First, some nitty gritty about the characters themselves. We learned yesterday that the three Followers are the Enchantress, Scoundrel, and Templar, but just who are these characters? Each one will have their own unique story and personality to add to the game. As you play through the main story arc, you will run across these characters in need of some form of assistance. After helping them through their own journey, they will lend their abilities to you. As they venture with you, you will explore their backstories. They will make note of particular instances or comment on something that is going on. They will help tell the story to the player while they are out fighting demons instead of having to sit and read some books.
Beginning with the Templar, named Kormac, he is a stoic character with righteousness on his side. His order is actually trying to retrieve scrolls and books that Lazarus had taken before the story of Diablo I. Betrayed by a corrupt member, you will find Kormac locked up in a dungeon. After you free him and slay the corrupt order member, the Templar will offer his services of protection to you. Kormac has a varying play style that will be valuable no matter what class you are playing. If you need a tank character, he will be able to fill this role very well. However, if you are already a melee oriented character, the Templar can offer healing and other supportive abilities.
After finding and rescuing Kormac, the next Follower you will run into is Lyndon the Scoundrel. Lyndon is a dark humor type character with a questionable sense of morality. Once belonging to a thieves guild, Lyndon was disgraced and thrown out of the guild. Perhaps motivated for more personal gain, he will join you for opportunities to obtain better riches and items. Lyndon is a sort of throw back to the Diablo I Rogue. His focus will be on ranged attacks with the use of a bow or crossbow. However, if a ranged damage dealer is not something you are interested in, he also has a variety of other skills that are more focused on his Scoundrel title like helping you get more gold.
The last Follower you will run into, about a third of the way into the story, is the Enchantress Eirena. Her story is a bit more shady and will unravel as the story continues. All we know when we meet her is that she is following a Prophet who has the ability to control people. In the midst of a fight, she is trying to protect some people and needs your help to save them. After doing so, she will follow you on your heroic journey. Offering magic-based ranged attacks, Eirena will be able to cast from afar to deal damage. However, thanks to her skills gained from the Prophet, she can also offer you services in helping control your foes for you to kill.
Moving past their stories, we go into the mechanics of how this system will work. First and foremost, it is important to note that the Followers system will only be available to those playing in a game by themselves. If another player joins the game, the Follower will head back to your caravan. However, if you find yourself alone again in this fight, the Follower will come right back to aid you. This was done to help players who want to play by themselves but decrease the clutter if multiple people are in one game. Along with this, despite having all three Followers at your disposal, you may only use the services of one at a time. But do not worry, all three will gain experience regardless if they are being used or not. This will allow you to use them when you want to and not because you have to in order to level them up. You can also switch them out whenever you want to aid you best in different scenarios. If a follower "dies," you will not have to go back to town resurrect them. This is how it was originally planned but Blizzard felt like it took too much time away from fighting and caused players to not even use them. Instead, the characters will be knocked out temporarily. After about 15-20 seconds, they will regain consciousness and rejoin the fight. If this is too much time for you, you can channel on them and help revive them sooner. To help keep them fighting longer, they will also gain the effect from any health globe you pick up.
Each Follower comes with their own unique skill set to choose from. Every five levels up to 20, you will gain access to a new set with three different choices. You can choose one from that set to help cater to your liking. Along with skills, you will be able to customize your Followers with some gear. One amulet and two rings will be able to be equipped by them to help customize their stats to the play style you have planned for them. Along with this is a weapon slot. Each Follower will have a distinct group of weapon choices that they can equip but there will still be some variety. Perhaps a heavy damage dealer is what you want for your Templar, so you give him a two-handed weapon. But if you are looking for a tank, then you can give them a sword and shield. The last item slot, which can be seen in the inventory screenshots, is for a class specific item. The only one we know for sure is the Templar's tomes. Speculation for the other two may be a satchel or quiver for the Scoundrel and perhaps some off-hand orb for the Enchantress. These unique items will only be for each particular Follower. These characters were purposely left with a limit to their customization and stats to help lighten the load of these characters. Blizzard did not want players to feel like they were leveling a second character. Instead, you are able to help design this person who will fight along with you when needed.
Moving on to the last part, the way the Followers function in a game is very important. Their are no direct controls for your Followers. Meaning, you cannot tell them to attack a particular unit or to heal you whenever. Instead, this will all be handled by the advanced AI system that has improved since the previous game. Player control is more based on the skills you give them. An example that was given of the AI is the Enchantress' energy bomb skill. A massive AoE, the Enchantress will use this skill when the player is low on health to help clear out some demons and hopefully get some health orbs. Healing and other support skills will be used similarly to best help your character in the fight. Now, there are a lot of people who are afraid that these Followers can be used to do all the killing for you while you just stand and wait; this will not be the case. This is handled in two ways. First, monster AI is improved. Back in Diablo II, you could just stand back as all of the demons would attack your hireling. Now, monsters will not just target the player closest to them. Certain monsters are programmed to go after the person in the back first while others will go after the biggest threat at the moment. Players will constantly have to be on their toes this time when fighting hordes of enemies. If this is not enough for you, then each Follower can be managed to not steal kills from you and instead just help you kill them more easily. If you do not want to spec you Follower with damage skills, then you can focus on more crowd control skills so you can still do all of the killing, or even choose more passive bonuses like extra magic or gold find. Either way, they have designed these Followers to not be a necessity to the game but will just aid you if you would like. Keep in mind, that they will also still level with you even if they are not being used so if you decide you want to use them later, you will not have to go back to re-level them.
If you would like to read any of the interviews that were conducted, you can check out the links below. You can also check out the official Diablo3 site page.
