Diablo III: Reaper of Souls Interview

It’s clear at this point that Blizzard has no intentions of removing the online-only requirement from the PC version of Diablo III, but that didn’t stop Rock, Paper, Shotgun from at least kicking the idea around again in a new interview with lead designer Kevin Martens and art director Christian Lichtner that focuses mostly on Reaper of Souls. A taste:

RPS: Auction house or not, many people also ended up finding Diablo III’s endgame to be pretty repetitive. Drab, not-very-well-randomized environments, etc. Sure, it’s an endgame focused on item farming, but I think there are plenty of options to alleviate tedium.

Martens: Yeah, we’re improving randomization a lot. Adventure Mode is the promise of Diablo randomness working as intended. We had all of these different elements: the randomization system the engine is very powerful at doing that. It can make random dungeons, put items all around in places, all the loot tables to make random items, etc, etc.

So we had that old-fashioned [structure of] play through the campaign four times in a row with increasing levels. Normal, nightmare, hell, inferno. That made players find different efficient parts of the campaign that they’d just play over and over again. It’s part of player psychology, and it’s understandable.

I think we had good things and bad things about that, but ultimately we took all the elements from the campaign, we put them all in adventure mode, and we have this mixing and matching system to keep variety fresh. And we just made that the best way to get loot. So variety has also become the most rewarding gameplay experience.

Lichtner: I would also add that, in Reaper of Souls, our exteriors are finally fully randomized. There are no longer patches that are predetermined. So that’s even more randomization.

Martens: We’ve also got Nephalem Rifts, which are pretty small they take 10-30 mins to play through and we’ve realized we can break a lot of our own rules with them. They’re constrained, so everything that happens stays within that zone. We can do things we couldn’t do in campaigns that’d be easy for people to take advantage of.

We can do things that’d be tedious in a larger setting, but in a smaller one are freaking awesome. Like, one example is the summoner monsters. You’ve got your skeleton summoners they laugh at you and they summon skeletons and in normal gameplay you try to target them first. We also have the zombie mothers, and where they vomit, more zombies rise. We’ve stuffed a zone with those two alone, and so quickly it starts filling up with zombies and skeletons. To the point where you can barely move. That would be terrible if you had to get across an entire zone.

But for five minutes? You know, using all your movement skills, being a lot more defensive it’s awesome. Same thing with buffs. Like, we can give you a lightning buff that one-shots every monster. You can just run down the hallway and everything dies. It can only last for 15-30 seconds, and it only works in Rifts. It’s a little period of arcade awesomeness in an otherwise random dungeon.

And those are just a couple of millions of combinations that could roll. You may never see those. We also play through, find especially neat combinations, save them out, and make sure they can roll again in the future.

RPS: OK, now the big one. The auction house is out, but the online requirement is still in. You’ve explained that it’s all about community and whatnot, but would adding in a simple option to play offline really hurt? I mean, the game’s already that way on console, and it’s not like your community would just up and disappear. Plus, if they did, I think that’d mean they never enjoyed being online with your game in the first place.

Martens: It’s interesting when you’re in the moment in gaming culture when you’re playing the game right now we see its flaws very well. When we look at the long history, it becomes sort of a rosy past. I don’t think people necessarily remember how mad they themselves were that they had an offline mode and online mode in Diablo II.

This will probably be controversial for me to say. People will be like, (I wasn’t mad!) But I was there at the time, and then I studied this for a living. It sucks when your friend or brother is online and he wants to join this game, but you realize you’re an offline character and he’s an online character, and there’s no way to transfer over because offline characters can be hacked and hex-edited to hell and back, right?

And then we had that split between expansion characters and normal ones as well [in Diablo II]. The community was inherently divided. And that’s what it boils down to. Long before any of this happened, we wanted to solve the trading problem. But before we even had the auction house, the always online thing was there.

The game is most fun when you can play with other people. To be ghetto-ed off to the side and not part of the real game, we didn’t want that to happen. This is an online game. We want people to play together. All of that predates the auction house. I can see how people would think otherwise, but the auction house was a salve we came up with in the last few months of the project. It was a six-year project.