Diablo III Interview

Blizzard’s game director Jay Wilson has been quizzed by AusGamers on the upcoming and really close to release Diablo III, which is available both in video form and as a write-up. Here’s a snip on PvP:

AusGamers: So you know that they’re there and you don’t talk about them either. I guess that’s the big key. Because this is a two-part question, so PvP — I overheard some of the reasons behind [postponing] that, and everyone has heard that already, just from previous comments — but you guys have been working on the game for a really long time. Was it a case of getting the single-player up and running and then PvP was secondary, ergo: it wasn’t finished to the level that the single-player was, because that was always the main focus?

And with that in mind, can you talk about a projected time period between when the game releases and when PvP will be available?

Jay: For us, the core issue is… the Diablo III team is — like a lot of Blizzard teams — is actually smaller than most games industry teams I’ve been on, and the reason for that is because we think small teams are more agile; we think they have a better team spirit. We really hit a point where, myself and the production director actively capped new hires, because we just didn’t want the team to get any bigger.

That means sometimes you make hard choices. And the choices that we made throughout production was to focus on co-op and single-player, so PvP kind of always got the shaft. So it was something that we didn’t feel that a compromised, shafted experience was what we wanted to ship. But we also knew, running up to the release date, that the single-player was going to get even more focus and PvP would get even less. So we felt like PvP needs its time, it needs its time where it’s the only priority, so that’s why we chose to kind of push it off.

Any time we make those decisions, we try to let everyone know as soon as we’re sure. But it’s really important to us that we not deceive our audience. A lot of the times I think our audience is like (Why don’t you give us more information?) and the truth is, because we change our minds, as we get more information.

The development process, when you’re aiming for quality over anything else — if I didn’t care about quality, I could tell you exactly what we’re going to do, because then if it didn’t work out it doesn’t matter, or we don’t care because the quality is not going to be there — but a lot of the times, we say (this is what we’re going to do), and then we go and try it and it doesn’t work. So we change it, and now we’ve lied.

I think with game systems, players are used to that, so it doesn’t feel that way. But if we tell somebody a date, and then we don’t hit it, we’ve lied to them, and that’s one of the things we try really hard never to do. So that’s one of the reasons why we hold on to that information a lot of the time.

AusGamers: Well, I mean delay in the videogame journalism world is an ugly word, and no publisher ever wants to come out and say (game delayed), so I think you guys kind of nailed the sense of (when it’s done it’s done), just from a PR perspective in regards to that. But to touch back on that question before. Do you have any concept of time that you could even throw at us? Like a year; six months?

Jay: Oh for the PvP patch? For the PvP patch, we definitely… I would say, we want to get it out within months after release. I would say, if it showed up close to the end of the year, that would be… I would say, almost a disaster. So I don’t see it slipping out of this year at all, and I think it’ll be much sooner.