Diablo 3 News: October 3, 2008 Battle.net Forums: Diablo 3 Death and Resurrection Mechanics: (source) Before I get in to what we are doing let me go over some things we want to avoid with a death mechanic. We want to separate being in town and being out on a quest/adventure/dungeon as much as possible. Leaving the safety of a town should not be a decision you take lightly. We don't want to remove the sense of suspense and danger by making town something you're always going back to pretty much whenever you like. The intent is to create a greater separation from being in town, and not, and to make your time away from town a lot more tense. On that same note we also don't want to remove the player from the action. Throwing them back to town for every death really breaks up the action, and not in a fun, interesting, or necessary way. So, with these things in mind we've found that a check point system works really well. Throughout your adventures, and generally at the ends of each "floor" of a dungeon your character is saved to a checkpoint. When you die you're dropped back at the last checkpoint with a small amount of health, and the rest regenerates slowly. It's obviously a very forgiving system as it is. It's just too early to put a ton of thought in to what penalties there should be, if any, added on top of it. Regardless, potential penalties aside, this is the death mechanic we're currently using and it's working really well so far. September 28, 2008 Ausgamer interview with Blizzard's Jay Wilson at 2008 Games Conference in Leipzig, Germany. Here's some excerpts: Jay: Obviously the MMO space is a big influence and one of the reasons we ended up making an MMO was because we liked them so much. Even though it’s our own game, we’d look at World of Warcraft for influence more than anything else. It’s a game we really like and it’s my favourite RPG. I also liked City of Heroes a lot - one of my favourite games. Mass Effect is one of the games a guy in the studio really liked and I enjoyed. There’s probably a whole bunch I’ve missed but I’m actually on a dearth of RPG stuff, because I’ve pretty much only been playing Diablo 2. Jay: Well one of the things we’ve carried over is the way the general co-op features work,. When you’re playing the game you can have another player jump into your game any time so it’s very dynamic - the game adjusts automatically to the number of players who are there. One of the ways we’ve really improved that is what I like to say is our prime directive is “thou shall do no harm to the co-operative game” - something that Diablo 2 didn’t really follow. So on our side we really focused on changing a lot of those things. Now loot drops on a per-player basis, so if we’re all playing a game together and the four of us are all killing monsters - if you kill a monster while 3 of us are nearby, it could drop an item for every one of us. So my item will be seen by me but not by anyone else - everything I see on the ground is fair game for me. So overall - while it's not a completely fair comparison - generally there's not as much loot in Diablo 2 as people think. I think sometimes when people are making a clone of Diablo, one of the mistakes they make is to think the loot in Diablo was good - "we should provide even more loot!" The reaction to that is that when they don't get that number right, people become loot weary. 20 magic items hit the ground and people are like "whatever, I know there's going to be nothing there for me to use - it's all kind of the same." So it's really important that in the early game you get loot and rewards that go towards progression, but you really need to pace them out. In Diablo 2, what they did really well was in the first 10 levels you were constantly upgrading, but after that you could play five to six levels and see nothing. I think that's really critical to understand - that key of early rewards, then pacing them later on to make sure it keeps the player interested. Game developers in particular tend to be a more competitive; a little more hardcore. They love to like... kill the crap out of one another. So for them, they think that's what everybody prefers. Wouldn't that be what everyone wants to do? But a large majority of the gaming audience actually prefers a more relaxed gaming experience. I think one of the best examples is if you look on battle.net, the number of games that people player competitively, versus the number of games they play cooperatively against multiple A.I. - the cooperative games outnumber the competitive games, I think almost by a factor of two to one. So it's a fairly large group of people that actually prefer cooperative play, even in the game [StarCraft] known for its competitive play over almost everything else. So I think what it's really doing is opening developers eyes to a broader audience, and that's nothing but a good thing. Jay: Yes. The barbarian is the only returning class. Originally we actually planned to have no returning classes, but as we developed the barbarian, it essentially ended up turning into a barbarian. We sort of got to the point where we went – because we actually had a different name for him originally - I think were going to call it this other name and everyone else is just going to call it the barbarian, so maybe we should just call it the barbarian. One of the things we really did not want to do – it's why we set that initial goal to not repeat classes – was, we didn't just want a rehash; we wanted to make the sequel and the sequel has new gameplay and new experiences. I know a lot of people really love the classes in Diablo 2 and it's not my desire to intentionally arc those people – I like those classes to; I love the necromancer, he's my favourite class from Diablo 2 – but as our goal we really wanted to provide new experiences; that was our focus. You can't make everybody happy, but when the game finally comes out, I think players will find that there's a good class for them that they will love just as much as the ones that came before. And if they don't, I absolutely promise that in the expansions we will consider bringing back old classes. We just don't want to do it with our first, we really want to establish our own identity. AG: I know there's no set date, but we're talking about release late next year[2009], is that right? Jay: There's no set date. When it's done. AG: Would you say, obviously, that there's a while to go? Jay: I will not speculate on that in any way shape or form other than when it's done [laughs]. One of the reasons why we actually prefer a really long window before we release a game is because we want a lot of feedback; we want to hear what people like and don't like about it; we want to give them several opportunities to play it before release. AG: So can we expect car jacking in Diablo 3 then? Jay: Oh absolutely, we just added it last week! (full interview) September 16, 2008 random rumors: Diablo 3 release date before StarCraft 2? The latest unconfirmed Diablo 3 rumor from an “anonymous source from inside Blizzard” is that the game will take priority over StarCraft 2 in Blizzard’s development cycle. The mysterious Blizzard staffer says that while StarCraft 2 is still being worked on, only a small team will be devoted to it as compared to Diablo 3. This is an unusual rumor in that SC2 was announced far ahead of Diablo3 and from all the multitudes of gameplay demos released, StarCraft2 looks to be far ahead in development than Diablo 3. Another point is that Blizzard has different mostly independent teams working on each of its games, be it StarCraft, Diablo, WarCraft of WoW. So unless both games are at the point where only ‘tweaking and balancing’ needs to be done, it’s hard to see Blizzard shuffling their manpower around between completely different projects. Here’s the excerpt from the source: We received news today from an anonymous source from inside Blizzard, confirming that development of StarCraft 2 will be largely postponed until Blizzard's recently announced, and long-awaited Diablo 3 is ready for the market. [Starcraft 2] is still being worked on, but only by a minuscule amount of people compared to what [Blizzard] put on the Diablo 3 team. This has yet to be confirmed officially by Blizzard, and I personally doubt they will respond. Because this information was leaked unintentionally through a casual conversation with one of our staff members, we can not reveal the name of our source publicly - so to protect this individual and his/her position within Blizzard. Nor can we say that this came directly from Blizzard.
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