Episódio 5

Bashiok: I thought it was awesome, just the entire experience of being there. You know, knowing what was coming up by you know, by being involved, obviously, on the project. And just that anticipation, I think I was in the front row with my head in my hands just you know waiting for the reaction to the announcement. There was just an overwhelming explosion of noise behind me when everybody was just cheering and going off.

Nethaera: There was so much to take in and you know I tried to get around wherever I could. I was having a good time being able to interact with some of our fan sites who were out there as well so you know that was great, getting to meet people face to face but you know it's just great whenever you get a chance to actually see a live match and hear Bunny calling it out and doing the shout cast and everything. It's just so exciting to be there.

Bashiok: Cool

Nethaera: Seeing everyone taking it all in and you know, concentrating on the action going on in the screen and getting into it with everyone else and being able to do a little geek-out with everybody, you know?

Bashiok: Yeah, long lines, it was a full blown event, there were all sorts of activities, like we had a signing table where you could get signatures from, like some of the lead artists and designers and developers and there was um the TCG section where people could go play the WoW TCG.

Bashiok: Yeah a huge TCG turtle mount was like actually there, you know modeled out of I don't know what but people could go and sit on it and take pictures.

Nethaera: They also had the new miniature game as well for people to check out. That was there.

Nethaera: Yeah

Bashiok: Yes they did, every goodie bag came with a WoW mini I guess.

Bashiok: It was awesome there was all this other stuff in that backpack they gave us, so everybody got one that went to the event. It doubled, as you know a nice carryall for t-shirts that was another thing that was cool: the store. You could go buy posters and t-shirts. There were Diablo 3 T-shirts.

Bashiok: They were smart and had 2 stores so they were able to fill orders

Bashiok: It was pretty cool, I mean I'm not like an endgame raider by any stretch so it was really a lot of fun to see people there, you know actually doing the instance live and giving commentary on what they're doing, how the fights were progressing and all that.

Bashiok: I think it's important to bring some of the larger players to the forefront, we've been doing it for so long for like the StarCraft pro-gamers and stuff like that, but these arena guys, the endgame raiders are just as hardcore if not more. And they're like really into this stuff so, it's exciting.

Bashiok: I think there's a point where the players can surpass the developers to some degree in their dedication to the game, which is exciting and scary at the same time.

Bashiok: Yeah, I interviewed the lead designer on Diablo 3, Jay Wilson, talking about his experience at WWI, the development of Diablo three and some of the topics that have come up since the announcement, some of the hotter topics. So, it's going to be fun. Get ready for it.

Jay Wilson: Hello, I'm good, How are you?

Jay Wilson: I think the thing I enjoyed the most was doing the autographs; you know we had an autograph table there where we would sign posters and books.

Jay Wilson: They brought Diablo 2 manuals, I think they were hoping, you know they brought lots of stuff for us to sign and it was really cool to be able to like talk to people one on one. Have the whole little subsection of the team there. We had artists drawing little impromptu sketches in people's books and that was really fun.

Jay Wilson: Well the team's pretty big so we've got them split up on different things. Most of the art team is actually working on the second act of the game, because a lot of the team is really production focused now and we're generating content for the most part a lot of the tech and underlying engine is really solid. Most of the design team is still on Act 1 because we're refining and improving the quests and flow and some of the big game systems that we haven't really announced yet. We kind of dove back into content production fairly quickly.

Jay Wilson: We spend, we initially kind of work in a linear fashion, we've started at the beginning of the game and gone to the end and there's a lot of different ways you can do it but since so many of our systems are progression oriented it's easier to start at the beginning.

Jay Wilson: But you want your best work, which you tend to do latest in the project, to be at the beginning of the game. So what we try to do is focus. We focused on Act 1 a lot because it was just kind of the core of our game and you know, getting the game play fun and getting monsters to be cool and all of those things. Once we felt like it was good enough, we moved on to Act 2 but we'll come back to every act along the way, especially Act 1. We'll probably do a major iteration on it later in the development cycle. It's pretty much how Blizzard works; we have a tendency to iterate over and over again on everything we do. So we build something and then we rebuild it. If we haven't rebuilt something five times it really doesn't deserve to be shipped. That's pretty much our policy.

