GC08: Diablo III interview
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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…
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- 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.
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- 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:
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- 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.
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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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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.
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!