Visual Effects of the Necromancer Panel Overview
This BlizzCon panel gave us some insight on how Blizzard created some of the visual effects for the Necromancer in Diablo 3. While we didn't get any important pieces of news, we did learn a little bit about how the Necromancer effects were made! Here are some bullet points covering several topics that were discussed.
Skeleton Mage
- This ability seemed strait forward at first, but it took a long time to find its spot in the Necromancer kit.
- Pets have an unspoken cool factor, and if they don't immediately feel awesome then it doesn't matter what the pet actually does.
- Once the team received really cool art from a character artist, it set the tone for the skill.
Readability
- Because of the nature of a Diablo style game, visual readability can often be a problem.
- With curses in Diablo 2, it was hard to tell what enemies were going to be effected by your curse when you cast it.
- This lead to a focus on showing the area your curse would effect when it was implemented into Diablo 3, and also if the enemies were effected or not.
- The icon that shows if an enemy is cursed was at one point multiple colors based on what curses were active or not, but they pulled back on the color since it started to feel clownish and too happy.
Creation of a Skill
- Starts between a dialog with the artists and designers as they determine what would best suit the skill.
- What is the best way to express the fantasy of the skill? What is its usage like? How can Players break the skill with legendary items later? What kind of damage type is it?
- If a skill is going to have a huge effect on screen, it can't also be one that you are spamming.
Poison Skills
- There weren't many memorable poison skills that the Necromancer had in Diablo 2.
- The Witch Doctor already had a poison theme.
- When it came to the death and decay theme of the Necromancer, it took on a dead serious look and tone compared to the silly tone the Witch Doctor has.
Team 3 Workflow
- The team doesn't use a "Waterfall Workflow" like others in the industry.
- They create a "Feature Team" that includes many people with all different skills, such as different kinds of artists and designers.
- The team meets often and discusses what needs to be done, rather than handing off responsibilities to separate departments without communicating between each other.
Command Skeletons
- Raising Skeletons from dead enemies meant you had to kill enemies before you can have skeletons, which can lead to game play problems.
- The team wanted to relieve players from the burden of having to raise the skeletons yourselves, but having them all at once made it not seem fun to use as a skill.
- This lead to the design we currently have. The skeletons summon slowly over time which feels like they are being raised from bodies, but you don't actually need corpses to do it.
Other Classes
- Playing a Necromancer with other Necromancers lead to a lot of readability issues. This lead to the team developing new tech that allowed some skills to play locally for the player, but not fully to other players.
- They found time to retrofit all of the other classes with this tech.
- This tech was added in the Necromancer patch.
Updating the Necromancer from D2 to D3
- In order to do it properly, they had to love the class and understand what the players loved about the class.
That was it....?
That was the only news from the fairly short panel. There is another one tomorrow, but we knew that Diablo news was going to be quite sparse this year.
Thanks for sharing. I actually find this stuff interesting. It's hard to go to my other diablo fan site because of all the negative comments. This actually shows that there is substantial work being done and that they consider many factors when implementing a change.
Still sucks Diablo isn't really a focus at Blizzcon. Makes you wonder the future of the franchise =/ Blizzcon 2018 D4? 6 years from vanilla and with probably 2-3 years until release?
"There weren't many memorable poison skills [...]" Sure there were. There was poison nova and - poison nova and...? Hmm...
Such a pity that army of the dead is so visually amazing, one of the best looking animations in the game.
AND NO ONE WILL EVER SEE IT
Next year is D2 HD. If they are making D4 or an aRPG in another universe it is 99% not a top-down view like D2/D3 and we might expect the reveal of that not earlier than 2019.
substantial work? they outline a few design processes, communication about how a skill is created and what it should do and a bit how a spell should handle. read: they have done next to nothing. and their talk about other departments or artists? ha ha! who? external people maybe? a few contracted clowns like in a kickstarter game?
there is a point in time in your game or career. and that is the point where you are holding out for straws and talking about some simple stuff only to fill a few minutes in a panel. we all know that there are great technologies at work when it comes to blizzard games. but why would the other teams talk about that in such a short time frame? they all have great going games, they all have hard work and the support of the company to show for it. what does the d3 team have?
indeed, what do they have? it is a husk of a former great franchise and blizzard is actively showing no compassion for it.
If something they are working it is another hero but not a new game D4 as so many people talking or should I say trolling about so yeah nothing new about D3 same old talk how it was hard to make necromancer from D2...
Yeah. they are totaly hiring a game producer to take the diablo franchise to the future, with mmo experience, just to make another hero for d3. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to understand they are hiring for a new game
They are indeed making a new game. Might not be diablo 4. May be something completly different like a diablo mmo or something else. But you can bet your ass that they did not hire a game producer for a unannounced diablo project. only to make a hero or a expansion to a dead game