Diablo community manager “Bashiok” has once again taken to the official Diablo III forums to address questions about skill progression, white item drops, achievements, the importance of core statistics, and more.
On concerns over meeting people’s expectations:
I too worry that we won’t be able to meet the expectations people have built up for themselves. Part of my job is managing people’s expectations, so… eh… stop it. Stop thinking about how awesome this game could be. Just imagine it’s a new M. Night Shyamalan movie. Sure Sixth Sense was amazing and Unbreakable had it’s moments, but this right here is the sequel to The Village … or The Happening … or Signs … or any of the movies besides the two I first mentioned. So just like, lower those expectations, but still definitely buy the game please, and everything will be just fine. K?
On how the game handles the seven available function slots:
1, 2, 3, 4, LMB, RMB, alt-RMB.
7 slots.
(Pro tip: press the X key to swap to your alt-RMB. The X key can be rebound to something else too.)
On why they’ve bothered to keep “white” items around:
Diablo is about loot explosions. We can’t realistically have loot explosions without a bunch of confetti and glitter that makes it all look exciting, but has no value except to make the explosions more satisfying. Gold still did this to a degree, but we were missing the “arrows and bolts” of yesteryear. White items were worth something and we really didn’t have any junk we could just throw out with no limit. Now we do.
…
White items will not be worth the inventory space. No one will pick them up. If people start picking them up we’ll reduce the meaningless amounts of gold they already sell for even further. We can address these things if they happen.
Being perfectly honest about the cauldron and cube, they were removed for very ‘designery’ reasons which makes it difficult to explain to people playing the game. Players want more freedom, more choice, almost limitlessly, but a game is defined by its limitations. It’s our job to define those limitations, and enforce them to create the type and feel of the game we’re attempting to produce. There are a lot of good reasons, such as breaking up combat, giving very solid and safe stopping points for groups (especially strangers), as well as ensuring players are staying acquainted with the town, its inhabitants, features, and what it offers. A player may say, well that should be my choice, I should just be able to kill demons without a break for as long as I want. It’s our job to make those limitations for the betterment of the enjoyment of the game, even if it’s an intangible and almost psychological improvement that on the surface appears to be a nonsensical remove of freedom. I expect this response to further confuse and enrage, unfortunately.
On a smooth level progression:
Our intent is to create a fairly smooth leveling curve between difficulties. When you finish Normal you should be around 30, and you’ll be ready for Nightmare, you should be around 50 when you finish Nightmare, and you’ll be ready for Hell, and when you finish Hell you should be around 60, and ready for Inferno.
We don’t expect that people are going to play start to finish, Normal to Inferno, in one sitting. Because of that it implies replays of specific areas (as enemies/bosses respawn when you leave and start a new game) which adds in some guess work on XP gains. It may be that you need to stick around in Hell difficulty for a bit longer because you beat the game at level 58 or something, but it shouldn’t be a long drawn out XP farming situation just so you can advance – if we do it right.
Again, personal play habits will influence leveling curves but we’ll do our best to make it smooth.
…
They might be under-leveled and have to run a few more dungeons to be where they should. But again it’s really dependent on playstyle as well as randomization. Also running around getting more chances at awesome loot isn’t exactly terrible, that’s sort of the whole game.
We could both sit and play straight through but I have 100 more champions that spawned in my character’s play time and thus I’m out leveling you. Or you’re a completionist and exploring everything and I’m just hitting main quests so you’ve out leveled me. It’s tough to really gauge, which is why we’re going to do our best to test these scenarios as much as possible and just set a leveling curve based on expectations for how most people will play.
On the possibility of more than 18 item tiers:
We have the actual visual progression looks nailed down, so I guess the direct answer is we’re not looking to make any more beyond those 18. We’re not nailed down on how we’re pacing them because we’re still creating a decent amount of unique armor pieces, which get more bang for the buck being placed around end-game itemization.
On when beta testing will end:
We probably won’t end beta until shortly before release, and traditionally we’ve tried to announce release dates about two months before release. I couldn’t speculate how invites might ramp up or down when the beta finally comes to a close, it definitely is not coming to a close yet though.