Jay Wilson: Well, Diablo, at its core is basically a trader's game. If you look at other types of progression based RPG games, World of Warcraft is a great example. In World of Warcraft the best items are you know, held by the raiders. In Diablo the best items are really held by the traders. You know those people that are really good at trading with other people. We have no intention of destroying that design or that group of players. That being said a bartering system is actually a very exclusionary trading system; it essentially favors a very small group of elite people and it's not just that those people have entry into it. It's that anyone who wants to gain entry to that system, anybody who wants to just trade items with people, they have this huge barrier to entry, they just can't get into because they don't the value of items, they don't know what's worth what, they don't know what they need. So an elite trader would probably say, ‘Oh well, I like that I have this exclusive knowledge,' but he's actually denying himself customers essentially because there's no common language. A currency really provides a common language: that's the point of a currency. So we do want to support some kind of currency, we don't want to do some of the stuff that Diablo 2 did where they kind of actively devalued gold. We really do want to make gold, or potentially another currency – it may not have to be gold – a valuable commodity that players can use to be able to trade items. That being said it doesn't really prohibit item trading like people can use items as a currency. We have no intention of adding a Bind on Pickup or Bind on Equip, if we did it would probably be for like quest items not for actual functional, like items which people use to hack down monsters and stuff. There's nothing that's stopping bartering in that system but it does give people at least some kind of language you know if you've got two items and ones like a little bit more valuable, you can pad it with currency as well.

Jay Wilson: Really we're trying to allow more people to get into the trading game because the more people that are in it the more fun it will be.

Jay Wilson: Greatly. Monster design and ability design go hand in hand. A lot of the times, creation of a particular monster will incite the need for a new ability or a new kind of capability on the characters and vice versa. A lot of times when we think about what monsters we want to put in the game, we think about, ‘Well what can the player do?' ‘How can we challenge them in a way given what we know about their strengths and weaknesses?' So yeah they go hand-in-hand.

Jay Wilson: They're actually pretty simple. I know there is a contingent of players who absolutely love the grid system, but for the most part, it's pretty un-popular with players. With the team in general we have a lot more people who dislike it than like it. In general feedback we've gotten, there's a lot more people who are happy that it's gone than, you know, wish that it was still there. That being said, we recognize that the real purpose for the grid-based system, really one of the coolest things was that it made the items feel a little more real, because they were larger, when you were interacting with them in your inventory. So, we tried to keep that in mind and really change how the look of the items and look of the icons so when you open up your inventory the items feel more real. We're actually not even happy with that; like, some of the feedback we got on just what people saw and, the fact that there were people who were unhappy with it. It made us really go back and revisit that. Right now, we're actually trying to design a new inventory that has even larger-sized icons and, again, makes the items feel very real, and you know, that's a focus we're trying to get the best of both worlds, but ultimately we made the decision because it's not a very popular feature.

Jay Wilson: Well, I think as long as there is limited inventory space, which pretty much as long as there's limited hard drive space there's going to be limited inventory space, you're going to have people who are going to want to mule, like, you want to store items. Storing items is fun, like collecting items is fun; that being said, the way that people had to do it in Diablo II was not fun at all. So, what we're going to be looking at is, you know, generally we don't want to encourage mulling, we don't want to make it the way people want to do- simply because the way it was done in Diablo II wasn't fun. So, we're going to make a lot of changes overall to how inventory's done. One of the first probably- I think all these changes will actually be quite popular, which is one of them is going to be we're going to give people more inventory in general- just a little bit bigger inventory. It's also easier with a one-slot system actually, because you don't have the items eating up so much screen real estate, you don't have the risk of an especially large item just destroying the inventory space, but creating tons and tons of room for lots of little items. So, we have a lot more control with that. The other one is we're going to give people lots of ways to expand and deal with your inventory and… more info on that, coming in the future. And then, the last one is we really want to make it easier for you to be able to share and trade items with other people and other characters on the same account. We've talked about ideas like a shared stash, or a mail system like World of Warcraft has, and we haven't nailed down exactly which one of those we want to do, but we're definitely going to do something like that, that's going to make it really easy for you if you've got, a witch doctor and a barbarian character, and you find that awesome witch doctor drop and you want to share it, it'll be super-easy to do that.

