Diablo III Interview
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Here's a snip:
DF: Josh, how did you get on board the Diablo 3 team? Was it something you were planning for a long time or did a position open up and you decided to try your luck?
Josh: That's a good question. When I joined Blizzard I specifically came here because I worked with Jay before. He approached me and told me they were looking for a lead for the console. Initially when I joined I was just really happy to take on the challenge of translating such an awesome PC game to console. I came from Ubisoft where I was Creative Director in a 300 person team, so I was really happy to lead a small team of about 20 people. It was a really nice change of pace. But then when Jay decided to step down and pursue different and awesome projects I spent a lot of time thinking two things in specific: how much I love the core fantasy of Diablo, but more importantly - just what a talented team 'Team 3' is and what a special culture the team had. I knew whoever the next Game Director was going to be, he was going to have a big influence on that culture. This team did an amazing job on Diablo 3 and I think that's just the beginning of what this team is capable of. I really wanted to be part of not just Diablo, but Team 3 in specific. After much thinking about it I decided to throw my name into the ring and I didn't realize that this was going to kick start a 3 hour interview process, which was pretty grueling, but at the end of the day I was really exciting to just be part of the future of Team 3.
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DF: You've hinted there probably won't be a patch before the itemization one. But just to confirm, there isn't going to be a patch before the itemization one, right?
Josh: That is correct.
DF: Well then, about the itemization patch: are there any new features that you're planning, but haven't announced yet? Josh: Well, yes and we won't be announcing them right now. I will say that we have really cool things planned and between now and BlizzCon you're going to be getting more and more information about what exactly's coming down the pipe in terms of Diablo 3, patches and other really cool things that at this moment we need to be very vague about.
DF: You talk about Thorns. Is it a good time to fix it in the itemization patch?
Wyatt: Thorns kind of touches on a broader topic, but as always it's Thorns specifically. There are certainly some item affixes in our game that can use a little love. Thorns is certainly one of those. We actually think Thorns isn't a fundamentally flawed mechanic, it's just that the tuning values that we currently have a little underwhelming. One of the things that we've already said we're going to do in the future with Thorns.
Travis: We have been working internally to have Thorns scale with your primary stat, but we feel like we need to do a lot of playtesting to know whether it's what we want. And in the grand scheme of things we're trying to look at all the item properties and item attributes that are underwhelming. Other examples might be healing from health globes which has dubious value, or life on kill. And we want to look at all those properties and say '˜How can we make these more appealing?' An example is the idea, which we've also experimented with internally, of having the Monk's Breath of Heaven scale off of your healing from health globes stat. With things like that we want to go through all the properties that are underwhelming.
