Diablo III Loot Tuning Interview

Gamasutra has published a brief article-style interview that they conducted with Diablo III lead content designer Kevin Martens about the “dizzying” amount of tuning they’ve had to do in order to get the loot system to feel right in the action RPG threequel.

“That balance is honestly the main reason why it takes so long to make a proper Diablo game,” Kevin Martens, lead content designer for Diablo III told Gamasutra.

“The bulk of our work goes into tuning the game’s loot drop system,” he said. “There are so many parameters to alter, it can be dizzying. Even the slightest increase to gold drop can suddenly change everything in the game. Even a .01 percentage change in loot drop can drastically change the balance between player challenge and reward.”

Knowing that the margin of failure can be so high, making a game expected to sell millions at launch alone is a high-pressure situation. “[Keeping fans happy is] absolutely one thing we always have to keep in mind when we tweak anything in the game, because we have to normalize those slight changes to over a million players, or even 5 million players.”

Martens added, “Even defining what ‘super rare’ means in the game changes when you scale to five million players. So even if we make a mistake with a ‘super rare’ item and it only affects 400 players out of 5 million, that still is 400 players who have a bad experience. It’s really a big deal.”