Update:
Er zijn weer wat interviews opgedoken van de GC in Leipzig.
GC 2008: Diablo III Progress Report by IGN
quote:
Lead designer Jay Wilson fills us in on the new potion system, inventory, and story details.
by Charles Onyett
August 20, 2008 - While Diablo III wasn't on display at GC 2008, we got an opportunity to sit down with the action-RPG's lead designer, Jay Wilson, to get a sense of how things are coming along in the much-anticipated sequel. Since the game was recently announced in Paris at Blizzard's Worldwide Invitational event, a segment of the franchise's fan base has been upset about the art style, claiming it didn't stay true to the darker nature of the previous two games. Wilson disagrees.
"To be fair, it's a small minority that really don't like the art style," he said. "A majority of the feedback we've gotten has been overwhelmingly positive about the art style -- I think when they see the final game they'll find it's probably a bit darker than they might think. What we've shown is the earliest parts of the game meant to be a little sunnier and brighter than the later because we're trying to set a juxtaposition and make everything feel worse as the game move on. In terms of the actual art style, we went through three full art revisions where we essentially hit the reset button on all the art and started over again and one of the main reasons was when we tried to go towards what our memory of Diablo II was we found that it created a drab, boring game that didn't play very well."
Barbarian using the war cry ability.
"One of the things I try to remind ... people who talk about the art style and what Diablo II looked like, [is] they're being very selective in their memory. They're remembering small parts of Act I and small parts of Act III and conveniently forgetting all the green fields of Act I and all of Act II, which is actually one of the most popular Acts. The general kind of almost garish look of the monsters really made them stand out, and those things made the game play really well. They were actually criticized at the time. When Diablo II came out it was panned for being too bright and cheerful compared to the original Diablo. Of course the original Diablo drew like little red lines around the enemies so you could actually see them."
Blizzard wasn't making any sort of announcements for Diablo III. So far it's just the Barbarian and Witch Doctor classes that we know of, and we were told Blizzcon 2008 will be the place for another reveal. So we took the opportunity to ask Wilson about some of the design changes with Diablo III, particularly with the removal of potions and the slotted inventory system. Players of the first two games will remember how much combat revolved around having a sufficient supply of potions at the ready to refill health. Well, that's not how it's going to work in this game; there are no health potions to be purchased at vendors. Instead, groups of enemies will drop health orbs that instantly restore lost hit points and disappear if not collected within a set time. Wilson described why this decision was made.
Female barbarian versus siege breaker.
"A lot of people, I think, would say that's a hallmark of the Diablo series, the potion system. We looked at it and said, 'No, that just makes the game worse,'" said Wilson. "It doesn't make it play like a better action game, it just kind of gives the player infinite health. It's actually a fairly poor recovery mechanic because it forces the designers to design monsters that have to deal with a player that has infinite health. The only thing you can do is have monsters that can overcome that health and essentially one-shot you. That's not a very interesting monster. It's actually a horrible monster. But that's the only option. The design shoehorned the designers into that kind of monster design. So we focused on a health system that actually forces the player to think tactically to recover health from monsters and to put them in some situations where they are low on health but have to walk into an enemy encounter anyway. That makes for a much more challenging encounter but it also makes for a situation where we can design the monsters to be a lot more interesting. We actually can lower damage on monsters. We want monsters to do less damage because we want them to wear you down over time and do things that are challenging in different ways."
Wilson was more positive about Diablo's treasure system. "It's perfect. You know, all we'll maybe do is tweak some little things that we don't like about it, some systems that we think were maybe a little broken. But for the most part, it works really well and we don't really want to change it, but the combat, oh, that could be so much better."
Going more in-depth on the subject, Wilson explained how the early parts of Diablo III would be similar to Diablo II. The new types of systems wouldn't be felt as much until after about 10 levels or so into the game where players will have a larger number of skills to use in dealing with groups of foes. "The goal is to have players use skills where previously they would have used a potion," said Wilson. "If I've got to deal with an enemy, I'm going to go in, stun a whole bunch of guys, and circumnavigate them to reach a health orb. Or I'm going to stun them and take out a bunch of guys with the hope that I'm going to get a health orb, and if I don't, I'll use some other kind of mechanic to deal with that threat."
Female witch doctor in action.
With the inventory screen, players will no longer have to deal with items taking up multiple slots as in Diablo games past. Now, all items will just take up one slot, though exactly how that's going to be implemented is still being worked on. Wilson explained some of the issues being taken into consideration. "The one really great thing that most people wouldn't argue with was the grid-based system allowed for very large icons which made the items feel better. So one of the things we don't like about the current inventory is the icons are smaller than we'd like them to be, so we're working on sizing up the icons themselves to be very large, much larger than say World of Warcraft ... We've experimented with other things like having different bag types hold different kinds of items, like big items go into this bag and small items go into this bag, but we haven't really settled on anything like that. What we don't want is the grid-based Tetris sort of system."
A crafting system is also in the works, though it won't be anything like Diablo II's Horadric Cube combinations. "I don't know if I can think of a comparison," said Wilson. "I think that system is a pretty cool and different kind of system from anything that we've had before."
Since our time for the interview was limited, we shifted gears into what Diablo III's environments might be like over the course of the story. "I don't think we're going to have anything quite as out there as [Diablo II's] Arcane Sanctuary. I'd say the scale and scope of the game in terms of the threat you end up facing is much, much higher than the previous games. I think if you look at the cinematic trailer there's never really been an invasion of Sanctuary, and I think from the trailer it's obvious that's where we're headed. A lot of what happened in the original Diablo was very small in scope. Even in Diablo II you traveled all over the world, like you're really just facing the aftermath of Diablo walking through the world ... There was a bit of it with Lord of Destruction. Baal's invasion was sizable, but we really want to go more, higher than that. That's about as detailed as I can be without giving away key story elements."
