Diablo 3 News: August 27, 2009 Diablo III Might Be Coming to Consoles: (source) BlizzCon was a flood of news, with the company talking to fans about the fresh World of Warcraft expansion, named Cataclysm, about Starcraft II and its wonderful map editor, and, of course, about Diablo III, announcing yet another character class, the Street Fighter-inspired close quarters Monk. But one detail went pretty much unnoticed for a few days after the convention: the fact that Blizzard might be close to, for the first time, creating a game for other platforms than the good old PC. Yes, evidence is mounting that Diablo III might be coming to home gaming consoles, presumably the PlayStation 3 from Sony and the Xbox 360 from Microsoft. August 25, 2009 Diablo 3 Monk Skill Tree Stats: (source) The Monk’s skills were an odd mixture at Blizzcon this year. There were only 8 of them, spread over 3 generically-named skill trees, but all of the skills in the game seemed very polished and worked nicely. I suspect that a lot of others are done but were held back to retain more surprises, and that lots of others must be in the “under construction” phase. There were no skills shown with icon and description, and a “disabled” tag, as was true for the other characters. With only 8 skills, divided up 4, 2, and 2 by tree (The 3 trees which were memorably named “Skill Tree A,” Skill Tree B,” and “Skill Tree C.” Catchy! Descriptive!) there is no way to say how they will be grouped or what sort of trees the Monk will ultimately have. The 8 skills themselves were quite well defined and were all fully functional and polished, and I used them all during my hour+ playing the Monk. The demo character starts off at level 12, with points in 6 of the skills. I leveled my Monk up to 15 by clearing out every bit of the large, multi-level demo, and adding earned points to enable Way of a Hundred Fists and Inner Sanctuary, so I could test those as well. One interesting detail was that the skills on the fourth tier, shown between level 15 and 20, were usable as soon as I reached level 13 and had a point to place. Looking at the tree, I thought I’d be unable to use that skill until level 15, since they were listed horizontally, between the 15 and 20 on the left side of the skill tree window. (The same was true of the other characters; they could put points into Tier 4 skills at level 13, so it wasn’t just the Monk.) It’s not clear if this was a change made just for the demo build, or if it’s a change/difference in how skill requirements are processed in the game. August 24, 2009 Diablo 3 to come out in 2011?: (source) Much to the chagrin of those who were expecting Diablo III to arrive next year, Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime has confirmed that just-revealed World of Warcraft expansion Cataclysm and StarCraft II are the two titles the company expects to hit in 2010. July 28, 2009 Battle.net forum, clarification of drops in Diablo 3: (source) We don't want to bias the drop system into only giving you items you want or can use, it would be a trading and economic killer. We want to encourage trading and encourage people to see worth in items even if they can't use them - give them to friends, use them for other characters, sell them, trade them, etc. Along those lines but somewhat off-topic we do now have some restrictions on weapon types usable by each class. It's been part of the game for a while now. Allowing every class to use every weapon type was actually going to require a huge amount of time and effort and it would have meant cutting out or cutting into other features. We evaluated really how often people would want to have their class holding a weapon type that (traditionally) contradicted their class-style versus that work going in to other features - specifically having a lot more skills and a lot more skill-rune effects. We made the obvious choice which is making sure there are a ton of awesome skills and rune effects to choose from. Because I can see the conclusions being jumped to RIGHT NOW in my old cranium - let me state that weapon types do not dictate stats. At least not wholly (barbarians can't use staves so there's no point in allowing fury related stats on them). We understand that the game is about variation, customization, and experimentation in class builds. We're not World of Warcraft, we're not looking to make weapon stats "optimal" for the types and classes that will use them. Which is to say, we're not going to put specific stats in specific amounts on each weapon of a specific type because we're making assumptions about what each class wants out of their stats. We want variation, and experimentation, and all that good stuff. These restrictions don't affect those goals, it really just means you probably won't see a wizard lugging around a two-handed axe. Kind of a bummer, but then think about what it affords us to work on with more and better looking skills, a more robust rune-skill system, etc. We want to spend our time and effort on what makes sense to making the game better. January 3, 2009 1up.com interview with Jason Wilson: (source) We recently talked with game director Jay Wilson and covered all sorts of nitty-gritty Diablo 3 topics, like why the Barbarian class is the only holdover from Diablo 2, what makes a Witch Doctor different than a Necromancer, and just how far along the classes are (you'd be surprised!). JW: When I started the project, I was a lot more fixated on what I wanted to keep. I really wanted to work on Diablo because I didn't want someone to take it and turn it into something else. I didn't want to make it a first-person shooter or a third-person action game. I wanted it to be the isometric Diablo that I knew and loved. I wanted the item-gain to basically stay the same. Certainly, when people see Diablo 3, they'll find lots of little changes that make an impact. But overall, the item-gain is the same basic concept as in the [previous Diablos]. The general feel of you versus a ton of enemies, the dark tone of the universe -- all of those things, I thought, were really important to keep. |
       
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