Diablo III Interviews

Diablo III game director Jay Wilson and other team members took the time to answer a variety of questions about the action RPG during BlizzCon.

The first Q&A is up at IGN:

IGN: Yeah, I made a sorceress and exploited Magic Find suit, which was the way to get the best loot in the game and give it to all my other characters.

Jay Wilson: Good job, sir, that was the best way in Diablo 2.

IGN: So am I not going to have to do that in Diablo 3? How are you handling loot in this game?

BZ: There’s a couple of answers there. The first one would be.how do we handle loot, you’re really probably interested in how we handle Magic Find. For Magic Find, we like the idea of Magic Find, it’s cool, something happens and all of a sudden I have a better chance of getting gear. But what we don’t like is that it changes how you play to such a degree. I dump really good items because they’re not Magic Find items. I play certain classes because they’re the best classes for Magic Find. So we want to keep Magic Find, but we want to pull that out of the balance. The easiest way might be to not make it item-based, or if we make it item-based, to make it something you could put on anybody. Maybe there’s some way to grant your items Magic Find on top of something, but then that maybe has some kind of inherent cost to it. So we haven’t decided yet, that’s why we’re kind of talking in riddles, but the key is, we don’t want players to play that way. We don’t want players’ items to be dictated by Magic Find. That’s not fun. So the next one will be the fact that you probably used a sorceress, is my guess, and the reason you probably did that was because items were less valuable for the sorceress.

The sorceress could fight really well without items. That was a flaw in the item design, in that that class didn’t need items as much. So that’s something that we’ve already fixed, through the addition of real power as an attribute, as opposed to magical power as a magic damage attribute. So now to really do the kind of damage you’re going to need to do to do those runs, you’re going to need items. That’s part of what we solved there. The one class won’t be able to clear the table because it has no need for items. All the classes should equally need items and be able to use items. The last one is, a player’s tendency is to follow the path of least resistance. We learned this in World of Warcraft, if you make the fastest way to level killing boars until your eyes bleed, then that’s what players will do. They won’t do the most fun thing. They’ll do what gets them progression the fastest. So we put in this massive quest system, it’s a ton of work, but what it does is, it says, go kill some dudes over there, run over there, grab me three of those things, do this thing over here. When the player’s always doing something different, the game stays fresh, it stays fun to play for a long time.

This is the philosophy we’ve put into the Diablo endgame. So it’s not that you’re not doing runs, it’s that you’re not doing the same run over and over again. There’s a reason for you to kill this boss, then that boss, then maybe explore that dungeon. There’s a benefit that pushes you around through all the content. We have some systems planned for that, but that’s definitely our focus, to get out of that.I’m doing one run over and over again, and get to the idea of, I’m doing every possible run that can be done. To show off the broadest array of content.

Next in line is GamingShogun:

GS) Has the game’s inventory screen been finished yet? Is what we saw in the demo the final build of that system?

JW) Well I would never say absolutely however, we’re pretty happy with this version. So, yeah, its very likely to stay. The version we showed last year was a ‘one-slot’ system where one item fit in one slot. The thing we didn’t like about that was we wanted the item icon sizes to be much larger. We felt that when the item icons got smaller they didn’t feel as prominent. And, we also felt we would have to boost the color on them to make them readable which did not make them look very Diablo.

We decided we definitely needed big item icons so we did a new item system that we did right after BlizzCon last year and that system actually split our inventory into large and small items but they were separated – there was a tab for the two types. And, that was annoying. So, we just decided to suck it up and say we’re going a hybrid system which we call ‘mini-Tetris’ essentially. We have large items which are one by two squares and small items which are one by one.

And we finish things off at Diii.net:

Q: Will gambling be a part of Diablo III?

A: One of the main issues with gambling previously was understanding how it worked, it was kind of a black box. I’ve talked to a lot of players and they’ve said they gambled, spent all my gold and got nothing and didn’t do it again and that was a very typical early experience. Then you talk to a more experienced player who knows more about it, maybe they read about it on a website, or they heard it from a friend, or they just got lucky and they disagree and think it’s awesome and it’s a great way to spend all this gold that you are probably not going to use for anything else. The ability to understand of how gambling work is important so what we do want to have is ways to get items in addition to going on runs but the Diablo II method will go through some revisions and changes.