IGN recently had an interview with Jay Wilson about where Diablo 3 is in development. Here is what Jay Wilson had to say
We’re trying to build up all the content to enough of a point where we can get into polishing. We have good examples of what does it look like for monsters when we’re at ship level, what does it look like for classes, what does it look like for items, we have the answers to those questions, but there’s still some story and questing stuff that’s not hitting the quality level that we want, so those are the things we’re working on.”
Jay Wilson has basically said this in a few of the Gamescom interviews, but this is a more in-depth view from him. It’s good to see that some parts of the game are finished, or at least they are at shippable quality. The quests seem to be the last thing that the D3 devs are going to work on. Granted, they more than likely have been working on them for the entire project, but they haven’t found the right rhythm for the quests. At least, that is what it sounds like. Jay Wilson has mentioned before that the Diablo 3 team was working on polishing act 1 so they would have an idea of how to tackle the rest of the acts. It’s not clear if this was successful, but never fret, Jay Wilson has more to say
We’re still adding monsters, we’re still working on bosses, we have some that aren’t made yet, we’re working on every Act but we’ve got some areas that haven’t been built yet. We’re still building, but we’re building very fast. We’re not in discovery mode anymore.
The D3 dev team is knee deep in content creation mode! This is good, but it is a large portion of any RPG. Without content, a game tends tends to be very short, at least if it’s an RPG. The new monsters are probably from later acts. Hopefully these monsters are revealed to us at BlizzCon this year. To move on to another topic, Jay Wilson goes on to talk about the scope of Diablo 3
Honestly it’s similar size to Diablo II. There are some differences here and there, exterior environments are a little more diverse, dungeons are about the same. Even the way the Acts increase in length and then scale down. We intentionally did that again because we thought, some of that was done to ship Diablo II, but we thought it had a good feel to it to reduce the length of later acts so that you feel like you’re accelerating towards the finale.
Well, it was pretty much known that Diablo 3 was going to be roughly 4 acts, and that is the same size as the original Diablo 2. Not too surprising that D3 and D2 are of the same size. Mr. Wilson is most definitely correct in the shortened 4th act in Diablo 2. Act 4 only had 3 quests, compared to act 3 having somewhere around 6, and the same goes for act 2. I suppose act 1 had quite a few as well. It’s kinda hard to remember the amount of quests each act has, considering the number of times I’ve just rushed to the end of the game. Jay Wilson goes on to talk about replayability in Diablo 3
Just like Diablo II there’s a nightmare difficulty and a hell difficulty and the areas all have random distribution. All the dungeons are randomly generated. The exteriors have a set layout but they have random monster distribution and events within them. And most of the questing there is done in such a way that encourages exploration. For example you have to acquire some item that’s found somewhere in the zone, very similar to how D2 had some zones not random, so they quested them a little differently.
All of this is known, but the exploration bit is a nice addition. It will be interesting to see how the nightmare and hell difficulties differ from the normal difficulty. It would be awesome to see quests, and monsters, meaning rare monsters, that only show up in the harder difficulties. The next portion of this interview is interesting, since Mr. Wilson speaks of the quest layout
It’s a very linear quest line. We actually tried a much denser, more complex quest system and we found that players who played Diablo games just didn’t really want that. They wanted a more focused game. They wanted to stay focused on killing monsters, they didn’t want a lot of weird side quests. We do side quests but we don’t put them in the quest log, they’re events that occur within a zone that you can go “Oh, this Hell portal need to be closed.” And then you can close it and it’ll go, “there’s three more portals in this zone.” And you can decide if you want to close those portals but it’s optional, you don’t have to.
