Diablo III: Reaper of Souls Ultimate Evil Edition Interview

AusGamers recently chatted up Blizzard Entertainment’s Julia Humphreys and Matthew Berger about the additions and refinements they’ve been working into the upcoming Diablo III: Reaper of Souls Ultimate Evil Edition for those of you who choose to play the action RPG on consoles. While I’m certainly interested in checking out any good co-op game on console, I’m not sure I’d ever be willing to start over after putting so much time into the game on PC:

The enthusiasm both devs have for these few additions of the many we’re going through is, as always with Blizzard peeps, infectious. What’s great though is while I’m being told these things, they’re actually happening on-screen and it’s all very straightforward. In fact, you can be a veteran from the PC life of the series ready to retire your desktop crouch-sitting in favour of a laid-back couch game and you’ll likely heavily respect the seamlessness of it all. Diablo in its original form, in many ways, could be a lot of work and the ideology behind a lot of these changes on console is that it shouldn’t be. It’s not that it’ll be easy, by any measure, rather the things that should be streamlines have been and the things that should be fun and challenging have been embraced and expanded upon.

(The final element of Action-Combat we’ve added is Trap-Kills,) continues Matthew. (So you could always kill people with traps in our game, but we’ve increased the damage so it’s easier, and every time you kill monsters with traps, we’re going to give you increased Resource Regeneration.

(So you were always playing the game this way, we’re just embracing this and giving you even more reasons to do it and more reasons to change the rhythm of your game a little bit because, you know, as you’re chasing a Massacre result, you might end up getting too many monsters attacking you at once.)

The console game also flags loot drops that are specific to characters so you’re not sifting through items that aren’t there for you. Moreover, anyone can pick up loot and it’ll go to the character it’s meant to, regardless of who’s collecting. Again, it’s all part of the streamlining process, which again isn’t meant to dull the experience, but rather expedite your shift in and out of monster encounters. Breathers and micro-management are one thing, but when you’re pulled out of the action too long because of lengthy and trivial things like picking up loot, the way the game works now makes much more sense.

(On console there are very few restrictions on what you can give other players, very few things are account bound,) Matthew reveals.

There are also mailboxes in the game that remind you to interact with your friends and allow you to share items, but like with everything else already mentioned, this just wasn’t enough, and so mail is also a renewed system.

These are built to send items to your friends by way of gifts and Julia explains that when a Legendary item drops, there’s a chance another item will drop that is tagged for your friend. It’ll actually have his or her name on it and you can then go ahead and mail that to your friend and whichever character they open that gift with, it’ll either roll a Legendary or Rare item for that class.