and was never seen again. Since then, the world went relatively quiet, and the massive invasion from Hell expected to come from the Worldstone’s destruction never came, causing the adventure against Prime Evils to fade from memory, with many believing it to be an exaggerated story. When Deckard Cain hears rumors of a new evil, he visits the ruins of Tristram, where a meteor falls to the earth and unleashes the forces of Hell once again.

Either this big guy killed someone or he pooped blood. Either way, it’s nasty.

Although there are currently few details about the game, Blizzard confirmed that both the Barbarian and Witch Doctor classes will appear in Diablo III; new class announcements will be made at Blizzcon 2008 this October. The Barbarian remains more-or-less the same as Diablo II, using war cries to bolster its strength while fighting enemies with an array of melee weapons. A destructible environment supplements its strength, so there will be times when the Barbarian may knock down a wall to crush a group of foes instead of taking them on directly. Meanwhile, the Witch Doctor will play like a beefed up version of Diablo II’s Necromancer, using a combination of dark spells and potions to repel, confuse and destroy enemies. And unlike the last game, players will be able to select the gender of their character during class selection.

Thankfully, classes aren’t the only thing to receive an overhaul. Blizzard will also get rid of the potion system that was so prevalent in previous games. A skill bar, similar to those seen in World of Warcraft, will take the place of the potion belt. Instead of carrying around sacks full of healing potions, fallen monsters will leave behind health orbs that players collect, or else they disappear after a set amount of time. This makes room for a different approach toward monster design. In Diablo III, big monsters will be geared toward wearing players down over time instead of simply using single shot powers to eliminate all their health, making for more exciting battles that require forethought and planning. Although there are no set details yet, players will also see major changes with the inventory system, as it will trade the Tetris-like grid system from past games for something more functional.

Diablo III will also employ a new crafting system, but that’s currently under development. The only thing that’s known for sure is that it won’t involve anything like stuffing items into a Horadric Cube. Other mysterious details, or lack thereof, include the game’s story and the identity of the new threat since the three Prime Evils were vanquished. The best we can do is wait. Of course, in the normal Blizzard tradition, Diablo III will release when it’s done.

Source: GameDaily

GC08: Diablo III interview

It’s only been a couple of weeks since Blizzard announced Diablo III, so there are still tons of unanswered questions - just the way like Blizzard’s veteran PR guys like it.

Thus Leipzig was the place where every games journalist wanted to get more Diablo III information and Boomtown had the rare chance of a one-on-one interview with Lead Designer on Diablo III, Jay Wilson. In fact we had him all to ourselves for 20 minutes at the Leipzig Games Convention – somehow he survived the onslaught of questions…

- To move from primarily 2D to 3D increases the demands on artists and game designers a lot. There is so much going on visually in Diablo III, and our primary concern is to make sure that the player doesn’t lose the overview. For example darkness doesn’t work the same way in a 3D world as in a 2D world. You have to take lighting and surroundings into account, things that are much easier in a 2D world.

Since Diablo III will be much more tactically oriented than the previous games, it’s crucial that the player can distinguish the monsters. Thus the team initially tried to emulate the visual look of the predecessors - only now in 3D. However, the result was not satisfactory. The gamers couldn’t tell the monsters apart from each other. However, Wilson is aware of the widespread criticism over the visual style, which a group of fans has been voicing since the announcement:

- It’s something we expected and you know, I can understand it. However, I can assure you, we’ve tried a lot of things and the less dark graphics work better in a 3D environment. It’s very easy for a 2D artist to make areas more or less dark without the player losing his orientation. But that’s not the case with 3D graphics. I think that as soon as the gamers try Diablo III for themselves, they will realise that we made the right decision.

But the developer has taken notes and has actually decided to change some of the things the players have been worried about - for example the very clean caves. These will get an improved look but it will not happen till the final portion of the development process.

- We knew from the start that we wanted to change to fights in Diablo III. You used to be able to teleport back to the city even during a fight, or survive a huge numbers of monsters just by consuming one healthpot after the other.

- That makes it difficult for a game designer. The only thing you can do is to make the player take enormous ammounts of damage, which we used to do in the previous games once the player got into the final parts of the games. That’s the kind of situation we want to avoid. Diablo III won’t just be a matter of having enough health pots.

