Diablo III: Reaper of Souls Interview

Strategy Informer has cranked out an interview with Diablo III lead producer Alex Mayberry about the recent release of Reaper of Souls, how the team has changed the overall game experience since D3 first launched, the role that the community has played in shaping the action RPG’s future, and more.  A snippet:

Strategy Informer: Expansions have been overshadowed recently by DLC, what would you say separates Reaper of Souls from a conventional piece of DLC?

Alex Mayberry: Well there’s a lot more content. We made some major architectural changes to the game. The new loot system is significantly different from the previous system. And on top of that we’ve created a mode called ‘Adventure Mode’. So in Adventure Mode you’re not tied to the story. In fact you’re given random goals throughout the world, if you complete these goals you’ll eventually get a key for a portal, and it will build you random dungeons. Multi-floored, up to 10 floors. It takes from areas all over the game to make these dungeons. It randomizes not just the areas but the lighting and weather, and all the monsters. You’ll encounter combinations of monsters you’ve never even seen before. In the story mode every monster has a home. In this mode we break all those rules and conventions, so you’ll see monsters together that you’ve never seen before. And you play through a rift and there’s a boss at the end, and the bosses are all random, and of course you’ll get the chance of getting legendary items by doing this.

These are infinitely repeatable. To do that we had to change the difficulty system of the game, and refactor that from scratch. We now make it so monsters are all dynamic in difficulty meaning anywhere you go in the world the monsters will be at the appropriate challenge level. We’ve added a new class to the game, the Crusader. We also added an entirely new act. So the act is probably 1 ½- 2 x the size of act 2 in the original shipping game. We’ve added the Mystic, who does enchanting for you. Lets say there’s a great item drop, and it’s almost perfect but one of the stats is not for your character class. You can take the item to the Mystic, and for a price she’ll re-roll that stat for you, and you’ll get a list of other possibilities. You can keep doing this over and over again.

So there’s a lot of new content in Reaper of Souls, we made tons of new legendary items. In the shipping version of the game you could get a legendary item, it drops, you get the pillar of light, you’re excited but you pick it up and it’s for a Witch Doctor and you’re a Barbarian. Now the game looks at the class you’re playing and it builds an item tailored to the class you are. So when that legendary item does drop, not only is it likely it’s going to be for your class, but it will have properties on it that are tailored to your skills. It gives you the option to look at the item and then determine ‘I don’t usually use this skill, but because this item has a property that augments that skill I’m gonna try that out’. And the legendary items are built in such a way where they have a lot of synergy, so as you collect more of them, it’ll change the way you play the game.

So we really want legendary items to become game changing like items. So there’s a lot of content here. Blizzard expansions tend to be much bigger than the expansions other companies put out. If you compared them to other games they’re often the size of the game themselves. So it’s not standard DLC at this point. It’s a typical Blizzard expansion.