We’ll probably make a trial edition at some point. It’s sort of a demo I suppose, but it’s a bit better because it’s essentially the full game just with locks put on certain areas. So you’d be able to jump into multiplayer games with your friends, but maybe you wouldn’t be able to play beyond a certain place and wouldn’t have access to all the game systems (certainly not auction houses) but if you choose to buy the game all that stuff just unlocks.
On revisions to “masochistic” character and skill progression:
Well, if we’re killing replay value by not making people have to level completely new characters just to try out a new build, we are ok with that.
Leveling characters is cool, and some people legitimately enjoy that process (me!), and we agree it can be fun and would still like to find ways to reward people who enjoy leveling additional characters, but being required to do it just to try out some different skills is no longer acceptable to us. That’s a level of masochism we just don’t care to revisit. We thank the 90’s for their contributions to game design, and the ‘crush the player’s soul’ dungeon master mentality, but we’re moving on. We have this crazy notion that games shouldn’t punish you for trying to enjoy them.
Fact of the matter is though that the longevity in Diablo II was not made by leveling characters. You can get a character to 80 in a matter of hours. The longevity was from experimentation, customization, and the randomized item drops needed to perfect them. And that’s amazingly even considering that a huge portion of the item hunt was completely ruined due to the mass proliferation of what should be insanely rare items. Longevity in Diablo is from exploration, character customization, and more specifically, killing monsters to see what they drop – not leveling.
You can also add to this that in Diablo III killing monsters to see what they drop will not be made lucrative by explicitly predictable means, such as boss runs. Exploring entire areas, even playing from start to finish of each act, uncovering all the nooks and crannies is intended to be the way you’ll be playing Inferno. You can pretend you’re leveling a new character each time, if you’d like. 🙂
On why they’ve axed death animations:
Unfortunately we never managed to get these implemented. They were a really cool idea, but a pretty huge amount of work. The one we showed of the siegebreaker was a scripted sequence we set up specifically for that video. It was never implemented, and never actually worked without someone sitting there typing in a bunch of commands to get it all to fire off properly. It’s still something we’d like to do, though.
All things considered there are just higher priority tasks sometimes. We’d love, for example, to have the monk display his weapons during all of his skill animations. But it’s an enormous animation and effects investment to get it done, and we have to weigh all of these things against other features and polish. A lot of the skills we could improve have multiple animation sets, multiplied twice for each gender, and then multiplied by each weapon type he can equip. That can be 40 or more unique animations, and then there’s a full FX pass, approvals, QA testing, etc. etc. and that’d just be for 1 skill.
We have our wish lists, but it’s a balancing act of resources. Ideally our choices when balancing go toward setting realistic limitations, and producing the best game possible.
On concerns over the World of Warcraft annual pass deal being a “fraud”:
I’ve seen these threads before, and it’s concerning to me. I’m confused as to what people believed the Annual Pass provided when they signed up.
It’s a year-long World of Warcraft contract for people who would be playing World of Warcraft for the next year, but who also want to play Diablo III. In those cases we say Ok, agree to pay through for that year, and you don’t have to make the choice, we’ll give you Diablo III for free, plus a bunch of other goodies just in case you’re not totally sold.
I’m not sure how a Diablo III release date impacts your intent to continue playing and paying for World of Warcraft for a year. Or maybe a better question is, how does a free copy of Diablo III being released at any different point in time affect your intent to pay for World of Warcraft for a year?
Even if Diablo III was to release after your 1 year contract was up and paid off, you’re saving the cost of a copy of Diablo III, and keeping all the extras. I don’t see how that’s a trick, or a scam, or otherwise a bad deal. Unless you were buying it, not intending to play WoW, believing it would get you Diablo III sooner than other people?
I sympathize with people excited about the game, and disappointed it’s not out, I want it to be finished as much as anyone, but I just have trouble understanding this point as I see it consistently made.
On pricing and digital availability:
Well first of all we haven’t announced a price for the game, so any costs being posted are guesses. I think you can probably look at the cost of a boxed copy of StarCraft II at your local brick and mortar and be pretty close to the cost for Diablo III, though. Looking at the link you posted they appear to be about the same.
