Gamelist / Diablo III

Can you tell us a little bit more about the Battle Arenas?

Sure. A lot of people have asked about the impetus of the Battle Arenas. Why are we doing it that way, because there was PvP before in Diablo 2 and why do this? The fundamental thing here is we recognize that there are a lot of players who just want to murder each other in that game. However, in past games, not having a special space to do it in meant that you had a lot of cases where people were getting murdered by people without opting into that choice. And then you end up having a lot of battles around the outskirts of town. And so the game that’s happening there isn’t all that fun and not everybody wants to do it.

One of the keys here is to give everybody a special space where we can match them up fairly through BattleNet and then they can engage and opt-in in a much more fair and (honestly) much more fun PvP environment. And then of course that allows us to do other things that you really wouldn’t be able to do with the other system, like teaming up. It was really hard to have team PvP in past games, but with the Battle Arenas, and having some structure around that, you can bring some team co-operation. And that makes the PvP a much more valid experience, and much more exciting.

Will there be any open-world PvP like it existed before?

No. That’s being removed.

It devolved into a social-engineering scenario. Like, let’s see if we can get this guy to come out here so I can slaughter him. Well that’s not fun. I mean, it might be fun for the person doing the slaughtering.

So if you think about it, the PvP Battle Arenas don’t just make a better game for people who want to engage in PvP, it’s also an improvement (by extension) to the PvE game, because you’ve got a lot of people there who *aren’t* interested in being murdered every five minutes, or being *tricked* into being slaughtered, right? So, they can go out and play co-operatively in a co-operative space, the PvP people can play in a PvP space, and then you’ve got other people who just want to play by themselves in the single-player experience. They can do that as well.

Do you think that attitude to PvP is a focus for Blizzard going forward, because essentially there’s two types of PvP: there’s sport PvP (controlled environments; team based; with lots of rules) and then there’s “open” PvP (I call it “drama” PvP), where the bit that the players like is the “moment of drama”. They want to be on the winning side (the ganking side), especially in a lot of the emerging markets, like China (where they don’t like the “sport” PvP much at all). Do you think that Blizzard is generally committed to “sport” PvP?

No. I think we have games that show our commitment to “sport” PvP, and I think those are our arenas in WoW, and Starcraft 2. And those games are built to really support that kind of competitive level of *balance*. But then you have a game like Diablo 3, where PvP is envisioned to be much more casual endeavor. With 97 billion builds possible per class, obviously there isn’t any way that anybody on this planet is going to be able to balance that enough to make it a viable PvP sport. But people do still *want* to PvP in Diablo. So, the goal there is just to make it fun, and make it the right fun for the game that it is. Diablo is probably not a good candidate for an eSport-type PvP experience, but Starcraft 2 is. So, I don’t think Blizzard has a *commitment* to necessarily doing one thing or the other, more than doing just what’s right for each game, and making sure that players are having fun.

After Diablo 2, it seemed like WoW had a lot of features that were common to Diablo 2. And since WoW has been the success it has, it looks like the character progression and itemization systems that worked really well in WoW have come out and gone back into Diablo. Was there a conscious decision to maintain some cohesive familiarity between everything in the Blizzard family?

I think there is to some intent. When you get to the cohesive part, I think the parts that we focus on with respect to that cohesiveness are things like a “definitive art style”; something that people recognize as being “Blizzard quality”; having games that are easy to start but difficult to master. Another hallmark would be an interface that’s easy to understand, and having iconic characters. Those are the Blizzard hallmark things, but not specific features.

When it comes down to specific features, we’re just fans of our own stuff as much as we’re fans of other people’s stuff. And when we come up with something in a game that works, that we think would apply very well to one of our other games, well why not take it?

If we like something in another product out there, that we don’t make, that we think would work particularly well for our game, we’ll take that as well.

If it makes it better, we don’t want to put a barrier in the way of being able to adopt that idea.

So again, I was just playing the Demon Hunter, and I got to a part maybe 45 minutes in where there was a glowing doorway. I’m presuming that that’s “signposting” to the player that “Hey! Event Incoming!” I went through it and suddenly I was outside, I did a cool fight, and it opened up a shopkeeper who I could interact with who had some cool stuff. How many events are there in the game? And about how many events will a player get to see during one play through?

I don’t think we have a definitive answer for how many events we’ve got, or necessarily even how many you might experience in one play through, because that’s something that’s an ongoing iterative process. However, I would say that how much can the player cope with in a given span of time is what answers that question, and I don’t think we have an exact answer.