Interviews:
- GamePlanet
- AUSGamers
- NowGamer
- FZ
- GameStar (it's German, here is a translation)
- IGN
- Diablo3-ESP
- GameInformer
http://us.blizzard.com/diablo3/world/systems/followers.xml
Doesn't that mean they WILL be in multiplayer?
I am hoping that the scale from useful to unusable is a little more gradual than it has been made out to be so far.
Singleplayer is singleplayer, and having a follower to help you definitely isn't less useful when the difficulty is harder - if anything I would have thought you'd need them more.
Moderately weak in Nightmare, weak but usable starting in Hell and then unusable by the end of Hell?
In saying that, I have never played the game and they have played it millions of times - I'm pretty sure they know what they're doing.
This follower system is a big waste of time in both consumer and developers' end.
We don't need an entire system that becomes useless, just so it "encourages" people to play "co-op".
Anyone sense an irony here? to play with Followers, we have to make a passworded game.
But yet, they want us to start playing with real people?
In addition, god knows how many times blizzard "iterated" through this follower system.
My guess is that it took them 5~6 months just to get this thing implemented...
Could've gone to design a better 5th class and name it better than a " Demon " Hunter...
Way to go Blizzard
On the side note, what is going on with this "too much action at once" on the screen.
We are not 5 years old who only have attention span of keeping one skill at a time. Most of us have played D2, and the sheer number of action that goes on with 8 man game is not all that spectacular. Having 4 players + 4 mercs is completetly fine.
Even in some MMO, 100 vs 100 was perfectly fine. It doesn't mean you are stacking 100 players into one screen, but just the possibility of interacting with other players are always open.
Step it up please Blizzard, we're in 21st century here.
Blizzard has spent 5~6 months recording the voices, creating a story line, creating a 3D model, animating, creating skills, animating skills, balancing the skills. Do you really think we need a complex system as this to get people to join a "multi-player" game?
If they wanted to make a tutorial, they would've made a better tutorial alright?
There are tons of better ways to make a tutorial and implement it in the game that would "ALWAYS" be useful. Meaning a small tip video or words from the townspeople saying "Join forces with your fellow fighters ! You put yourself in danger by fighting alone !"
Having all this work and system done just so that they'll be completely out of the content (once we are lvl 60) is what makes it a huge waste of time on blizzard's part.
They could have used their time more efficiently and effectively by creating a more "get to the point" tutorial that encourages people to play co-op.
These followers are getting their own story line, lol....
Little too much for a tutorial? It makes you wonder these followers are almost complex enough to be their own class themselves...
Too much work done for too little benefit.
Then why not just go and create a "tutorial" system instead of taking a system from the previous game and hacking it apart. I have yet to be disappointed in something blizzard has done with D3, but I'm definitely in that crowd on this one. Overall that's a great track record and I'll be playing this game the day it comes out, but I feel shorted on the follower system. I was expecting something as cool as the D2 mercs at minimum, not something 1/3 as cool.
Just my 2 cents.
oops, forgot to type anything on my post.
I have to disagree with the "time estimate" here. As you can see by my post above i'm not all that happy with this system either, but generally you can't get an overall feel for the effort on a project in the amount of time it takes from start to finish but rather the "man hours" it took. Because it could have taken 6 months from start to finish, but that doesn't mean everyone was working on that one thing the whole time. Heck, it may have only been something like 60 man hours, which is a few hours for several people across weeks of time.
Since we don't have *any* of this information it's clear your statement is purely conjecture.
We've heard all along that the enemy AI will be much more advanced, targeting different players and what not, so we will actually need strategy in order to defeat groups of monsters.
Compare this to D2, where there was almost no strategy except spam the same attacks and potions. Co op will no longer be about everyone travelling closely to each other just spamming attacks, but strategy will be needed. The followers seem like a good way to introduce people to this fact that the game will generally, be tougher.
Of course I was disappointed at first. But I started to realize this wouldn't be that bad. Lots of people like to play solo sometimes. The follower would be there to help out with your hell difficulty item finding runs. You could make a character built to work with his/her follower to farm items solo when you didn't feel like playing with anyone. So that, in my eyes, almost justified their decision to make followers solo only. I scratched my head a bit but then I accepted it.
THEN they told us followers were designed to only be useful on normal difficulty and they intentionally made them too weak to handle any higher difficulty. Coupled with the statement that normal difficulty is so easy you can mindlessly click your way to the end without using a follower made me realize that followers are, as other people have been saying, nothing but a tutorial. A very well made, very detailed, very awesome tutorial. But still a tutorial. So now I'm sitting here scratching my head at this decision again.
If followers were only there to help the story out a bit and not really intended to be used much except for the first few hours of the game why did they spend so much time and effort? They could have easily just made them NPCs that follow you around and have their own items and their own AI. It would have achieved the exact same goal and they could have saved themselves hundreds if not thousands of man hours. I think followers are cool but I don't understand why they wasted so much time working on them when they are pretty pointless in the long run. Maybe someone could explain why they did this because I'm baffled.
"... we will ensure followers are not part of the end-game MF equation. They are not intended to be, and we will take whatever steps are necessary to ensure they cannot be."
Making them useless in hell is a bit too harsh a step, in my opinion.
Right on, what bashiok said is kinda like what I said on the other thread. Since this is a new thread I will say it again, "a game is not made solely for you" (i'm talking in general btw esp. to those crying about the system). Blizzard is trying to create a game that will make different player who plays different game style happy.
I am trying to accept why they aren't allowed in multiplayer, too much clutter, and them talking all at once or whatever blah blah blah.
But I think it's stupid to have their effectiveness in difficulties go from, "Cool and awesome sauce" to "Gimp handicap fool" to "Useless decaying OD'in bum" (Also no offense to anyone who may be handicap)
I was like super excited when I first saw the trailer, and now it feels like Blizzard returned my Christmas presents right in front of my damn face.