Diablo III Interview

AusGamers managed to track down Diablo III game director Jay Wilson for a surprisingly lengthy interview about the soon-to-be-released action RPG threequel. In it, Jay tackles a variety of topics such as their post-release plans, how the game scales in difficulty as a player progresses through it, the “strike team” they had to use to test Inferno, why he’s looking forward to Torchlight II, and more:

AusGamers: Now moving on, this again is something that has been touched upon in many, many interviews with many of the team members working on the game and it’s something that has sprung forth — I think probably more predominantly from the beta than anything else — and that is this concept of challenge.

Everybody talks about how the first two games had this ramped-up challenge and a lot of people have talked about the [Diablo III] beta not being challenging enough. I know you guys have said it’s the tiniest slice of the challenge that’s awaiting everybody. But one of guys that is part of our community asked a question about… he played through the beta a bunch of times with a bunch of different people and never really felt like there was a differentiation between his solo playthroughs and the cooperative playthroughs in terms of the level of challenge that was being thrown at them.

Whereas in the other games, if you had four players, it was a lot more. So I know that you guys have this line that is (just wait; just wait until the game comes out), but for their sake and our readers sake, can you reiterate that?

Jay: It’s interesting that you’re specifically saying that compared to the previous games, the co-op doesn’t feel like it ramps up. What’s interesting is, I know the exact numbers for how Diablo II ramped up, and ours are higher — even in the beta, they’re higher.

AusGamers: So quantifiably, that’s exactly what’s going to happen?

Jay: Yeah, the difference is though, when you take something that isn’t very hard, and you add in more players, it’s going to be even less hard. The sheer versatility of having more people just kind of scales it down.

But we view Act I as a tutorial. We didn’t put the beta out there to test game difficulty, we put the beta out to test our hardware; to test our software. Traditionally, that was our betas for the original Diablo and Diablo II, they were software and hardware stress tests. They weren’t there for kind of comprehensive game balance and tuning feedback. We do that a lot more in World of Warcraft, because the scope of the game is so big that it’s not something that we feel like we can tune without that kind of feedback.

Scope on Diablo is not as big as an MMO and so we felt like we could tune the game really well without having to put it in front of the entire world. It’s really that players getting used to the difference between the way we used to do betas — and still do for the more boxed-product game — versus how they see MMOs working, where a lot of players are more familiar with MMO kind of betas than they are with a boxed-product like Diablo.

…

AusGamers: Is there an issue… well I don’t want to use the word issue, but in terms of… the game has been coming for a really long time and there’s such heritage there. Diablo II came out close to 12 years ago, by the time D3 comes out. Do you ever feel like there’s always going to be a point where hype for the game — based on its heritage and just how much information you’ve given everybody and how good the game looks in terms of the media outlay that we get — that you’ll never quite reach a point where everybody’s satisfied?

Is that something that always sits with you guys? Or is it just a case of (let’s get it out there and we’ll deal with it later)?

Jay: You know, I would have said (yes) about a year ago. I would have said (oh yeah, that terrifies me). Now, no, because I’ve played the game. Sitting in our test area and we’re doing four-player Inferno. I can’t name a time in the last few years I’ve laughed so hard and had such a great time.

So, do I think there will be someone out there who will be disappointed? Yeah. There’s always somebody you can’t satisfy. But seeing people playing the game; playing the game myself and also seeing the response to the beta that’s been so overwhelmingly positive and to me, I look at that and say (wow, you guys aren’t even playing the good part yet!). To me, the early part of Act I on Normal difficulty, that’s boring. It’s not hard enough, you know. When I have to do testing, that’s the part that I grind through so I can get to the good stuff.

It’s funny because it starts getting better. Even almost right after beta, I think it starts getting better because it gets a lot more challenging. But in Act II and especially Act III it really takes off. But overall, I’m really proud with how the game has turned out. So I don’t worry about people being disappointed or [the game being] over-hyped. I think if the game’s great, then people will enjoy it and if they enjoy it, then the hype is justified.