Diablo III Interview

The guys at AusGamers have finally gotten around to publishing a Diablo III interview they conducted with lead designer Jay Wilson during this year’s Leipzig Games Convention.

AG: What sort of elements have you brought over from Diablo 2, especially in terms of the cooperative multiplayer aspect, and how have they been improved in Diablo 3?

Jay: Well one of the things we’ve carried over is the way the general co-op features work,. When you’re playing the game you can have another player jump into your game any time so it’s very dynamic – the game adjusts automatically to the number of players who are there. One of the ways we’ve really improved that is what I like to say is our prime directive is (thou shall do no harm to the co-operative game) – something that Diablo 2 didn’t really follow.

They liked the idea that players can compete against one another while being co-operative. But I think – while a noble experiment – it mostly proved to make players not like each other and not want to play together. The average game size on battle.net in Diablo 2 games is 1.2 players – which basically means almost everyone is playing games by themselves. One of the main reasons is (why would you want to play with someone else?) They can go hostile at any time and kill you, mostly in an exploitive way and it’s not like it’s a fair fight – you’d probably be dead before you even noticed they went hostile; there’s a good chance they’ll steal all your loot so you won’t get anything good and it just makes the game a little bit harder so why would you want to play that way?

So on our side we really focused on changing a lot of those things. Now loot drops on a per-player basis, so if we’re all playing a game together and the four of us are all killing monsters – if you kill a monster while 3 of us are nearby, it could drop an item for every one of us. So my item will be seen by me but not by anyone else – everything I see on the ground is fair game for me.

The nice thing about that is that it’s a bonus. When you played Diablo 2 together there was less items – you kill slightly faster but overall there was less items for you to get. In Diablo 3 there’s more because now you’ll have all your items and the other players will have their own items and if you guys trade, there’s even more to trade on. Another tendency in this model is that when people’s bags fill up, they don’t want to go back into town because they want to keep moving forward – so they’ll just open their bags and just throw out the things they don’t want. When it starts hitting the ground, everyone comes and focuses on that, and they start doing the same thing. Then you just get these little ‘pow-wows’ of people all tossing items out of their bags and picking up the things they can use. Those kind of things make cooperative gaming positive. Bringing people together to experience things together is what we’re focused on.

Thanks, Blue’s News.