Diablo community manager “Bashiok” discusses the BlizzCon art panel, auto-distribution of attribute points, binding equipment to characters, and more in his latest responses on the official Diablo III forums.
On the BlizzCon art panel:
Let’s see if I can give a brief overview. First is the panelists, these guy’s names don’t get out there too much but them along with the rest of the amazing artists help to create the world and do a kick ass job of it too.
Art Director – Christian Lichtner
Lead Character Artist – Paul Warzecha
Senior Artist (animation) – Nick Chilano
Tech/FX artist – Chris Haga
Environment Artist – Nathan Bowden
Sr. Environment Artist – Patrick Stone
The first part was with Paul and went over “character” creation, in this case the Fallen monster family. How it went from early concepts to more recent concepts, modeling, animation, and texturing. Imp, Shaman, Hound, Lunatic, Overseer. How their silhouettes define them outside of their design/abilities. There was some hint that the family revealed thus far may not be complete.
Then he went over the creation of the witch doctor, again from concepts through the modeling and texturing process. Through some of the earlier artistic designs of follower/helper type skills such as the wicker man and fetish that would have rode on the witch doctor’s back (both of which were either scrapped or transformed into other ideas).
Then Nick went over animation, how the animation team pours over design docs and references to get an idea of how the creature/character should move and react, but ultimately just relying on the fact that “Jay Wants Awesomeness!!” There were videos showing examples of animation progressions, reference videos used to help the animators (we don’t mocap), and some final products.
Then Haga went over Tech/FX. Some of the things the tech art team does: Rigging, Character Implementation, Data wrangling, Debugging, Lighting and Light Map creation, Custom Tools and Scripting, FX, Design/Implementation. He went through how some of the monk skills were created, and the progression of them getting more and more awesome.
Pat Stone went over dungeons, from concepts and theme/lighting/mood to rough models, textures, refining passes, etc. How areas are created in “gray box” modes first, which are rough block outs of rooms to test how they play before any texturing or detail work goes into them. He also went over the concept of “showcase rooms”. These are larger rooms that are made (essentially) first and encompass a lot of what will be going into the dungeon to serve as a style guide for the rest of the dungeon. Everything needs to blend seamlessly so a large central focus to build from helps to keep the dungeon feeling cohesive. And of course a brief bit on how dungeon rooms are randomized.
Nate went into exterior, taking the concept of the Stinging Winds (playable area at BlizzCon) and how the colors/shapes translated into playable space. How they wanted to keep a lot of depth in the zone with the rocks as well as cliffs and mining operations. Then probably my favorite part, and completely unfulfilling to type out, was a video showing Nate taking a concept of a small village/building in the Stinging Winds and building it in-game using our editing tools. He walked through how he builds out areas from big items to the smaller details, and then it’s handed off for lighting passes, and the panel ended with run through of the area we watched him build in-game looking all pretty.
On weapon damage types:
Damage types aren’t actually completely finalized. There’s likely to be some additions, maybe some combinations. For instance people may have noticed that a few of the witch doctor skills refer to a damage type called “black magic”. All of the monk spells seen relied purely on weapon damage as their base, but that doesn’t mean there couldn’t be a holy damage type. What we don’t want is for players to carry around a ton of different resistance sets to deal with a large number of different types of damages. There’s quite a few different ways to go about solving that, but just to be clear we want damage types to serve the gameplay and not require players to have to pursue complex or item-heavy solutions to it.
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At the very least on skills that it may not be obvious for, which if I were to guess would probably just make it easier to list it for all of them. But, UI/skill description brevity is always a goal, so we’ll see.
On auto-distribution of attribute points:
There is a continuing idea that we have either said or stand behind the notion that auto-stats are either partially or in-whole being implemented because it makes the game easier to balance. That is completely false.
If manual stat placement was or should become the best system for the game then we would balance for it – bottom line. But the fact is, it isn’t the best system. The game needs to be fun, it needs to be awesome. We’re not going to cut corners or try to make it easier on ourselves by choosing systems that are less work. In fact I’d say the exact opposite is true. Some of things these guys do requires an insane amount of work, but it makes the game better, and that’s why it’s done.
Manual stats ultimately provide no better or more interesting customization options than other systems, and in fact by removing it we’re then able to implement systems which are better and more interesting ways of character customization.
