Diablo III Forum Activity

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Written by BuckGB on July 21st, 2009

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Just like Diablo II we're saving secondary weapon/shield slot and hot key for the expansion.

Kidding! ... probably. We don't have it now, but that doesn't mean there won't be one. I don't think it's an irrelevant question, maybe just not the most pressing one.

I don't think it NEEDS to be there. It's not really an iconic part of the game. The gameplay dictates its necessity, and if there's no reason to hot swap weapons mid-fight, then having it there just clutters the UI.

Personally I just used it in Diablo II for extra item storage.

Hey!

The following is posted on our EU WoW forums (http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=10106902396&sid=1):

We're pleased to announce that Blizzard Entertainment will be attending gamescom 2009 in Cologne, Germany next month. We look forward to welcoming old friends and new to our booth, which will feature hands-on gameplay with our upcoming games. Our booth is open to the public from Thursday 20 August until Sunday 23 August.

We will be revealing more information on our activities during the show in the coming weeks. You can find out more about what gamescom has to offer, and how to get there, at http://www.gamescom-cologne.com/

Our recruiters will be at the booth ready to answer your questions about recruitment and working at Blizzard Entertainment. Blizzard Europe currently has numerous open positions in quality assurance, localization, customer support and other departments in our offices in Velizy, France (near Paris) and Cork, Ireland. We're looking for Italian, Polish, Russian, German, French, Spanish and English speakers. Bring your CV along and talk to us about our employment opportunities. http://eu.blizzard.com/en/jobs/

"Upcoming games" isn't broken down to specifics, but StarCraft 2 and Diablo III are both upcoming games, so draw your own conclusions.

We definitely agree randomized levels have some key issues with them, but they are a big part of what makes a Diablo game, and how could we not have them? The Diablo franchise is built on randomization in all forms.

You bring up some good points though, but I don't think they're issues that are insurmountable.

Randomized levels can indeed create a very generic feeling if not done well. We're working really hard to ensure that doesn't happen though. It's actually one of the reasons why our exterior layouts aren't randomized. It's extremely difficult to have wide open areas be randomized as well as interesting. Instead we have static exterior zones where the roads, towns, and edges are always in the same place. To keep some bits of random in there though we have a bunch of small, medium, and large pieces cut out of them. In those cut out pieces the game can then place the randomized "adventure" sets. They could be artistic in nature (a fountain, an abandoned cart), they could spawn extra enemies, or they could spawn quests.

Our interiors are randomized, but we do some things differently that help make them more interesting. I think we accomplish this mostly by using our interior jigsaw pieces more intelligently, building more and different types of jigsaw pieces, and also because our artists are amazing. I don't think anywhere in Diablo III are you going to think "This place is not visually interesting". The types of interior pieces do make an enormous difference, and I think we're pretty good at it now. In Diablo II for example you pretty much had a few standard square set pieces, and then a bunch of hallways. We still have those in Diablo III but we're mixing it up a lot more with more intricate and interesting 'showcase' pieces that make it seem like they're not even randomized levels.

Anyway, that's all just something you have to see to believe.

Your other point was that randomization doesn't really matter because you're just essentially rushing from the start to the end. I think you're mixing in some specific Diablo II issues with randomization issues. Without hacks (like maphack) and some unhindered mobility skills (teleport), being able to just rush through the dungeons would be considerably hindered. So I think those are really non-issues when we're talking about a different game. They're things we have to be prepared for of course, but they don't mean that randomization is a waste of effort.

All that said there are a lot of things that you can do to entice a player to be invested in each and every trip into a dungeon. Rewarding them for exploration and perseverance. It could be something as simple as having chests spawn that the player actually cares about finding! (gasp) or something as complex as an entire game-wide system based around dungeon exploration. Either way or somewhere in between, we aren't looking to create a game where rushing from entrance to exit is the most rewarding way to play.

If you're basing the entirety of your purchasing decision on if Plague of Toads remains in the game or not, then sure, otherwise that's a giant leap of logic.

I'm saying if you don't think it's cool enough there are tons of other skills to spend points on. I happen to personally think it's a cool ability. It works really well, the sounds and visual of a plague of toads hopping around and exploding in poisonous goo is entertaining to me. It fits the style and feel of the witch doctor class, and it's a fun and useful skill. I like it.

If you don't think it's a good ability, you don't have to use it. The great thing about Diablo III is there are lots of options for building a character. If you don't like an ability for whatever reason, it doesn't work with the build you're going for, it seems weak, or you just don't like the way it looks, don't get it. There are plenty of skills to spend your points in. The witch doctor trees have only been shown in a very limited amount, so I know that's kind of hard to put into focus, but he has tons of awesome (AWESOME) skills. Pick the ones that appeal to you. Customize your character as you see fit.

Saying it's not cool enough is completely subjective, and based on limited knowledge. So I disagree with you, I think it is awesome, and it should be a skill. There's no consensus here. So where does that leave us?

We could argue back and forth how appealing something is to each individual person. Or! We could agree that not every skill will appeal to every player, and through diversity and choice we welcome a wide range of players to choose how they wish to play.

[edit] It's worth mentioning that I wasn't implying that we would purposefully have weak or underpowered abilities in the game ("it seems weak"), I was only referring to personal perception of each skill.

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would love! to have a dedicated feature just to the sound engineering that goes into the game. It's truly amazing how much of an abilities power and feeling comes from the audio.

Jay had an anecdote at ... the last BlizzCon I think, where he talked about seismic slam. It was one of if not the first barbarian abilities created, actually first in the game entirely, and they were working on it and working on it, and just never really happy with it, and then one day the sound came back for it and they got it all working in game, and finally it all came together. It became this stunningly powerful feeling ability. I think that speaks volumes (nyuk nyuk) about how important sound is to the feeling of a game.

That same lesson is true through the development of the game. A new skills goes in and it seems awesome, it looks cool, but until you get the sound attached it just seems incomplete.

Just because a lot of the sounds are early renditions though, as amazing as they are, we'd need to make sure the audio engineers are far enough along where they'd want to showcase them. They're perfectionists. So hopefully a sound feature is something we can do, but if I had to guess it won't be for a while yet.

If I had to guess it was probably a ragdoll death in which case the hit knocked the corpse away.

We do have a specific animation type done by hand for just about every enemy that we refer to internally as "mega knockbacks". But I don't know that we've shown or talked about them yet, so ... I've probably said too much.

I know that comparing one number to another seems to be a good idea for how to gauge popularity or success of something, but statistics can be shaped and formed to fit any outcome desired. It sometimes takes a lot of research and information to find an actual common ground to compare one number to another.

A lot of these lists do their best to post numbers released by the different companies, but if you look at what the numbers are actually saying you couldn't accurately compare all of them.

In our case not every region that plays World of Warcraft purchases a boxed product, so that coupled with the nature of the game, possibly the "best" number for us to gauge worldwide popularity is through active subscription numbers. For every release we also include a piece of text that explains exactly what we count as an active subscriber, and it's a very logical, no-pulled-punches way of describing them.

To take that number of subscribers though and compare it to total boxes sold of other games would be inaccurate. These types of lists just don't wholly exist with an actual baseline to compare them accurately, and that's not the list maker's fault, it's just the nature of business to release a statistic that is favorable to your product.

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