Diablo III Interviews

A couple of new pre-launch interviews with Diablo III creative director Jay Wilson have been brought to our attention, so we’ll get things started with this two-pager over at Atomic:

Do you believe that the cash shop will wind up dragging the best items out of the economy? There seems to be little reason not to sell your ultra rare items for cash rewards. Won’t this lead to a model where those who spend the most will be the best geared? Does Blizzard see this effecting the game long term?

I don’t think it’s a big issue, and here’s why. So let’s say you are… if you don’t have any time invested into the game, or money, well, you’re probably not going to be very successful. I’ll admit that.

But let’s say you have a situation where you can invest a lot of time, but have no money, or you don’t want to spend a dime… well, you’re gonna find good items. It’s mathematical – you WILL find good items. It may not be the items you want, but you will find them. You can put them on the Auction House, and earn currency to buy whatever items you want, without putting a single dollar of your own currency into the system.

Originally we planned to have a listing fee, and we struggled to find ways to remove it, and finally did – so that players don’t have to invest money into the Auction House if they don’t want to. We thought that was essential – being able to trade with virtua; currency should not mean you have to open your wallet.

So I don’t t think anyone needs to worry.

And you know, if you look at Diablo 2, there were lots of traded items, and they traded in the essential equivalent of a an Auction House, even with money changing hands. They’d trade with friends, or with random people, and I think that now we have the Auction House, I think people will trade there too. I don’t think it’ll hurt the game at all.

And then there’s this video interview on Games On Net that has been partially transcribed:

Speaking in a video interview with games.on.net, Diablo III game director Jay Wilson mentioned that internal Blizzard staff had suggested the game should move away from isometric camera controls. “Very early on in the process we had some people who argued that we should not make the game isometric, that it would be better technology, more modern, if we made a third or first-person game,” said Wilson. “I really would have nothing of it. For me a camera is not a technology choice, there’s more than enough first and third-person games out there.”

In the same interview, Jay also discussed the reasons for not including ladders and offline play in the upcoming, highly-anticipated sequel.

“We didn’t consider the level-up process to be the primary way you show progress in Diablo III. The only point to doing it (reaching level cap in Diablo II) was to show to other people that you’ve levelled to 99 (…) For us we were much more focussed on the acquisition of items.”

“As soon as the acquisition of items goes away, people lose interest,” Jay concluded. “The ladder mode really catered to a smaller group of players than what we’re trying to cater to.”

Speaking of the hot-button-issue of always-online DRM, Jay had this to say. “We see Diablo as an inherently multiplayer game. There were a lot of issues with Diablo II where players would play offline and never realise the game had an online component, which felt wrong to us.”

Many players have claimed that there is no technical reason why Blizzard can’t just implement an ‘offline mode’, but Jay claims differently. “One of the big reasons is if we take a server-client structure and you allow offline play, you have to put the server architecture into the build that you give to players. Once you have that server architecture, it’s way easier to hack it.”