Diablo III Interview

IGN recently chatted up Blizzard’s Jay Wilson to learn how the team has used the feedback they gathered during Diablo III’s beta testing period to help refine the game as a whole and balance its five character classes. An excerpt:

IGN: We’re excited for how balanced the five classes seem and how each of them delivers such a different experience. How did the team go about developing those five [classes]? They’re all so different. They complement each other but they also work well solo.

JW: Well, a lot of it goes back to the core Blizzard class design philosophy where we look at each class and [ask]: what makes this class special? Why do I want to play it in the first place? What’s the fantasy? This is something we ask a lot. And then when we target the key signature [fantasies], we don’t let the other classes have those things — we’d even go so far as to not choose a particular class just based on the fact that its fantasy steps on the fantasy of an existing class.

IGN: Do you have examples of that?

JW: Yeah, if we were going to do a warrior, he’s probably going to have too much that crosses with the barbarian. Whereas you get somebody more like — I’ll use the D2 example of paladin versus the barbarian. Because of the shield focus, because of the holy abilities, there are a lot of good fantasies that are different than the barbarian, even though they’re similar characters, so it just depends on the choices you make.

For example the monk is the only class that gets passive movement increases. Other classes can have travel powers but the monk is the only one because he’s the fastest. That’s his thing: he’s fast, he’s agile, and he needs things that make him faster and more agile. Each class has rules that we put in; they’re loose but they’re strong enough that they make the classes stand apart from one another.