I guess I mean comparatively. In the original playthrough for Diablo, sometimes you would see The Butcher and sometimes you wouldn’t. There were a handful of key encounters and most of the time you saw 60-70% of them….

Yeah. Definitely a lot more than Diablo 2. In Diablo 2 you encountered a lot of random monsters, you would encounter random dungeons, and you might encounter, say, unique monsters. And of course the loot was entirely random. We’re definitely adding a lot more of that randomness to the game, particularly events. There are *a lot* more events than in Diablo 2. If Diablo 2 had something like a dozen, we’re going to have more like 50. Now those aren’t exact numbers, but as a “How does it *feel* to play the two games?” A lot more.

With the rune system, you have them broken down into five colors -- golden, crimson, alabaster, indigo, and obsidian – each corresponding to a broad category of abilities with the same theme. So, for example, “golden” runes might always modify the player’s mana somehow. Could you elaborate on that choice a little bit?

We had a system that was “more dogmatic”, where we said “crimson rune will always add damage”. And then we had another rune that would always do some multi-strike thing. The problem is that when we sit down to design the skills, that’s not the way we design them. It makes it really difficult because what if we had two good multi-strike ideas for one skill, just simply because the “fantasy” of what that skill does (or even the mechanics) lends itself to being lots of different multi-strike ideas. Having only one multi-strike rune makes it really difficult to take those good ideas and put them in. And you end up doing things that feel like you are “shoe-horning” good ideas in. Or, worse, coming up with excuses to *not* put good ideas in. And so having them be loosely themed gives us an “out” to design them the way we *really* design them, which is “we get in a big room and we throw *crazy* stuff out there”, and then we just pick from that pile of crazy stuff the ones that are going to be the most fun to play, and the most visually exciting; and the ones that are really going to satisfy the fantasy of being that character. And then we don’t have to worry so much about “where does it fit?” in that other system. Well, it can fit where we need it to fit.

What do you think is the most fun class to play?

We worked really hard in making sure they’re all really fun. I know it sounds like a cheap “out” to say that, but the truth is I jump around. I’ll give you an example. I’m pretty much a hard sell on something like a Barbarian. My favorite character from Diablo 2 was the Sorceress, and secondarily the Witch Doctor, so it’s not something I’d go for. But see, that’s the thing I can put into that character as a developer. What can I do with the Barbarian, without changing the nature of what the Barbarian is supposed to be, that’s going to satisfy me a little more, make me a fan of that character? And definitely I become a much bigger fan of that particular class. We’ve given him a little bit more mobility. We’ve given him a lot of area effects. We’ve upped the *fantastic-ness* of what he can do, but without making him a caster, without making him a ranged player. It’s a tough thing to do with a melee class. But now I like that class. I’m going to play the Barbarian for sure. So, that’s the focus we’re putting into all those classes. There’s going to be fan favorites, but we want to make sure that everyone’s got something in every class.

You’re the Lead Technical Artist?

Yeah, so what does that mean? The easiest thing to understand is we write some tools to support artists. Other things that we do that are bit more tangible are we make all of the special effects in the game, all the things that communicate what your skills do. That’s the stuff that comes from us for the most part. And then we’re also actually involved in authoring the skills themselves. It’s kind of like a one-stop-shop team. We’re involved with design in coming up with *a lot* of ideas, visualizing them, and then writing the code that supports actually making them work. Having it all together in a nice tight team --we’re all in the same room together -- allows us to be loud and crazy. Because we do a lot of iteration, having everybody in the same space makes that go a lot easier.

Have you come up with any new abilities this time around that are just super obnoxiously over-the-top that when you saw them for the first time you went “This is awesome!”?

They’re all like that .

I played the Demon Hunter and literally *everything* in that level exploded when I killed it.

Yeah, yeah. And that’s the way we start with all the characters. It’s like “OK, if we’re going to have this skill that allows you to shoot multiple arrows, well what’s important about that?” Well, the fact that it shoots multiple arrows. OK, in Diablo 2, how many arrows could you shoot? Like 30 or 40. And we said “how do we top that?” We have to shoot hundreds! OK, how do we do that? How do we make that possible, and how do we make that not annoying? And *that’s* exactly the way we approach it. It’s like 30 arrows is impressive, but a *hundred* arrows is better.

And then maybe there’s a point where that goes too far. We actually try to find that. That’s the first thing we aim for. Where’s the point where it’s *too much*, and once we find that, then OK we know where we went too far. Let’s just pull it back and find that spot where it’s right.

Have there been instances in development where you’ve come up with a cool concept for a visual effect, and then the ability designers have come up with an actual ability because the effect was just too cool to pass up?

