Diablo III Interviews

New interviews with Diablo III’s Jay Wilson, Leonard Boyarsky, and Christian Lichtner have hit the web, courtesy of last weekend’s BlizzCon event.

First, Jay’s chat with G4:

G4: I noticed after leveling up in the demo, you are just required to make a skill selection. The stat progression is handled for you. What was the design decision behind this change?

Wilson: Stat progression as a system is very difficult for a lot of players to understand because you get these 5 points, but you don’t exactly know where to put them or what benefit you’re getting with them. You might make some obvious choices, for example, with Diablo II’s Sorceress, you might put all of your points into energy because that’s the obvious choice, right? Except that for almost every build out there, you’ve just made the wrong choice.

Any system where you have to go up onto the Internet to figure out what the right answer is, is not a good customization system. Any system where there’s a (right) answer is not a good system for customization. The truth is, with stat point systems, they are simple math. It’s not hard to figure out what the absolute best choice is so we decided we didn’t want that as a customization system. With that being said, we do have another system we’re working on. The specifics intent of it is to capture the imagination of what stat point spending was supposed to do, which is, (I want to be stronger. I want to be tougher.) These kind of simple ideas are not contextualized well within a skill system. The skill system is about what the player is doing, not higher ideals about what their character is. So, we’re going to work on a system that really satisfies that feeling, but is way easier to understand and also has some true customization to it.

Next, Jay’s chat with Wired.com:

Wired.com: At the convention, we saw the Fallen Lunatic, who explodes after stabbing itself in the chest multiple times. Can anything ever too be too gory for Diablo?

Wilson: Yes. We do get a couple of things that are questionable, but usually, it’s not so much gore-related . it’s that you can have gore that implies things that we as a Western society aren’t really comfortable with. Any kind of nudity, you can’t really have, especially when you couple it with violence. Those types of things don’t work well. You have to be really careful with things like torture. Those things are difficult. But to honest, in the development of the game, we tend not to think about it. We tend to build what we need to build and then wait for somebody to say, (That’s a step too far.) There are a few ways we edit ourselves, but usually not with gore, like sheer amounts of gore. It’s like, (You want to behead the guy? Go ahead, yes. You want to slice the guy apart? Go ahead.)

One example of one of the biggest ways we edited ourselves is . we have this cool system where we can hit a dude so hard that his skeleton flies out. It was awesome, really cool-looking. And we added several skills that did that; every time you hit somebody, their skeletons fly out. But I have to say, it got a little boring after a while! It became a little excessive. It took away the coolness of it. And so there, we felt like our overuse of it actually de-emphasized it, and we didn’t like that. We were like, (No, if we want to push the skeleton out of somebody, we want it to be a big deal.) I want to really like see it, and I want it to be a special event. And that’s probably the main way we’ve toned ourselves down, is to go back and say, let’s not go so overboard, that there’s nothing cool about the violence.

And, finally, Leo and Christian on AtomicMPC:

How does fan feedback affect that process? There were some very critical views expressed when early Diablo III screenshots appeared.

CL: Oh, it’s huge. I think Blizzard definitely has an art style and it’s been honed through the history of the Blizzard games that have been released. And the philosophy that we think works best for making a game really fun. Visual feedback is so integral to the gameplay experience, so if you can read characters really well or if the UI works really nicely, this all has an impact and that’s very art related obviously so that’s part of it.

As far as listening to people goes, yes, definitely. If anything Blizzard listens to their community. This ‘con in a lot of ways is exactly that. We get the players playing and we get the feedback from the stations, we sift through that, we listen to forums. We do a lot of listening, so the art style has had a progression but so far the feedback has been really positive. I think the concern early on was; is this still going to have that dark and moody feel? Not as far as the colour palette, but is the subject matter going to be dark?

LB: It’s so hard when you just see a clip here and a screen shot there to really understand what the tone is, and how all of it fits together. And a lot of fans had the same reaction when the first screen shots of DII came out showing the deserts. You know ’cause Diablo I was all at night and this one little town and all of a sudden there’s bright desert. So we know what the intent of the series is, in terms of mood and in terms of tone and we’re really happy with that. We think it’s coming along great.

CL: We are big fans of the series, obviously and we don’t want to do anything that would stand in its way. So, we’re very mindful of that, we want to make sure that the game has a very dark, moody, visceral feel to it. And I think that’s exactly what we’re doing.