Jay Wilson: I think there's some truth to that, primarily with charms, but then I think anybody who looked at the charm system would probably say, ‘yeah but I don't want a bunch of charms taking up my inventory. Like, inventory is for inventory, charms should be separate.” But, as far as other items, like, “I'm not going to carry this suit of armor because it's really big and I can carry rings that sell for more,” that's not really much of a choice and it's pretty obvious what the best choice there is- to just carry smaller items. So, there is some game play to that, but, you know, I don't want to dismiss it, and like any other design decision there's a tradeoff, but ultimately, so many people disliked the grid system overall that the benefits of it just did not outweigh that general kind of aggravation that people had with it.

Jay Wilson: Ah, the art question. This one's pretty complex, um, so you know, I can first say that the response from the team has been, that really what we've heard is kind of an overwhelmingly positive response. We know that there are some people that are very concerned with the overall tone of the game and tone of the art, and, kind of what we wish we could do is take them through the last two and a half years of, you know, where we basically, created and dumped two complete art style directions. So, I'll kind of go through and explain all the reasons that we went into this decision. So, the original two art styles that we did were probably more in line with what some of the sample shots that people put up online of what they were hoping the game would look like, and, you know, they were very dark, they were very monotone, a lot of grays, a lot of brown, not a lot of color. And the problem we had was that it just didn't produce a very good game for us. Diablo is game that you spend hundreds of hours in as opposed to, if you look at a lot of the current round of very realistic, very grim, gritty games, you know, a lot of those are five, six hour games. So, a gray-brown environment, gets old very quickly when you're playing it for, tens or twenty, you know, a hundred hours potentially. So really, environment change was a critical part of Diablo II. What made Diablo II so compelling was, the environments changed drastically very often. So, if your environments are all kind of grey-brown it doesn't work. So the other one was that we, it was actually not very easy to play the game; Diablo is a game where you fight a lot of monsters and not just a high number of monsters, but a lot of different types at once and you're facing, three, four, five different types of enemies at a time. So being able to identify those enemies was critical. And what we found was, again, when we made the enemies that very realistic dark, gritty look, like the environment, they all just kind of blended together, and again, it made the game not very fun. So, at that point, after we had done this twice and gone, “wow, we really don't like the results here, we started going back to Diablo II in particular and looking at it, trying to figure out what Diablo II did, that worked so well. What we found was that a lot of the ideas that made Diablo II work well, just didn't translate well to 3D. We also found a very different game than a lot of us remember, even though a lot of us played the game still, like a lot of us are still big Diablo II players, we still have kind of this idealized vision of it where we really remember, like, Durance of Hate and act I dungeons and we kind of conveniently forget, you know, the act II desert and the really bright lava hell levels and the things like that that are filled with a lot of color. And we saw that and we were kind of surprised. We were like, “wow, look at how green the fields are in act I, look at how much color there is in this world.” We also were kind of surprised by the monsters, the monsters are really almost garish in Diablo II, they're very, very bright. And this makes them, you know, you'll have like a bright red fallen next to a bright blue, I think they're called blood hawks, somebody's going to lambast me for not getting the name right. And you've got a corrupt rogue who's bright white and then you've got these, you know, big, hulking windigos that are brown and, you've got all these different color palettes all at once, and they're all very, kind of out there and garish; the reason is so you can tell each one apart. You've got a big guy who's brown, you've got humanoid person who's white, you've got a squat humanoid who's red, you've got a bird figure who's blue, like each one has a different profile, each one has a different color and they all really stand out. So, we tried that idea, and it didn't work. Once you took that idea of very bright, very garish monsters and put them into a 3D environment, it was almost like taking a comic book character from the pages of a comic book, and putting them in a movie- the suits don't translate, those primary colors don't work. And so, with the higher resolution, and things like that, so we had to explore other options. And essentially, that's what brought us to this current art style, where we really focused on, well, a couple things. One, we decided that we really didn't want to make- we did want to make a kind of a realistic-looking world, but we also decided that realistic just does not equal gray and brown. The real world's filled with all kinds of colors. We also decided that we didn't want to make, while we wanted to make a more realistic world, we didn't want to make a photo-realistic world. Again, a lot of games are doing that, it's not what Blizzard is about. We wanted to see if we could create a game that visually had an art style that was unique- that's stylized without being cartoony. So, I know that's kind of a lot of information, but it's probably our biggest struggle with Diablo, was Diablo III was trying to the art style right, and we're really proud of how it turned out and so, that's just kind of my effort to explain how we got to where we are.

Jay Wilson: No problem