Diablo-Source

Diablo-Source: Ok, the first one is kind of directed towards artwork, what do you guys thoughts on the special effects and death animations since all the feedback fans gave at Blizzcon?

Julian Love: Well, actually, the feedback I found that the fans gave mirrored our own internal feedback. It turns out that in order to get the Monk and a number of other features for Blizzcon we just slapped a lot things into a special effects kit that were not meant for how often they showed up in the game and made the Blizzcon build a little messier than we had intended it to be. However, the way we tend to go about doing this kind of thing is to make everything too big on purpose to make sure that we've gone far enough. Once we realize that we've done that, we go through a period where we sort of pull things back. It's kind of akin to mixing music where you sort of record everything in full volume and then you go to the mixer board and you tweak knobs until you tighten everything up and get back into reality. That's the mode we're in right now, tightening some things up.

DS: Very Nice!, while talking to some of the artists when visiting Blizzard HQ during Blizzcon they weren't too sure about the red outline on the mobs or bad guys whenever you mouse over them. Can you talk about that or any of other changes you've made since Blizzcon in direct reference to the feedback you received from fans?

JL: Yeah, actually the red outline is still something we're adjusting, at this point I don't think we have too many plans of changing it. I wouldn't say that it's finished. The thing that we're looking at with the red outline specifically is to find that balance of player selection notification relative to different levels of combat. We want to make sure it's working while you're engaged with a lot of mobs, while at the same time maybe not being so loud while you're fighting with just a few. It's a matter of adjusting that balance over time till we get it where we feel it's just right. Definitely the tendency there is to error on the side of supporting gameplay and making sure that the game responds really well.

In terms of the changes that we've made since Blizzard, that we've really been working on lately along those lines have been towards player feedback in combat specifically. One of them being your ability to read when your health is low and another one is to pump up your ability to feel physical hits. Impacts didn't really have a lot going on and we felt that a lot of people were hitting monsters but not really feeling it. So we're taking a look at that right now.

DS: So are you thinking about like maybe a knock back or camera movement whenever you get hit hard, or just more animation wise as far as your character?

JL: Probably not with the camera, if you do that too much people tend to get a little queasy. But everything else you mentioned is something that's kind of on the table. I'm not sure if knock back would be the way we'd handle it, but we're looking at the character animation when you receive a big hit. We're also looking from the special effects point of view, putting some extra notification on the player receiving the hit and changing the way that stuff is visualized. Also maybe mixing some of the other things going on down in order to make those hits come up. It's the kind of problem you have to address with every single knob at your exposure.

DS: I am not sure if you're going to be able to answer a question about battle.net but here goes. Jay mentioned at Blizzcon that you're not that far in the development cycle yet (with b.net). Are you guys thinking about doing the same type of formula with Battle.net as being used with Starcraft 2 with achievement point-based content and customizations with your Diablo characters like maybe tabards, insignias or anything like that?

JL: Overall, what we're doing with Battle.net right now is more or less we're involved with a lot of the discussions and right there along side with Starcraft 2, watching what they're doing and taking notes on what they're doing that we could translate to Diablo. Obviously letting that team know the kinds of things we're going to be interested in doing. I know for a fact that we're going to do some kind of achievement system. The specifics of that I can't really divulge right now. But really it's a matter of letting Starcraft 2 go first and pave the way for us to follow.

DS: With the changes in the way items drop in Diablo 3 some players have expressed concern about things like Magic find gear, especially since Magic find gear would be directly responsible for things like damage especially for the Wizard. Jay mentioned that if you geared up completely in Magic find that you wouldn't be doing if she wasn't totally geared in damage gear. Are you guys doing anything to graphically represent "Hey, that player is obviously decked out in magic gear, he's not going to really help me out in taking out this huge boss"?

JL: Acutally I think that the quote that you're referring to, Jay was actually talking about a deficiency with Diablo 2 where it was actually the Sorceress who had to make that kind of compromise. She had to lower a lot of her damage down in order to gear up on magic find, but part of the problem there was that other characters in the game couldn't make that kind of trade and be successful. So it sort of led to a case where everybody plays a Sorceress character to have a magic find character. What we're trying to do with magic find is eliminate those kind of strange decisions to make but also not have the game lead to "If I want a magic find character, I must have X class". That we don't want to do. While we haven't finalized the details of magic find just yet, we're aware of the effects on Diablo 2 and we're looking to either negate or minimize them.

DS: But is there going to be any graphical representation of what type of gear you are wearing, like if you have a set that has plus to damage and the exact same set, but plus to magic find, are they going to look the same, or are you going to be tweaking them a little bit? For example, in Diablo 2 if you put nothing but perfect skulls in an item it would looked a little bit black compared to something that had perfect diamonds.

JL: We're going to have a lot of gear and we're going to have a lot of systems that change the look of that gear. Whether or not there will specifically be something that shows differences for a magic find based set versus plus damage, it's a little early to say. You're probably not going to be in a position in making a choice between being high damage and being high magic find. It really won't be a gameplay decision in terms of - like in terms of something we want to highlight so you can tell one player from another in that sense.