I don’t know much about retail pricing, but I do know that for some countries there are heavy import tariffs and taxes that can raise the cost of imported goods. Whether that’s the case for New Zealand I honestly have no idea. The story of the PS3 retailing for $1,200 in Brazil comes to mind. http://kotaku.com/5610337/the-playstation-3-launches-in-incredibly-expensive-brazil
Of course we’ll have information on our digital download version, including price, availability and pre-loading as we move closer to release, which may be an option to consider.
On what achievements to expect:
“Squish X critters by walking over them.”
“Dye each piece of your armor a different color.”
On the mechanics of the real money auction house:
Gold and other stackable items can be searched for and purchased from multiple people in a single transaction. You can get a better explanation here: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/3595343777
In short, no, we don’t generate any items or gold on the auction house. It’s a player driven feature and the items you’re buying are from what other players have found and placed on the AH for sale. There can certainly be a situation where you may want to buy 1 million gold and only 850,000 is available in total from all current auctions. You’d be informed of this when presented with a final purchase price.
On the mechanics of the real money auction house, continued:
You can purchase portions of stacks of items on the Diablo III auction house. It’s pretty cool. I can put up say 40 of X crafting mat, one person can buy 5 of them, another person can buy 1, another can buy 22, etc. etc.
On monster levels in Inferno difficulty:
All monsters in Inferno will be 61, which is probably sufficient, but we’re leaving it open if we need to tweak some higher.
On their change of opinion on breaking up the action:
After a lot of playing at high levels we realized returning to town and breaking up the action is actually good. There are some more designery reasons that reinforce all of this, but the bottom line is that the action is very important, and being actively engaged in the action. Being able to be out and killing for hours and hours straight was negating the fun elements. Just like a story arc has highs and lows, a game needs to promote those ups and downs through its mechanics.
As far as harming co-op, there’s really no difference now. Before you’d say “WAIT UP” and everyone would have to stop while you examined each item and decided to sell, salvage, or keep it. In the best case scenario everyone would agree to stop and do this at the same time. It’s no different than everyone agreeing to head back to town, and in fact it provides a more prominent, not to mention safe, pause point where everyone can take care of a few quick tasks, and then head back out.
Say your friend’s inventory is full, but yours isn’t, well you both decide to TP and while he’s going through his bag you have time to craft a few things, or alt+tab free of fear to read reddit or something. Whatever. It’s not different to the co-op game because you had to stop before, and the benefits to being in town now are actually pretty substantial.
On their system design philosophy:
It’s weird because this is exactly how we develop every single game. You have to go all in with a system. You have to believe in it and sell it and make it absolutely certain it’s the best it can be… until you figure out it’s not and throw it away and go with the new better solution you just realized was better. You don’t halfass something or noodle around testing possible theories, you find the best solution you can and you go after it full force, because that’s really the only way you can successfully test it and see if the electric fence has any weaknesses.
That’s the iterative game design we embrace. It’s what we do. I think the issue is that Diablo III is really the first game, in my opinion, where the window into the design process has been open all the way from the beginning* (and boy oh boy has it been open for a long time). We didn’t have BlizzCon during the development of Diablo II, Warcraft III, or even World of Warcraft. We didn’t have websites that supported big in depth articles, we didn’t have billions of people on the internet, we didn’t have twitter and Facebook and live Q&A chats and all this stuff we have now that offers unparalleled access into the play by play development of a game. For us we enjoy being able to share that stuff. You all get to follow along in the process of us creating our games! We think that’s awesome. But it has some pretty big cons in that sometimes it’s hard to understand why we work the way we do. I’m not going to ask you to “Trust in Blizzard” or some other far fetched motto, but I do want to impress that this isn’t different than the development of any of our other games.
On the importance of core stats:
Core attributes are important. They’re your core attributes! But they have never been and continue not to be the primary driving force behind your itemization choices. At all times you’re going to need to keep doing and avoiding more damage. Enemies get tougher, they hit harder, and take more hits. No matter who you are you have to counter those inevitable truths. No character would ever say “I can ignore defensive stats because I am a glass cannon!” no, you get to Inferno and you’ll die. You can be a glass cannon, but it’s going to be a balance between offense and defense, not an all-in decision. There is an inevitable requirement to have a variety of the core stats, offensive and defensive. It’s the balance that’s important.