Yay! optional quests are always good. The dev team must of had focus groups to figure out the quest makeup. Hopefully they did enough of them to get a good feel of what the Diablo player wants in the game. The side quest system sounds a lot like the one in Red Dead Redemption. Someone comes along and asks you for help, and you as the player can decide if you want to help them or not. I found the system to be quite entertaining. The last bit of this interview goes over character classes
We wanted to solve some of the issues of the Diablo II system, and to be honest we wanted to do something new. We haven’t shown our new skill system yet but we’ll show it at Blizzcon. It looks a lot different. It’s actually functionally not that different from the D2 system. It’s got some key differences but in terms of the choices that it has the player make it’s actually very similar.
Well, there’s one thing that is guaranteed to be at this year’s BlizzCon. Many questions are created by this little bit here though. Will there be synergies? What are the differences that Mr. Wilson is speaking of? If only BlizzCon were to get here faster, but all of us must wait. I’ll keep you posted on any new developments!
Our Forum relaunched today and what would be a better warm welcome to all our new users as making them happy?
We are happy to announce that we will be giving away three DirecTV BlizzCon 2010 Virtual Tickets, one Diablo 3 T-Shirt and one special prize. The accesses will be sent to the winners shortly before the BlizzCon.
How to participate?
You simply have to register at our new forum and have at least 1 forum post to automatically participate at the giveaway of the 3 Virtual Accesses and the Diablo 3 T-Shirt.
But what’s with the Special Surprise Box? Well this box is in fact so special that you have to do more that you get what’s inside. The first member of our new forum who achieves 1000 (one-thousand) forum posts will get this (big) box full of Diablo swag and other goodies from all the other Blizzard Franchises. Believe me you want to get this! (one piece of the box will be sent to you when Diablo 3 launches). I guess everyone can guess what’s this piece. Spamming/Flooding the forum with useless posts is not allowed. You have to contribute useful and informative posts.
Swag to win:
3x BlizzCon 2010 Virtual Ticket
1x Diablo 3 T-Shirt
1x Special Surprise Box
This competition ends on the 1st of October!
All judges decisions are final.
Today a commercial trailer for the BlizzCon 2010 got released. Like last year, for all of you who could not get a BlizzCon ticket or simply don’t want to pay that much there is the Virtual Access from DirecTV. Next month DiabloSpot will giveaway several DirecTV accesses for BlizzCon so stay tuned. Till then have fun watching the trailer.
A battle.net forum member was curious to know if the Artisans will be in the multiplayer aspect of Diablo 3… I would hope so, since the online portion of Diablo 3 is more than likely very similar to the single-player portion. Here is what Bashiok had to say on the subject
You will see and interact with your own caravan while in a multiplayer game.
That doesn’t stop someone from crafting something from their upgraded artisan and trading it to you, of course.
Q u o t e:
Yea that was a concern I had as well. If you were lucky enough to find a very rare powerful recipe, you would want to control the production of it. It would have been lame if any1 in the current game with you could just start using your’ artisans at their leisure.
I always imagined a situation where people would have rare recipes and actually charge entry to their games so people could craft them. It has huge griefing potential, and really selling the crafted item is a cleaner way to make desirable items accessible. It does require the investment up front though.
It’s an interesting thing to have each player own their own set of artisans. It is similar to the chest in D2, everyone can see it, but no one usually has the same stuff in the chest. I’m guessing that if a player has an artisan that another player does not, the artisan will still be in town, but the player who cannot access that artisan will not be able to access them. Plain and simple. The player will probably get some sort of error message saying that they cannot use that artisan’s services yet.
I’m excited to see how crafting turns out in Diablo 3, hopefully there will be a ton of options for what can be done with it, and hopefully it offers items that cannot be attained otherwise. Granted, there needs to be items that are the opposite; items that can only be attained by dropping from a monster. This will give more facets to the player for getting good items. This idea of having items that can only be created by crafting, and only items that can be gained from looting has already been mentioned by Jay Wilson more than a few times. So, you can be guaranteed that it will be in the final release of the game. I’ll keep you posted on any new developments!
I decided to make a video for this years gamecom. It’s a compilation of the newly released information. Enjoy!
I’ll keep you posted on any new developments!
