Wyatt Cheng: My name is Wyatt Cheng, I work as a Technical Game Designer on Diablo III.
We actually have multiple different types of, what I would describe as, difficult encounters. Elite encounters. Obviously we have bosses that are key to the story, in the beta, people will be able to fight the Skeleton King, King Leoric. He is a named boss who appears in a very specific location. But then, if we take a step back from that, Diablo II also had the notion of Champion Monsters, and Rare Monsters, and those are really important. For me, Diablo is largely a game about feeling awesome, and heroic, and huge, and doing huge damage and having lots of mobility, and tons of utility skills, and great visual effects. But at some point, you have to feel challenged, because if you don't feel challenged, then you're knocked out of the zone. You don't have the concentration. All of my builds and my gear are only meaningful if they help me become more powerful, and becoming more powerful is important. I need to be able to feel it, and to feel it you need to be challenged. And so a lot of that challenge is provided by these "elite" encounters, as I like to call them.
So on top of bosses we have champions, who are packs of monsters, with special abilities. In Diablo II, the champion packs were things like champions, and ghostly, and fanatic, and so we've expanded a little bit on that idea in Diablo III, just the idea that there would be these packs of monsters with special ability. Then there's also the rare monsters, which are again packs, a rare and his minions. And it's a pack of monsters where one monster is the ring-leader. And fire enchanted monsters, and everyone remembers lightning enchanted monsters, and multi-shot monsters, those are great examples of rares. So even though they weren't named bosses in a specific area, they were a really integral part of Diablo II, and so we have rare monster packs in Diablo III as well, and they're scattered randomly throughout the world for you to come across.
And then there's unique monsters, unique monsters are a lot like rare monsters but they have a specific name, and sometimes they have a story element to them, and sometimes they appear in certain locations only, there's no hard and fast rules when it comes to uniques, but generally it's when we want to build on the story a little bit, or we need a monster who has a specific set of powers for the location that they're in. Again, that's an elite encounter to provide an additional challenge.
Gameplanet: The crafting plans - I actually picked up one before, it looks very good. But with so often of these designs, they sort of lose a bit of steam towards the end of the game. So endgame content, are there really awesome, epic crafting plans you can get?
Cheng: Yes. Absolutely. I don't know if you saw the recipes - what kind of recipe did you get right now?
Gameplanet: It was an apprentice something-or-other...
Cheng: Were you able to make a belt, or a chest-piece?
Gameplanet: It was something like that, I didn't have enough of what I needed to do it.
Cheng: Ok, normally there's a really important part of the text there, when you go to craft. I think one of the first recipes is a belt, and it says something like "+ attack", and there's a random range on it, it says plus one or sometimes plus two other random properties, that's a really integral part of our crafting system, because one of the core values of Diablo is randomness. Random environments, random loot, random drops. And we wanted to integrate that randomness into our crafting system as well, so what we've done is crafting gives you some input as to what comes out. So you know you're going to get a belt, you know it's going to have two affixes on it, you know that one of those two affixes is going to be plus attack, but what you don't know is how much attack, and what's the second property going to be. So you can make two, three, four belts in a row, and get something different every time, in theory.
So then for the endgame, we have more recipes that generate yellow items, with lots of properties, and they have a chance – randomness, always randomness – they have a chance to be the best items that the player can find. I'm not guaranteeing that, but it's certainly possible. In the same way that people would ask me in Diablo II, who is the best boss to kill? Pindleskin runs were really popular, Mephisto runs were really popular, but it was always a chance, always giving it a shot and seeing what came out.
Rest is te lezen in het artikel zelf!
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, beta begint pas op zijn vroegst in september waarschijnlijk (late Q3). Bovendien hebben ze aangegeven dat deze beta voornamelijk dient om hun nieuwe hardware te stress testen. Ze zullen dus waarschijnlijk met kleine aantallen beginnen en deze daarna flink verhogen om te kijken wat de servers aankunnen, vandaar dat de beta ook zo klein is (klein deel van ACT I maar). Dus goede kans dat veel mensen de beta kunnen proberen.
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Maar we wachten het af, opzich heb ik ook eigenlijk helemaal niet veel tijd om die beta te spelen. 
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stom.
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Dit topic is gesloten.
