While Diablo III wasnt on display at GC 2008, we got an opportunity to sit down with the action-RPGs 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 Blizzards Worldwide Invitational event, a segment of the franchises fan base has been upset about the art style, claiming it didnt stay true to the darker nature of the previous two games. Wilson disagrees.
"To be fair, its a small minority that really doesn’t like the art style," he said. "A majority of the feedback weve gotten has been overwhelmingly positive about the art style -- I think when they see the final game theyll find its probably a bit darker than they might think. What weve shown is the earliest parts of the game meant to be a little sunnier and brighter than the later because were 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 didnt 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] theyre being very Selective in their memory. Theyre 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 wasnt making any sort of announcements for Diablo III. So far its 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 combat revolved around having a sufficient supply of potions at the ready to refill health. Well, thats not how its 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 thats 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 doesnt make it play like a better action game, it just kind of gives the player infinite health. Its 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. Thats not a very interesting monster. Its actually a horrible monster. But thats 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 Diablos treasure system. "Its perfect. You know, all well maybe do is tweak some little things that we dont like about it, some systems that we think were maybe a little broken. But for the most part, it works really well and we dont 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 wouldnt 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 Ive got to deal with an enemy, Im going to go in, stun a whole bunch of guys, and circumnavigate them to reach a health orb. Or Im going to stun them and take out a bunch of guys with the hope that Im going to get a health orb, and if I dont, Ill 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 thats 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 wouldnt argue with was the grid-based system allowed for very large icons which made the items feel better. So one of the things we dont like about the current inventory is the icons are smaller than wed like them to be, so were working on sizing up the icons themselves to be very large, much larger than say World of Warcraft ... Weve 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 havent really settled on anything like that. What we dont want is the grid-based Tetris sort of system."
A crafting system is also in the works, though it wont be anything like Diablo IIs Horadric Cube combinations. "I dont 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 weve had before."
Since our time for the interview was limited, we shifted gears into what Diablo IIIs environments might be like over the course of the story. "I dont think were going to have anything quite as out there as [Diablo IIs] Arcane Sanctuary. Id 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 theres never really been an invasion of Sanctuary, and I think from the trailer its obvious thats where were 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 youre really just facing the aftermath of Diablo walking through the world ... There was a bit of it with Lord of Destruction. Baals invasion was sizable, but we really want to go more, higher than that. Thats 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 thats the big problem. If you join into my game and Im three quests ahead of you, we dont want you to feel like Oh, I dont want to play with you because youre 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. Thats 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 couldnt do because your friend didnt have it ... We dont want you to lose anything by playing with someone else."