Diablo III: Reaper of Souls Interview

Diablo III’s lead content designer Kevin Martens and senior level designer Laura Paolilli discussed the title’s reception, the lessons learned after its release, and the upcoming expansion Reaper of Souls in this PC Gamer interview. Without further ado, here’s a short quote to get you started:

PC Gamer: Sounds like the majority of your efforts since launch have been based around responding to fan feedback.

Martens: Yeah. And the auction house decision didn’t come easy. It’s not like the day we realized it was a mistake was when we could shut it down. A lot of things had to come together for us to get to that point. And honestly, what the console build did with their loot system… what we have now we call “Loot 2.0,” what they did I would call “Loot 1.5.” They had no auction house inherently, more because they couldn’t than anything else.

So it’s been a learning process for us as well. And finally as the loot stuff came together; as the enchanting system was dialed in; as our new legendaries were coming online, we realized that we could get rid of the auction house and get rid of that reward curve problem without causing new problems of people going back to trade scams or people feeling like they couldn’t have any fun gear. Now we can give it away like candy, along with all of these ways that people can upgrade it, and all these crazy powers. And you can get it the way you’re supposed to, which is by killing a monster and taking it from them.

PC Gamer: What else have you learned since the launch of Diablo III?

Martens: I think the randomness thing. We should have made everything random from the start. So the reason we didn’t have random exterior zones was because we wanted the game to have more of that real RPG feel; that the world was real and had a sense of place. And like the loot problem, until Loot 2.0 was really dialing in, it was hard for us to figure out what to do with the auction house; it was the same with the randomness. Until the other aspects that made the game more RPG and more connected to the world were dialed in… you know, we’ve gotten better at storytelling since Diablo III; the world map that comes with Adventure Mode makes Sanctuary feel a lot more real just because you have a map of it, if nothing else, and that’s a relatively simple solution to the problem. All of that made us comfortable with introducing randomized exterior zones as well.

Paolilli: Yeah, and that’s actually one of my favorite things that we’ve done. With the map you have that sense of place, whereas before I think the environments looked great, but you didn’t really have that sense of how everything is connected. And I think the map and the ability to go anywhere and do anything helps.

Martens: Dynamic Difficulty is another great example of that. We had our old-school linear difficulty that was inherited from the past, where you had to play through normal, nightmare, and so on. Dynamic Difficulty, which we made for Adventure Mode, allowed us to break that dichotomy for the game as well because otherwise we would have had to have a version of a monster for every possible level. So if you played Act II, we would have to have a Level 31, 32, 33… all the way up to 70 version of every monster for it to be fun. The overall Dynamic Difficulty system removed that burden and let us focus on a grander vision for our gameplay.