DS: Good to hear! Since you guys have gone away from the whole "need x amount of skill points in Juggernaut to get A,B,C skills", have you thought of doing anything similar to what WoW is doing with Cataclysm where so many points in one skill-set will give you an extra bonus to melee or even with items like an item of Awesome Juggernaut would give a bonus to Juggernaut.

JL: It's a little early for that, I'd say that from an item building standpoint we're just now actually getting the point where we can put a lot of focus on that kind of stuff. We've been working with a temporary item population to facilitate the development of the rest of the game. So we really haven't gotten to a point in the development cycle where we're putting a lot of focus on those kinds of intricacies. We've also just gotten to the point with the skill trees where we're pretty happy with the design and the way that it plays. We're really focused on getting those skill trees filled out for a lot of the classes. So it just happens to be that that's where our focus is right now.

DS: Have you made any User Interface (UI) improvements since Blizzcon?

JL: Yeah, we do that all the time actually, it just never stops. We have this really awesome UI designer named Mike Nickleson. What makes him really awesome is that we probably throw about a dozen UI changes at him a week, and he just fields them all and just copes with it. This is what's really allowing us to get to a point where we feel like we're going to be able to deliver a best of class UI experience. That said I don't really have any specifics other than one thing that I can pull out for you is that we have been working a little bit on the Wizard's resource visualization. That's the biggest thing that we've touched on.

DS: I'm not sure if this has been talked about much before, but do you guys have any plans for hireables, or hireable mercenaries on Diablo 3?

JL: Yes! We're going to have them, but we're calling them followers I believe - we keep changing the name. Essentially the hirelings or mercenaries - those are the names that people used before. The plan is to have them, but to change up how you work with them a little. [Checks with PR] That's pretty much all I have.

DS: Expansions and download-able content, are you guys - I know it's really really early in the development cycle to talk much about this, but can you talk a little bit about the plans for the higher level content and how you're going to keep players coming back? I think Jay hinted during Blizzcon that there might be updated quests to keep higher level content exciting to keep people coming back and playing again.

JL: It's not so much actually high level versus low level. I think we have a plan that facilitates high level content. What I think you're really getting at there is replayability, and what that gets down to is the way we're exercising randomness within the game. We've put a lot of focus towards what kinds of randomness are really beneficial in supporting replayability and what things are just, heh, not all that important or not all that awesome. One of the things that we have in the system that we have is something that we call - well, we have a really technical name for it - sub scenes

What it comes down to is we can sort of like create a hole in the world that's like a socket that we can fill with just about anything that we want. It could be empty ground with a bunch of monsters on it, it could be a giant canyon that a really elaborate scripted event happens, it could turn into a caravan walking across the desert that you have an escort quest on. The point being is that this hole in the earth can randomly, at any time become something totally different. It could even be a doorway to a whole new dungeon that you've never seen before. So, the fact that the world is able to change things up and actually deliver different events, stories and quests is what's really going to make the game a lot more replayable at the both the low and high ends.

DS:That's awesome. Are you guys going to build it so that say, a couple years after Diablo 3 is released you can get a new idea for a quest or dungeon that's not even in the game and upload that and it automatically starts rotating or randomizing into the games that are being played online?

JL: It's a little far out for something like that. It sounds great, [he laughs] I'll write that one down. It's hard to say, right now we're just focusing on trying to get a bunch of that good stuff into the game. We'll worry about how to facilitate things like that and expansions down the road.

DS: haha Sounds good. Have you guys sat down and decided on a number of acts for Diablo 3 yet?

JL: I... don't think we have actually. We have a lot of possabilities, but I don't think we've nailed that down just yet.

DS: Have you decided on the size of an act, like compared to an act in Diablo 2?

JL: Yeah, well, what we did do is we looked at act size in general as an issue. We looked at ones that we felt were good in Diablo 2 and ones that we felt maybe went a little too far and maybe got a little stale. At this point we don't have an ideal act size. Act 1 must be this big and Act 2 must be this big and whatever. What it really comes down to is given the content that we plan to build for each act, how often can we keep that content changing for the player. The big problem will be that if the content doesn't keep changing, that's when it gets really boring. We've got to keep throwing new stuff at the player every so often in order to keep them engaged. As soon as you run out of your ability to do that, that's when it gets old. That in itself tends to dictate the act size more than say, an arbitrary decision that we might make to say "well, it must be 2 miles..." - it doesn't work like that. Really it's kind of more of the case of the tail wagging the dog.

DS: I was wondering if you could talk about some of the motivation of some of our heroes and why they are fighting the forces of evil in Diablo 3?

JL: I think that gets down to some story elements that we haven't yet revealed. So I can't go there without revealing too much. So I think I'm going to have to leave it at that.

DS: What can you tell us about PVP?

JL: Just the overview, we like PVP we recognize that it wasn't treated very well in the previous games and we would like to do something to make it better for Diablo 3. What that will be is not something that we can talk about right now.