Diablo III Interview

The editors over at MMORPG.com have cranked out a brief article-style interview that they conducted with Diablo III’s Wyatt Cheng and Andrew Chambers during last weekend’s BlizzCon. An excerpt, as usual:

The Witch Doctor came up and they wanted to something with voodoo and necromancy but did not want to make a Necromancer clone from Diablo 2. Therefore the Witch Doctor was born. The class is very iconic as we all have the image in our head of a Witch Doctor, but then giving it powers and bringing it to life as a hero in the game was very important to the team. Also making sure the class had a solid set of skills was important and that some still honored the Necromancer’s memeory in design. The exploding zombie dogs are a testament to the exploding corpses of the Necromancer.

The next topic for discussion was the changes in the design of the skill tree. Wyatt and Andrew both explained that the skill point system just led players to cookie cutter builds. This same issue existed in WoW. Blizzard was looking to make changes to skills in order to give layers fun choices when playing their character, not having every character spec the same because it was the most effective build. So the new skill system was created to give players viable choices in how they want to play. The team wanted players to have one significant choice between three skills rather than twenty tiny ones. This design takes away the number crunching of skills and brings in the idea of a clear player choice. It will be interesting to see how it is used when the game launches; for now the system takes a little getting used to but does work well at giving choice to the players. In PvP the team knows there will be dominant builds that will come to the surface however they want to make sure there are plenty of viable builds for players to go into combat with and not just be forced to use one set up all the time. Primarily D3 will be about the PVE and that’s the way they want it to stay.