Blizzard is not prepared to talk about boss fights, yet. Thus the only thing resembling a boss we’ve seen is the armoured cow (…) on steroids at the end of the announcement trailer. However, according to Wilson that’s only going to be a mini-boss. He loves the boss fights in God of War and Zelda, so there’s no doubt we’ll have to come up with better strategies than just rushing:

- The goal is to make players use the specific strengths and weaknesses of a class and utilize the environment - while still retaining the series’ focus on fast action. Don’t worry - Diablo III will not be a tactical game but it doesn’t hurt gameplay to make the player consider all options before launching the attack.

At the moment Wilson and his team work on getting new content ready for the presentation at Blizzcon later this month. Apart from that the days (and nights) are spent on Act I and II work. Just like tradition demands there’ll be four acts in total, and the game will for most players take the same amount of time to complete as Diablo II did.

The team has been working on Act I for nearly two years now, but don’t be alarmed - the other three acts won’t require the same amount of development time. Act 1 has been the focus of massive tests, and the team has scrapped all art work and started all over again several times, because they weren’t satisfied. That’s why they are sure they’ve hit the right art style for the game.

Another reason for the long development time is the game’s random content generator, which required a ton of work from the arts guys. They had to create 10 times as much content, but once it’s all done, the maps can be created extremely fast.

The developer has also decided on using five classes, of which the four are implemented in the game at the moment.

- We made the decision to go for five classes pretty early in the game design, which had to be really unique and challenging in their own ways. Actually I announced that at a presentation by a mistake, I simply got a little carried way by all the excitement, Wilson says with big smile on his lips.

An important part of any Diablo III game is of course loot - which apart from the story itself is the reason to fight foes (story? there’s a story? I only ever thought about the loot, sweet sweet loot, ed.). In Diablo III loot will drop individually for every player. That means that even in co-op you can’t see what the others got. But if they decide to drop their loot, you can pick it up afterwards. This actually lead to an unexpected social element:

- During tests players would suddenly gather around a player who was dropping items on the ground. Even if he couldn’t use it, others could. That’s a nice side-effect and shows you that we as developers can’t always predict the consequences of our own choices.

Our 20 minutes were over, so now we have to look forward to BlizzCon to get more information. Perhaps we will be told what the final class will be?

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Barbarian will be the only returning class in Diablo 3

When Blizzard announced the first two classes in Diablo III, the Barbarian and the Witch Doctor, at least one fan of the series was taken aback by the class rehash. That would be me, for the purpose of this post. After enduring such a long wait for the third Diablo installment, why resuscitate the Barbarian, when there are plenty of perfectly good fantasy game archetypes still left to explore?

Diablo III lead designer Jay Wilson says the reason is simple. The Barbarian in Diablo II could’ve been better. He was a bit more diplomatic in his dissing, saying that the brute force attack class had “room for improvement.”

There’s one class that definitely won’t be coming back for another appearance in Diablo III. And Wilson says that it was because that class was just shy of perfectly designed.

The Necromancer, he said, was simply a victim of his own success. He was just too well crafted as a character, something that Wilson’s Blizzard design cohorts, current and former, likely don’t mind hearing. Necro fans on the other hand, probably won’t be too thrilled to learn of his disappearance, despite the Witch Doctor class’s similarities.

Wilson says that there are absolutely no plans to bring back any other classes, but, given that Blizzard wasn’t breaking any news at Games Convention, wouldn’t dish any details on what the remaining three classes will be.

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Eurogamer Interview: Diablo III

Jay Wilson - portly, laconic, in a black Diablo t-shirt, in a black briefing room, in Activision Blizzard’s black business suite at the Games Convention - is in Leipzig to talk about the game he left Relic Entertainment and joined Blizzard to make. At Relic he worked on fan favourite Dawn of War and critic’s favourite Company of Heroes, but he’s jumped from RTS to action-RPG now, as the lead designer on Diablo III. As we saw at its June unveiling, it’s a sumptuous, visceral update, whose traditional isometric camera belies some deceptively subtle twists in its design - all of which has been overshadowed by the fan-created brouhaha over its brighter art style. We sat down with Wilson to find out how he goes about making the old new, and the new old again.