Oh Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely . You’d be surprised …

Which way round does it usually work?

It goes both ways, but it goes the way you suggest more than you might believe. I’ll give you some *really* excellent examples. The Poison Dart skill on the Witch Doctor. The designers usually come in with a first pass, and they had the idea of doing the rapid strike. And we were like “that’s fantastic!” And then we all sat down and said “what else?” because the rest of it was just costless mana. Wait a minute. What’s the *craziest* thing we can do with the fantasy of “blowing” a dart gun? Well, what about a live snake? -- because we were all thinking “what can I shoot that would be cool?” The live snake -- that came from us. You could see that on their faces when we said that: “Is that going to look good? What’s it going to do? Is that weird?” And then what happens is, because we’re that one-stop-shop, we’ll just throw it in the game. We’ll just build the stuff really quickly and get it in there and see. Is it cool? Maybe it is a terrible idea. Maybe it’s a *cool* idea. And it turns out, it’s *unbelieveably* satisfying. When you shoot a snake at a caster who’s winding up to melt your face, and the snake goes at him and knocks him out it’s like the funnest thing in the world.

The Big Toad was another idea. We said we wanted to put a big toad in the game that’s going to eat monsters, and the designers were all definitely “Uh Oh!” Because there’s some worry there. Are we going to get too far away from the class with some of these crazy ideas, or are we going to make something that’s maybe game breaking. So we slammed it in there with some temporary art, we got it working, and it was a huge success.

The end game. In previous Diablos, once you beat Diablo that was basically it. What do you have planned for Diablo 3’s end game?

We don’t have anything in place right now, and we don’t have anything really to announce about the end game. Because the end game is something you design toward the end. And we just haven’t quite got to that point.

However, we definitely desire to *not* have the experience of Diablo 2. I think one of the valid experiences that may happen is that there will be times when you want to go and seek out bosses and do that. That was the only thing you had to do in Diablo 2 to get loot. Some examples that you can see in, not exactly the end game, but to give you an idea of how we’re trying to pull that apart a little bit is the Artisan system.

Making crafting a much more story driven and much deeper world experience, rather than going out to a website and looking up a list of formulae and then plugging them into your cube. If every player has a much easier and more thematic access to that content, then it gives them something else to do besides something that becomes more of a mathematical exercise. There’ll certainly be other things, we just don’t have anything to announce about it.

What is the primary role of crafting? I was playing and I found a couple of crafting items. There didn’t appear to be a crafting interface. But “cool! There is crafting”. Is it like in some other games, where it’s just a mechanism for the end-game players to come up with something that’s maybe slightly better than what they can get their hands on? Or is it something to keep people busy throughout the lifetime of the game, even in the single-player experience?

It’s probably a little bit of all of those things. The primary thing is that it’s an alternative methodology to acquire gear, and (by extension) power. And it can provide utility to items you might have otherwise outgrown. As you’re leveling up, you still end up with “Oh, I found that bow ten levels ago and now I’m not interested in it”. In Diablo 2, your only choice was to decide to either do nothing with it, or ferry it back to town and sell it. Neither of those are really attractive options. But with the crafting mechanism, and being able to melt those items down into materials, now suddenly there’s value in that bow that you might not have otherwise cared about. And you don’t have to go all the way back to town to get your 10 gold out of it. It’s that alternate path, and bringing value to the items in the world.

It’s great that you’ve announced the fifth class. And the amount of information that’s already out there is …“a lot”. I guess we’re looking for any opportunity to get some human stories from some of the developers about what they *especially* want people to know about Diablo 3 as we get closer to its launch. What particularly resonates in the game for you?

For me, it’s a lot. If I can go personal here, and this is going to sound sappy, because I’m here obviously to promote the game that I’m making, but the truth of it is I came to Blizzard because I was a *huge* Diablo fan. I played the *crap* out of that game! I’ve done *everything* there is to do in that game! And there isn’t anything you’ve done (I can guarantee you) that I haven’t. So, it was 5, 6 years of my life. It was like going to college, but Diablo. So, for me, personally, to be involved in the making of this game, and being able to put special investment into things like “zombie barf”, and exploding monsters, and decapitating heads, being able to put my personal touches on those things is the stuff that really does it for me. It’s what gets me to work every day. It’s what sends me home happy.

Do you think you’ve achieved that?

So far! So far, I’m pretty jazzed . A week doesn’t go by where something doesn’t go into that game that I can point to and say “I had some involvement in that!” And, oh my god, it’s *so* awesome to see that stuff go in there. It happens on a weekly basis.