Diablo III Interview

Chinese website Diablo3.cc has posted an interview that they recently conducted with Diablo III lead designer Jay Wilson, and while the Google translation is certainly readable, this hand-translated version on Diablo IncGamers makes reading the Q&A a more pleasant experience.

6. Is there anything you can share with us about battle.net 2.0 for D3? Any new feature that you think is exciting that sc2 doesn’t have?

Most focus for battle.net for D3 is around taking a lot of the features that we already have and adapting it to our own unique nature of Diablo. So…cooperative match making, is a big function, while there is a aspect of that in Starcraft 2, it’s vastly different. Diablo3 is a little more dynamic, people can come into game and leave dynamicly, and there is no lobby system per se. There is no reason that when you start searching for a game, you can’t just be immiately to be put in a game, and have to search in the background and continue to go. So, a lot of features focus around taking these thing and adapting. Messaging system, so you can open games up to other players. We have a system called “Arms”, where we essentially broadcast the fact that you can broadcast to other people that you want them to come and join your game. So, there is a lot of features like that we focus on. Achievements are essentially a system that we are very happy with. We will continue to focus on content improvement. So, we are more focused on “let’s make better quality achievements”, that are more fun to get, that are better motivators for players, and less focused on….there is not a lot of hug features we want to add there. We mostly want to iterate the quality of that feature set. There are others things we are planning, but they are not announced yet.

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9. This question is about Legendary item. That’s the name for unique item in Diablo 3, as we know it basically replaced the unique item. Other than the name different. Is there any improvement or general attributes that has changed?

Jay: Not significantly. Certainly attributes are handled differently in Diablo 3 than D2, but not necessarily as how they relate to legendary items. Mostly we changed the name because we felt like unique was not cool enough….*laugh*…we felt legendary was way cooler name for them, but they fill the same roll which is to provide kind of predictable source of power and some known quantity items for player to seek. We have try to balance them, such that they are very build specific, so if you are trying to make….say….really good berserker barbarian, there might be a weapon is legendary that’s specially designed for that. But in general, we don’t want players to just use legendaries, we want them to use wide variety of legendearies, sets and rare items.