August 20, 2008 - While Diablo III wasn't on display at GC 2008, we got an opportunity to sit down with the action-RPG's lead designer, Jay Wilson, to get a sense of how things are coming along in the much-anticipated sequel. Since the game was recently announced in Paris at Blizzard's Worldwide Invitational event, a segment of the franchise's fan base has been upset about the art style, claiming it didn't stay true to the darker nature of the previous two games. Wilson disagrees.
"To be fair, it's a small minority that really don't like the art style," he said. "A majority of the feedback we've gotten has been overwhelmingly positive about the art style…I think when they see the final game they'll find it's probably a bit darker than they might think. What we've shown is the earliest parts of the game meant to be a little sunnier and brighter than the later because we're trying to set a juxtaposition and make everything feel worse as the game move on. In terms of the actual art style, we went through three full art revisions where we essentially hit the reset button on all the art and started over again and one of the main reasons was when we tried to go towards what our memory of Diablo II was we found that it created a drab, boring game that didn't play very well."
"One of the things I try to remind…people who talk about the art style and what Diablo II looked like, [is] they're being very selective in their memory. They're remembering small parts of Act I and small parts of Act III and conveniently forgetting all the green fields of Act I and all of Act II, which is actually one of the most popular Acts. The general kind of almost garish look of the monsters really made them stand out, and those things made the game play really well. They were actually criticized at the time. When Diablo II came out it was panned for being too bright and cheerful compared to the original Diablo. Of course the original Diablo drew like little red lines around the enemies so you could actually see them."
Blizzard wasn't making any sort of announcements for Diablo III. So far it's just the Barbarian and Witch Doctor classes that we know of, and we were told Blizzcon 2008 will be the place for another reveal. So we took the opportunity to ask Wilson about some of the design changes with Diablo III, particularly with the removal of potions and the slotted inventory system. Players of the first two games will remember how much of combat revolved on having a sufficient supply of potions at the ready to refill health. Well, that's not how it's going to work in this game; there are no health potions to be purchased at vendors. Instead, groups of enemies will drop health orbs that instantly restore lost hit points and disappear if not collected within a set time. Wilson described why this decision was made.
"A lot of people, I think, would say that's a hallmark of the Diablo series, the potion system. We looked at it and said, 'No, that just makes the game worse,'" said Wilson. "It doesn't make it play like a better action game, it just kind of gives the player infinite health. It's actually a fairly poor recovery mechanic because it forces the designers to design monsters that have to deal with a player that has infinite health. The only thing you can do is have monsters that can overcome that health and essentially one-shot you. That's not a very interesting monster. It's actually a horrible monster. But that's the only option. The design shoehorned the designers into that kind of monster design. So we focused on a health system that actually forces the player to think tactically to recover health from monsters and to put them in some situations where they are low on health but have to walk into an enemy encounter anyway. That makes for a much more challenging encounter but it also makes for a situation where we can design the monsters to be a lot more interesting. We actually can lower damage on monsters. We want monsters to do less damage because we want them to wear you down over time and do things that are challenging in different ways."
Wilson was more positive about Diablo's treasure system. "It's perfect. You know, all we'll maybe do is tweak some little things that we don't like about it, some systems that we think were maybe a little broken. But for the most part, it works really well and we don't really want to change it, but the combat, oh, that could be so much better."
Going more in-depth on the subject, Wilson explained how the early parts of Diablo III would be similar to Diablo II. The new types of systems wouldn't be felt as much until after about 10 levels or so into the game where players will have a larger number of skills to use in dealing with groups of foes. "The goal is to have players use skills where previously they would have used a potion," said Wilson. "If I've got to deal with an enemy, I'm going to go in, stun a whole bunch of guys, and circumnavigate them to reach a health orb. Or I'm going to stun them and take out a bunch of guys with the hope that I'm going to get a health orb, and if I don't, I'll use some other kind of mechanic to deal with that threat."
With the inventory screen, players will no longer have to deal with items taking up multiple slots as in Diablo games past. Now, all items will just take up one slot, though exactly how that's going to be implemented is still being worked on. Wilson explained some of the issues being taken into consideration. "The one really great thing that most people wouldn't argue with was the grid-based system allowed for very large icons which made the items feel better. So one of the things we don't like about the current inventory is the icons are smaller than we'd like them to be, so we're working on sizing up the icons themselves to be very large, much larger than say World of Warcraft…We've experimented with other things like having different bag types hold different kinds of items, like big items go into this bag and small items go into this bag, but we haven't really settled on anything like that. What we don't want is the grid-based Tetris sort of system."
A crafting system is also in the works, though it won't be anything like Diablo II's Horadric Cube combinations. "I don't know if I can think of a comparison," said Wilson. "I think that system is a pretty cool and different kind of system from anything that we've had before."
Since our time for the interview was limited, we shifted gears into what Diablo III's environments might be like over the course of the story. "I don't think we're going to have anything quite as out there as [Diablo II's] Arcane Sanctuary. I'd say the scale and scope of the game in terms of the threat you end up facing is much, much higher than the previous games. I think if you look at the cinematic trailer there's never really been an invasion of Sanctuary, and I think from the trailer it's obvious that's where we're headed. A lot of what happened in the original Diablo was very small in scope. Even in Diablo II you traveled all over the world, like you're really just facing the aftermath of Diablo walking through the world…There was a bit of it with Lord of Destruction. Baal's invasion was sizable, but we really want to go more, higher than that. That's about as detailed as I can be without giving away key story elements."
Wilson went on to talk about how story would work when players join up to play co-operatively online. "Our leaning tends to be towards people playing together over always maintaining coherency of story. Because that's the big problem. If you join into my game and I'm three quests ahead of you, we don't want you to feel like 'Oh, I don't want to play with you because you're three quests ahead of me.' So what we try to do is lean more toward 'Okay, you can get done everything from this point on, and then you can come back in a previous game and finish these other things.' That's the one advantage the Diablo series has. People are used to returning to games to get things done, kind of like in an MMO where you return to a zone to finish that one quest that you couldn't do because your friend didn't have it…We don't want you to lose anything by playing with someone else."
Diablo III doesn't have a release date at the moment, as Blizzard is saying it'll be done when it's done.
