Official Blizzard Quote:
What we're doing right now is going broad across the whole game. 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.
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.
As was explained shortly after announcement, the newest installation in the Diablo franchise will be similar in length to Diablo II, even in act structure. That does not include, however, multiple expansions, and the introduction of more complex and diverse end-game systems and mechanics, such as randomized quests and the new crafting system.
Official Blizzard Quote:
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.
And, just like Diablo II and I, there will be nightmare and hell difficulties to squeeze out that extra bit of play time out of the same game. What you might not like to hear is how questing has been watered down from Blizzard's original ideas and vague promises post-announcement:
Official Blizzard Quote:
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.
Not sure what fans they asked about that, since basically any fan here would want something more interesting than fetch quests, and that example sounds frighteningly similar to Elder Scrolls IV's completely redundant and uncreative "close ten million Oblivion gates" quest, but I guess we can let the experts handle that. Right?
The actual skills, which have seen enough renditions to make politics look concrete, also have some changes coming out this Blizzcon. Wilson promises that this updated skill system will be seen (and possibly played?) at the coming convention, though he did elaborate slightly on what it would mean in terms of the old and the new:
Official Blizzard Quote:
We always wanted to focus on a system that reinforced what Diablo is, which is an extreme focus on a small number of skills. The Diablo II system forces you to get a bunch of skills you don't want and makes the door completely open. It says you can customize any way you want, which is great, it's part of the game, but the user interface doesn't imply any direction or focus, and as a result your player is very likely to end up being broken. Your player is very likely, the first time they play through the game, to put a couple points into every skill that they can, which is terrible. If you do that, you're not going to be a good character. What we wanted to make sure was that that didn't happen.
Though I think I've read contrary to the first sentence earlier in development, none of that matters now. Sweet, simple, classic Diablo skills are here to stay! What some of you might not be to happy about is the ending, there, which may destroy elements of difficulty, replayability, and overall learning curve. Is that a good thing? You decide!
Lastly, Wilson went on to explain why the team decided to scrap the gambling system and the Horadric Cube from older games, arguably two staples of the series that some of us can't help but to shed a tear for their passing.
Official Blizzard Quote:
The problem with the gambling system, which was a great system, but people didn't know it was a great system so they didn't use it. The more hardcore players certainly did, but the more casual player didn't see the benefit. We can tune a crafting system to make sure that early on in the game you always get something good. Because it doesn't matter if the system's balanced at that point. What matters is that when you get to the end game that it acts like a completely true random system.
[...]
Any system that essentially requires you to go on the internet to figure it out, that's a fail. That's a bad system. While we loved what those systems [like the Horadric Cube] did, we didn't like how they played. We loved combining gems together and collecting gems and we wanted to enhance that, but we didn't like that the collecting aspect caused you to not want to use your gems. So now we have an artisan that allows you to remove gems from items so that you can still keep them.
And there you have it. Enjoy, rant, or whatever. Thanks goes out to FingolfinGR for PMing me this tidbit!
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Posted Sep 2, 2010SC2 had lots of sideplots, and it did not work. The momentum of the story wasn't kept, there were way too many people doing too much over too little time, and it didn't feel solid, but rather like you copy&pasted different stories into each other.
While I do not think Blizzard's intention with their quest change has anything to do with this, I do welcome less focus on side-quests and side-plots in general if we receive a strong focus on the main storyline. That's what I want. Whether we get that or not because of this I don't know, but as long as we do, I don't care too much about side-quests.
If it had been possible to be even remotely successful with spread points in D2 while having beginning knowledge, I'd agree. But the sheer amount of trouble you get for spreading points just makes it too big of a problem. I mean, all that's required is a tooltip saying taht it's a good idea to focus your skill points. That's not a threat to replayability.
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Posted Sep 2, 2010I also might be reading too much into nothing and stating the obvious but notice when he talks about balancing out the class to work together. He says the ranged classes. To me, the WD is more of a mid-range class and not considered a true ranged class. So the plural would once again confirm some sort of bow user who is ranged.
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Posted Sep 2, 2010Oh, my bad! You did send me a PM yesterday about this, although I am missing any PM you sent me two days ago.
Depends a great deal on who you are. I only added a minority opinion in there because there were numerous flame wars started by two people I can think of off the top of my head because their ideas weren't represented. If you care, I can share those with you in private. I'm sure you know who I'm talking about, and if you don't, once I tell you, you will
I would say, however, that in a way it does spoil replayability in the sense that you don't have to replay the game to make a better character, since they'd just spell it out for you. However, that does not mean that the advice they give you is the best, since patching and stuff changes the online character build dynamic greatly, and then you have to consider PvP and the different builds you'll want for fighting certain characters, and certain specializations of those characters, and certain PvM runs and bosses.
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Posted Sep 2, 2010Well I don't mean for them to tell me which skills to invest in, only that, regardless of what skills I pick, I need to focus on just a few. That's not spoiling replay, that's like: vitality increases health. You should consider boosting your health in order not to die horribly.
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Posted Sep 2, 2010