Eurogamer: You’ve come fairly recently from outside Blizzard to work on a quintessential Blizzard game. Is that intimidating?

Jay Wilson: Yes, it was very intimidating. It’s funny, when I first arrived, they had somebody they were trying to hire and he was really nervous about it, he wasn’t sure if he was good enough to be working at Blizzard. And they were like: if we’re trying to hire him, of course he’s good enough. If you knew their interview process you would know that he must be.

For me, when I first interviewed with Blizzard, I was just trying to get information about how Blizzard worked. I wasn’t actually trying to get a job, because I didn’t think they would hire me. So yeah, it was intimidating to come in and work there and take over something like Diablo which is so precious to me. On the other hand, I would have hated to see somebody else take it over and not do it right, or I would have hated to see it not get made. So it felt like this weird sense of, almost, responsibility - like I needed to go do it because maybe somebody else wouldn’t.

The head below the bridge has a beard. That makes it for us.

Eurogamer: You’re a fan of the Diablo games?

Jay Wilson: As my wife likes to joke, Diablo was always said in hushed tones in my house. I remember seeing the first ad for Diablo on the back of the Warcraft II CD and thinking ‘what is that?’, and wanting to play it so bad. I was at day one for Diablo and Diablo II and [Diablo II expansion] Lord of Destruction, and I took days off of work for each one of them. At this point I think I’ve taken pretty much every class to Hell difficulty in Diablo II, and a few of them I’ve capped out. I only did one Hardcore character and I lost her, it was a Sorceress. I was grieving. Couldn’t do it again, it was so painful.

Eurogamer: Notwithstanding your affection for them, was there stuff about those games that you wanted to fix?

Jay Wilson: Uh-huh, yeah, there’s a lot of things, and I think a lot of those are evident in what we showed at WWI. I look at the Diablo series as an interesting mix of an action game and a role-playing game; and I felt that as a role-playing game, it really sold itself short, and as an action game, it really sold itself short. What it did right was the addiction, the drops.

Has anyone asked them why there are so many bridges?

But as an action game, we really felt that it lacked some things. You have a character class that has endless health, endless resource, they can run faster than almost anything in the world. When you combine speed with endless power and endless health, really, the only way you can challenge that player is to kill them. And you see that with Diablo II - you’ll be running through the game having a great time and all of a sudden something will walk up and just step on you. That’s the only time the game ever feels challenging. But that’s also the time when you’re most likely to lose the player, with such harsh penalties. So a lot of our focus has been, can we set the game up so that we can have a higher barometer of challenge for the player without making the early game hard?

So we rein that [health] system in, and having basically a little bit more challenge to recover health means that we don’t need to make the monsters as gruelling - which is a good thing, but also means that a monster that can pin you down or slow you down or trap you in some way is suddenly way more threatening, even if he doesn’t do as much damage. We’ve tried to get away from damage as the big scary thing; we’ve tried to get towards restricted movement, and having a health system that actually plays into placement, where where you’re standing makes a difference. That really opens things up.

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GameSpy: Diablo III Interview

It wasn’t too long ago that Diablo III was not much more than a hushed rumor. But as this year’s Blizzard-hosted World Wide Invitational came and went, the latest iteration of the definitive action-RPG came into clear focus. And perhaps unexpectedly, it turns out it’s a lot like what the most conservative guesstimates would have bet on it being.

Just like Blizzard famously releases its games when they’re done and no sooner, so are the company’s reps reluctant to speak on specifics in their games before they’re good and ready to. But don’t blame us for trying. We caught up with Diablo III lead designer Jay Wilson at the Games Convention earlier this afternoon, and asked him to speak on various topics surrounding Diablo III.

GameSpy: World of Warcraft essentially evolved out of Diablo II in many ways, but by its very nature never required a Battle.net-style system to keep its communities connected. Can you speak about how you plan to implement Diablo III into the upcoming version of Battle.net?