Ok, so, core stats are super great, but they’re still just four of all the bonuses that items can roll and provide your character. Four. And for most builds they’re never going to be where you’re focusing your attention. The other things that can roll up (which still include +armor, +dodge, +health globe, +crit chance, +crit damage, by the way) have always been the more important decision. It’s your choice between doing more damage or being more defensive, but that’s a forgone conclusion. That’s not where true build diversity ever comes from, it’s too broad a plateau.
On the importance of inventory management:
Managing your inventory is and has absolutely always been an integral part of the Diablo experience. Picking up items and deciding which ones to keep, equip, or otherwise is the game. When it comes down to it that is the entire point of the entire game. Killing demons to get item drops, and those item drops being ‘dealt with’ in some way.
You had to stop and manage your inventory before. You have to do the same thing now. The difference is a 2 second cast timer to head back to town and a right click on the Blacksmith. You’re going to be just fine.
On the size of shared stash:
We reevaluated average character and account storage space requirements, and found it necessary to ensure we could handle what we anticipate will be a large amount of data very quickly after release.
Diablo III has both the benefit and disadvantage of having completely random items. Pretty much everything can roll up different affixes, if not a range of its benefits. That’s obviously great because the item hunt is what it’s all about, more randomization means you can keep chasing that perfect item, but that means the amount of data needed to describe an item is much, much larger than say, a World of Warcraft item, which is static and only needs a unique number to identify it. For example: http://www.wowhead.com/item=51003 that number there at the end is that item’s unique number. That’s all we need to store to identify that item no matter where it is. A Diablo III item first has to say the base item, then each individual affix that it rolled up, then the ranges of each variable, and if it has any sockets. And we have to think about everywhere an item can be, an item on the ground is still an item, and so is an item on the auction house.
We obviously have room to grow if our projections are incorrect, or we just find that we eventually have the space. World of Warcraft definitely grew over the years, and that storage space didn’t appear out of nowhere (although it does seem rather magical at times). We find three tabs to be plenty for at least the initial release of the game though. Not counting the items you’re wearing (assuming they’re the best you have), and assuming worst case scenario of nothing but 2-slot items, you’d be able to hold 405 swords per region. That’s a lot. We don’t expect people to be storing 405 swords… hopefully ever, because that might indicate you have an obsession with swords, but at the very least there should be enough storage to start and then we can continue to evaluate as we go.
On how the in-game chat will function:
It seems there’s been some confusion taken from the above statement I made back in September. The chat in Diablo III is exactly as I described, you do all of it in a single window. StarCraft II has a system where each chat is broken out into a separate window, chat program-style, but Diablo III keeps it all in one. The same single window that’s used for chat when you eventually jump into a game, too.
As far as having open public channels, there’s far more negative to them than positive and we maintain a stance that creating an open chat environment without a social structure behind it is an invitation for moderation and support disasters. Most people that want chat channels though are referring to guild channels, or otherwise channels they themselves can operate and choose to invite others to, and we see those as completely valid forms of chat (there’s a social structure backing the channel). As I said, back in September, it’s unlikely to be anything we attain for ship, but the social group-type chat features are still very much a desire for the future.
And on how the in-game chat will function, continued:
Soooooo… hey everyone. How’s it going? Good? Weather ok? Great… so, right… You know how sometimes you say something that’s stupid and wrong and then people very reasonably get upset and create a lot of threads and discussions and demands with some pretty reasonable reasons for the thing you said wouldn’t happen but then it turns out that you’re stupid and wrong and the things you said are completely the opposite of what’s actually true?
Yeah. So that happened. Public chat channels will be in Diablo III, barring any catastrophe that requires we remove them, because they’re already implemented. In fact they’ll be in an upcoming beta patch so you’ll get to see and play around with them yourselves.
I’m not sure I can offer any explanation as to the incorrectness of my statements, except that I believed them to be correct when I made them. I apologize, and I’ll strive to not be stupid and wrong in the future.
More info on the chat feature, and others, to come in the weeks ahead. Thanks for sticking with it, and me.
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