There’s a last thread of “well why can’t we have everything?” that auto-stat opponents hold to, and the simple answer there is that having a bunch of different systems all just sort of tossed in onto each other is not a clean or fun solution. We want a lot of customization, we’ll have a lot of customization, clicking a button to allocate stat points in no way needs to be involved to make that true.
On Blizzard’s presence at PAX:
Blizzard Entertainment will once again be representing in full force at the 2009 Penny Arcade Expo, taking place this weekend, September 4-6 in Seattle, Washington. PAX attendees will have access to playable versions of Diablo III (including the recently announced Monk class), the earth-shattering World of Warcraft: Cataclysm expansion, and the engrossing StarCraft II single-player campaign. Community managers will also be in attendance to chat with attendees about the past, present, and future of Blizzard Entertainment games. We hope to see you there!
http://www.paxsite.com/
On character customization being minimal:
Well that’s just not true. Where and when possible itemization and playing the game more to get drops and find items play into the various types of customization. Diablo is an item game, our customization systems play into that as much as possible. Runes for example. Another being every item you wear, as items and their stats play a big role in how your character is defined.
Those require playing the game more to find items to customize your character.
Anyway, so yeah let’s say that character customization is out of the picture entirely as far as reasons to continue playing the game.
Well, we have some ideas, and we’re not going to tell you what they are. 🙂
On binding equipment to characters:
Yes, true, as Jay said at BlizzCon we are planning to have some amount of items that will bind to a character upon equipping them.
We absolutely won’t have items that bind when picked up, except for the obvious things like quest items and other character-specific items that wouldn’t/shouldn’t be tradable anyway.
That alone, I think, should dissuade the most severe concerns with binding items.
And before I go on just understand that while a lot of this is very stable in its concepts, the details aren’t final.
For Bind on Equip (BoE), the idea right now is that it would only be applied to “end game” items of specific quality levels. So to start, it’s not every item, and it’s not even every item above a certain level. For the BoE items that will exist, you can pick them up, if you don’t want it you can still trade it, or give it to another character, a friend, vendor it, whatever you like. But, if you make the commitment to keeping the item and equipping it, yes, it’s yours now.
The reasoning is that in reality we need a solid way to keep the economy stable at the end game. With items building up over a potentially infinite amount of time there’s no way to have any measure of control over worth of items. While an item may be the rarest and best in the game, over four or five years a stockpile has built up and those items are now commonplace and hold little value as compared to their rarity. The gold being earned by players stays the same or likely increases as players become more proficient at playing the game while they spend less as items lose their value. Gold value drops, and we’re skirting into a familiar cycle.
By ensuring we can rely on some amount of “consumption” of items, their relative worth stays high, the market is predictable and both sellers and buyers enjoy a stable marketplace for (hopefully) many years.
Diablo II has an inconsistent approach which is the somewhat stable Ladder economy, since it’s quite literally flushed out every so often. But it’s a very intrusive approach to a problem that could be solved through other means that don’t require making everyone start over.
As a quasi-aside: There’s an idea being thrown around, and this is really not guaranteed in any way, that some or potentially all items that are bound to you could be bound to your entire account. So if you yourself “own” an item from it being bound, you can trade it between all the characters on your account freely. Feed alts your old-but-still-very-nice items, etc. That’s just an idea, it may not take shape, but it’s a possibility. One obvious issue with it is that it removes market demand. If you already have the best staff in the game you’ll never need one again, eventually no one ever needs them, prices drop, etc. etc. That’s maybe an over simplified scenario, but anyway, we’ll see.
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1. Hrm… well no, I didn’t mean class specific items. What I mean was… for the items that ARE bind on pickup you wouldn’t be surprised that they were.
2. I didn’t mean to indicate that but I’m not sure it’s a system we’re looking to carry forward. The leveling competition aspect is really cool (if it works), the dumping of one economy onto another… maybe not so much.
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…let me clarify again (I’m not doing this well today, huh?) and see if it helps.
No armor/weapons/equippable items will be Bind on Pickup unless they are rewarded by quests.
End-game items of specific quality types are currently planned to be Bind on Equip.
I confused it all by attempting to allude to other things just so I don’t get called on it later, and it really wasn’t necessary. Just follow the above two lines.