Jay Wilson, Lead Designer: One thing you mentioned is [how WoW was an evolution of Diablo II]. One of the things that we have people comment on a lot is, they say, “Oh, you’re doing that, just like World of Warcraft!” And we’re like, “yeah, but they took all that stuff from Diablo.” There is very much an evolution. We learn from every game. There’s stuff we pull from StarCraft, and they pull from us as well. We tend to look at games in general that we think are good, and we just happen to like our own games as well.

In terms of Battle.net features, to answer your question… we’re kind of waiting for a big unveiling to announce a lot of the new features. I don’t want to steal their thunder by talking about those features, but what I can talk about is the intent behind them — to create the best online experience that you will find in gaming, and really support the Blizzard community. We think we have the greatest community in the world. They’re wonderful people, they’re great gamers, and they really love the community. What we want is for it to be easier for them to be together. Easier for them to talk to one another, easier for them to play games together, easier for them to find each other, no matter what they’re doing. That’s really the core goal behind the new Battle.net.

GameSpy: Lots of games are doing the social networking thing — a good example is Battlefield Heroes. Can we expect social networking functionality on that level in the new Battle.net?

Jay Wilson: Maybe!

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Designer: ‘Diablo III’ Gender Choice A ‘Big Debate’

The art direction and selection of character classes weren’t the only topics disputed heavily among the “Diablo III” team.

Unlike the previous games, every controllable character in “Diablo III” can be male or female. Sound innocuous? Lead designer Jay Wilson told me the gender option was the result of “quite a big debate.”

For those who aren’t familiar with past “Diablo” titles, the character classes were either one gender or the other — the Necromancer was male, the Amazon was female, the Barbarian was male, etc. Like the desaturated art style and the inclusion of old character classes, some “Diablo III” team members wanted to stick with the familiar one-gender archetypes.

And why was that?

“These [characters] are not people; they are so far above the normal civilians because that’s the tone of the game,” Wilson explained. “We really wanted the classes to be archetypal, and we wanted them to stand out from the world as a stark contrast.”

“‘World of Warcraft’ was very efficient with the number of models that they made. We were not.”

Wilson also told me that in making these unique archetypes, that meant having to create custom models. Add different genders to that, and it’s not cheap. “It’s pretty expensive for us art-wise because of the way we do our classes and the way we do a lot of the weaponry we create,” he said. “And essentially doing [different genders] adds a lot of model artwork. ‘World of Warcraft‘ was very smart about how they chose their class models and their NPCs, because they were very efficient with the number of models that they made. We were not.”

Despite the cost, the company is moving forward with gender choices for the character classes. For Wilson, it wasn’t even an option anyway. “For me it was always a no-brainer to have gender choice,” he said, having both male and female characters in “World of Warcraft.” “There’s so much interest as to guys who plays girls or girls who play guys. Sometimes it’s assumed that people play their own gender, but a lot of the times people don’t. It’s obviously a really important choice that we want people to be able to make on their own.”

“The problem with doing the differences between genders is that one or the other will be perceived to be better.”

I also asked Wilson if there was any thought given to having different abilities between genders. “No, we give specific timing on animation and abilities so that they’re exactly the same,” he said, when I referred to the recent “Age of Conan” gender debacle. “The problem with doing the differences between genders is that one or the other will be perceived to be better. Whether that’s true or not, we still may be perceived as having some kind of gender bias, probably in favor of men.”

“Although I think if we were to favor gender, most of us would probably favor female,” he added with a laugh. “But yeah, it’s an aesthetic choice, and I think that’s where it needs to stay.”

Source: MTV Multiplayer

Diablo 3 Developer Explains Health and Potion Changes

One of the new features in the upcoming Diablo 3 release is a change from the traditional potion-guzzling, inventory-clogging system of previous games to a new scheme in which monsters drop health orbs on the ground that refill your health when you touch them. Lead Designer Jay Wilson says the change makes for more varied gameplay and a more consistent way to scale difficulty. He told the Multiplayer blog: “When the player has similar downsides, it means we can make a lot more interesting monsters. We don’t have to kill you to challenge you. We can make a monster that affects your mobility, we can make a monster that has different kinds of attacks that are dangerous to you and that you actually have to avoid. And so it makes the combat a lot more interesting.”

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