Diablo III Interview

Diablo III lead world designer Leonard Boyarsky and art director Christian Lichtner were on hand at this year’s BlizzCon to tackle a fistful of questions about Diablo III for the folks at Blizzplanet. Here’s the deal:

So have you done anything with the AI to make them a little more intelligent rather than just running toward the player to damage/kill them?

Oh yeah, certainly. It really depends on the monster. For example, a skeleton caster might throw a magic missile at you and then run back and is always trying to keep his distance. Other monsters do swarm in and try to overwhelm you because that’s what they’re meant to do. Each monster has a custom made AI and in most cases have custom made abilities and powers. We really try to get the most out of what they are so like a sandling might burrow underground, come up and attack you, burrow back in the ground and run away. But like a bunch of zombies, it might just shamble toward you because they’re not as clever.

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In Diablo 1 there was some useless prefixes and suffixes on a lot of the items, have you cleaned a lot of that up a bit to make sure everyone can use everything?

We agonize about this every day. We’re constantly looking at the affixes and their value. There are some affixes that are better than others, but you really just have to make choices. When you see an axe drop and it has 3 affixes to it you have to decide if those affixes are right for you, for your build, or your class. That’s crucial, because otherwise all the loot is the same. So some affixes are by definition [not as useful], but maybe they’re nice to have. So there’s a sort of a pecking order in the usefulness in some of the affixes. We definitely don’t want affixes though that you dread, that you see and are like (oh geez, what a waste of time!) We look at this every day, and as we add more affixes in because of new game mechanics that come in we look at them again to see if it changes the balance of ones that are rolled up. We’re always looking at the classes to make sure they’re evenly distributed so like the wizard doesn’t always just use one affix all the time. It’s just an ongoing topic of conversation at work for us.