Witch doctor killing ghouls.
Wilson went on to talk about how story would work when players join up to play co-operatively online. "Our leaning tends to be towards people playing together over always maintaining coherency of story. Because that's the big problem. If you join into my game and I'm three quests ahead of you, we don't want you to feel like 'Oh, I don't want to play with you because you're three quests ahead of me.' So what we try to do is lean more toward 'Okay, you can get done everything from this point on, and then you can come back in a previous game and finish these other things.' That's the one advantage the Diablo series has. People are used to returning to games to get things done, kind of like in an MMO where you return to a zone to finish that one quest that you couldn't do because your friend didn't have it ... We don't want you to lose anything by playing with someone else."
Blizzard's Jay Wilson Talks Diablo III by Gamespy
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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!
GameSpy: Although we've seen some interesting stuff overseas and in the free-to-play sector, action RPGs have stagnated since Diablo II came and went. How do you feel about launching Diablo III in this day and age?
Jay Wilson: I think the RPG market in general is very interesting. I think we can look at an isolated genre, like the Diablo genre, and say, "Oh, it's not a very good genre." There haven't been a lot of successful games that have come out, and the ones that have haven't even approached Diablo II's success. But I think that's kind of true in almost any subgenre of RPGs.
I think that if you look at the BioWare games, which are great, [you'll find] that there are not that many games that are like them. They're almost like their own genre in and of themselves. I think it's because RPGs are generally very challenging to make, and each one for different reasons. The hardest thing involved in making a game like Diablo is that you have to rely very heavily on replayability, randomness, and scope of content. On the surface, it looks like a very simple game to make, but name another game out there that has over 100 monsters -- individual, unique types of monsters -- that isn't an MMO. There's not a lot, and it's because that's not easy to do. It's a lot of content to create.
Or games that have randomly-generated environments with randomly-generated encounters. Not easy things to do, but those things are key. It's what keeps Diablo interesting over time. And it's one of the reasons that, I think, you haven't seen many games succeed in that genre.
GameSpy: Other games have tried to do randomly-generated content without much success. Why is it that Diablo can make it work?
Jay Wilson: I honestly think that randomness is incredibly hard to do, and incredibly expensive. And so, to a certain degree -- and I hate to throw it down to just this -- it's a resource problem more than anything else. If you're going to make a really cool dungeon -- let's say a good-sized dungeon probably would be, if you use our dungeon as an example, 12 to 15 rooms is what you need to create. Maybe even a little bit less; we find six to eight rooms can take you 15 to 20 minutes to get through. That's actually a good amount of time for a single level. Maybe you repeat it a couple so times so you get up to 20 [rooms]. It takes about 80 rooms to make a truly random dungeon -- a dungeon that feels random. So you look at that, and it's about four or five times the amount of content. And the creation of background content is one of the biggest bottlenecks in the creation of games.
When you look at games, they don't have problems creating characters. Animation is a bit of a bottleneck, because there's so much animation required nowadays, but if you look at any game company and see who they're trying to hire at any one time... I don't know anybody who isn't trying to hire background people. Part of it is that there's so much background to create, and part of it is that most people would rather create a big, giant monster than a tree. But boy, what we wouldn't give for some good tree creators! People who love to create trees are worth their weight in gold!
GameSpy: Back in the days before it was formally announced, it almost seemed feasible that Diablo III would be some kind of free-to-play game. That isn't so much the case anymore. Did you ever consider any alternate commerce models?
Jay Wilson: The way we tend to approach things is, we make the game we want to make, and then we figure out the financial model that works for that game. We never -- it's actually a big deal -- we never, ever go, "Hmm, microtransactions would make us lots of money! Let's figure out a way to force them into the game when it's not appropriate!" That, to us, is a recipe for failure. Now, on the other hand, you can't make a game and then go, "this financial model won't really support us, but who cares?" It's gotta be a balance, but the game has to come first. We actually haven't decided on a financial model for Diablo III at this time.
One of the keys is that every region is different, and we are an international company now. We sell games in Asia, Europe and North America, and we just now released WoW in Russia and Latin America. We're going to try and hit as many markets as we can, and we're going to look at each one of those markets and try and decide a financial model that works. So, if we were to say, for example, that we're not going to have any subscription fees for Diablo, that may not be true in some markets, so we can't really say that.
Is our intent to make a subscription-based game like World of Warcraft? No. We're not an MMO. That's not our goal. So we are leaning towards more of a boxed product. Would we consider microtransactions? Yes, we would -- if it was right for the game. Would we consider some kind of subscription-based, or pay-to-play? Maybe in some regions. Or maybe for North America, if it was right for the game, and if it felt like a "win" for the fans. We want to make money, obviously, we're in business for that, but we don't want to gouge our customers, we don't want them to have an experience that feels worse. What we prefer is to offer them a service that they feel is worth paying for. And that's how we tend to approach things: "This is a service that we want to offer. How much is it going to cost us? OK, it's going to cost us this much, so we do need to supplement. Is it something we feel is worth paying for?" And if the answer is yes... obviously, no one likes paying for anything. I'd love to get everything for free. That would be awesome, right? But the truth is, we wouldn't ever get anything.
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Forum » Spielerij » Spielerij - Games & Discussies » [PC] Diablo 3 - Deel 2
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... Je zal alleen wat meer tijd verliezen 
... Zolang je D2 speelt, denk je niet met heimwee terug aan iets wat nooit meer zal zijn, je denkt aan wat j een uur geleden hebt gedaan, en wat je leuk/niet leuk vond.
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