Diablo III Interview

The guys at VideoGamer.com are next in line to fire over some questions about Diablo III to lead designer Jay Wilson.

VideoGamer.com: What elements have been carried over from Diablo II to Diablo III, in terms of co-operative play?

JW: One of the things we’ve carried over is just the general structure of how co-op play works, so as you’re playing you can have another player drop in or leave at any time. It’s very dynamic, the game simply adjusts to the number of characters present. But one of the things we’ve improved on is one of our prime directives is now “Thou shalt do no harm to the co-operative game.” This was something that Diablo I and II didn’t really follow. Many people liked the idea that players would compete against each other while being co-operative. While it was a noble concept, I think it mostly proved to make players not like each other and not want to play together. The average game size for Diablo II on Battle.net is 1.2 players, which basically means that almost everyone is playing by themselves. One of the main reasons for that is… well, why would you want to play with someone else? They can go hostile at any time and kill you, mostly in an exploitative way. It’s not fair – most of the time you’ll be dead before you realise they’re attacking. There’s a good chance they will steal all your loot, so you won’t get anything valuable, and it makes the game harder – so why would you want to play?

On our side, we’ve looked at changing a lot of those things. Loot now drops on a per-player basis, so if four of us are playing a game together and you kill a monster when three of us are nearby, it’ll drop an item for each of us. My items will be seen by me but not by the others – so anything I see is fair game for me. The nice thing about this is that it’s a bonus. When you play Diablo II together, there are less items. You may kill slightly faster, but there’s less to pick up. In Diablo III, there’s more. You have your items, other players have theirs, and you can trade. The other tendency we find about this model is that when a player’s bag fills up, they don’t want to go back to town. They want to keep pushing forward, so they open up their bags and start throwing out things they don’t want. As soon as an item hits the floor, everyone gathers around. Then they start doing the same thing, and soon you have these little pow-wows of people tossing things and picking up stuff they can use. It’s these kinds of things that make co-op a positive experience.