Back at Gamescom 2010, a major videogame event in Cologne, Germany, Blizzard held a press conference to break some news about Diablo III. No, it wasn't a release date. It was instead a crafting system, called the Artisan system, which game director Jay Wilson detailed during the hour long session. While Blizzard likely won't be making public any more bits of information about its anticipated action-role-playing game until Blizzcon this year, which takes place at the end of October, we were able to sit down with Wilson to get some additional details about how development was going.
Since most of the publicity about Blizzard over the past few months has been the launch of StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty and the World of Warcraft: Cataclysm beta, it was a good time to switch gears and ask about progress on Diablo III. "What we're doing right now is going broad across the whole game," said Wilson. "We're trying to build up all the content to enough of a point where we can get into polishing. We have good examples of what does it look like for monsters when we're at ship level, what does it look like for classes, what does it look like for items, we have the answers to those questions, but there's still some story and questing stuff that's not hitting the quality level that we want, so those are the things we're working on."
For anyone curious about exactly how long they may have to wait for the game to be ready to ship, Wilson provided more specifics about the production status. "We're still adding monsters, we're still working on bosses, we have some that aren't made yet, we're working on every Act but we've got some areas that haven't been built yet. We're still building, but we're building very fast. We're not in discovery mode anymore."
Transitioning to more general topics, Wilson touched on how big the game is compared to previous titles in the franchise. "Honestly it's similar size to Diablo II. There are some differences here and there, exterior environments are a little more diverse, dungeons are about the same. Even the way the Acts increase in length and then scale down. We intentionally did that again because we thought, some of that was done to ship Diablo II, but we thought it had a good feel to it to reduce the length of later acts so that you feel like you're accelerating towards the finale."
Replayability is a big focus for the team, meaning once you're done with the initial playthrough there's an opportunity to hack and slash your way through again and again. "Just like Diablo II there's a nightmare difficulty and a hell difficulty and the areas all have random distribution. All the dungeons are randomly generated. The exteriors have a set layout but they have random monster distribution and events within them. And most of the questing there is done in such a way that encourages exploration. For example you have to acquire some item that's found somewhere in the zone, very similar to how D2 had some zones not random, so they quested them a little differently."
In terms of the actual questing, Wilson commented on how they'll be structured and how they'll tie into each other as you progress through the game. "It's a very linear quest line. We actually tried a much denser, more complex quest system and we found that players who played Diablo games just didn't really want that. They wanted a more focused game. They wanted to stay focused on killing monsters, they didn't want a lot of weird side quests. We do side quests but we don't put them in the quest log, they're events that occur within a zone that you can go "Oh, this Hell portal need to be closed." And then you can close it and it'll go, "there's three more portals in this zone." And you can decide if you want to close those portals but it's optional, you don't have to."
On the subject of character classes, Wilson says each will have somewhere around 20 active skills and slightly more passive skills. "We wanted to solve some of the issues of the Diablo II system, and to be honest we wanted to do something new. We haven't shown our new skill system yet but we'll show it at Blizzcon. It looks a lot different. It's actually functionally not that different from the D2 system. It's got some key differences but in terms of the choices that it has the player make it's actually very similar."
Though the skill system in Diablo III will be similar to its predecessor, Wilson did highlight a few issues that were being adjusted. "We always wanted to focus on a system that reinforced what Diablo is, which is an extreme focus on a small number of skills. The Diablo II system forces you to get a bunch of skills you don't want and makes the door completely open. It says you can customize any way you want, which is great, it's part of the game, but the user interface doesn't imply any direction or focus, and as a result your player is very likely to end up being broken. Your player is very likely, the first time they play through the game, to put a couple points into every skill that they can, which is terrible. If you do that, you're not going to be a good character. What we wanted to make sure was that that didn't happen."
The new Artisan system was also discussed, as Wilson explained more about why it was created and how it'll work. "Looking at a lot of features from Diablo II inspired the Artisan system. A lot of how crafting works in our game has a lot of reflection on gambling. You know the type of item you're going to get but you don't know what's going to be on it. So you keep crafting that item until you get the thing that you want. The problem with the gambling system, which was a great system, but people didn't know it was a great system so they didn't use it. The more hardcore players certainly did, but the more casual player didn't see the benefit. We can tune a crafting system to make sure that early on in the game you always get something good. Because it doesn't matter if the system's balanced at that point. What matters is that when you get to the end game that it acts like a completely true random system."
Wilson also specified why the Horadric Cube, the device used in Diablo II to squash together gems and produce new ones, was taken out. "Any system that essentially requires you to go on the internet to figure it out, that's a fail. That's a bad system. While we loved what those systems [like the Horadric Cube] did, we didn't like how they played. We loved combining gems together and collecting gems and we wanted to enhance that, but we didn't like that the collecting aspect caused you to not want to use your gems. So now we have an artisan that allows you to remove gems from items so that you can still keep them."
Many Diablo fans are likely looking forward to chopping through throngs of monsters with others, and Wilson talked about how that might play out and how the classes relate to one another. "We focus very much on, when you get another player into the game, you get bonuses for doing that. You get all your own items drops and they get theirs and you kill a little faster, so items come little faster. You also get experience at a slightly accelerated rate so you'll level a little bit faster. You'll find that we dynamically tune the game so that it get a little harder when you have more people in, so you really need to stick together and use your skills together. A great example is, the barbarian has some good skills for essentially allowing him to run into enemies and get the attention of a lot of enemies, which is great when coupled with a ranged class who probably doesn't want to get hit a lot. Whereas a lot of the ranged classes have a lot of great control skills that reduce damage or control enemies such that they're not attacking as often, and that's a great combo with the melee class. We try to design within every class ways that they complement each other, such that when you play with other characters your class feels a lot more diverse."
From what Blizzard's said and what we've played at trade events so far, it certainly seems like Diablo III is going to be a lot of fun. Expect more updates around Blizzcon, where we'll be bringing you all the latest on Diablo and the rest of Blizzard's properties.
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