Diablo III Forum Activity

Diablo community manager "Bashiok" discusses the unburied, elemental weapon effects, and variations among the game's monsters in his latest responses on the official Diablo III forums.

On the unburied revealed on the official website:
The Unburied is formed by the fusion of soil, rock, human bodies and angry souls. The spikes that jut from its body are shards of stone ripped from the earth during the development of the creature.

On elemental weapon effects:
I made a post earlier and it contained this, people seemed to like the idea, so I figured I'd give its on thread.

The enchanted weapons are just a joke. Don't get me wrong I think that they should leave the flame, lightning and cold weapon animations. There just needs to be variety of effects for different levels of damage that a weapon does.

cold damage - 1-10 weapon glows blue, 11-25 weapon leaves a blue trail, 25-50 weapon leaves frost trail, 51+ weapon has constant frost + trail (what we saw in gameplay demo) and similar for all enchanted items. Its a little ridiculous when an maul does 1-5 fire damage is on fire....just looks too over the top. The effects should be more varied plus it would add some identification for multiplayer and for just add more depth to the game...not to mention give you something to strive for weapon wise.
That's actually exactly what we have. The elemental effects seen in the video were, at the time, the most "powerful" versions of each effect to make sure they were noticeable. And of course, they were certainly not final.

On monster appearances:
Well to be perfectly honest all of these shots are set up. Generally you're probably not going to run into that many at one time. So a couple dispersed within a sea of every other monster, you don't see the stark repetition. I don't think normal spawning conditions would have that many facing you at once, especially because they're kind of tough.

As far as having randomized creatures... mmm... it would take a lot of work but of course it wouldn't be impossible. The question is though, does that massive undertaking just to make sure a creature doesn't look the same as the one next to it matter when they're dead within a matter of seconds? Probably not.

Or a more important question is, how many unique types of monsters do we cut from the final game so this guy doesn't always have an arm in the same place?
The stark reality of production schedules! They give me nightmares too.

There will be creature variations, but it's not quite the same as randomization of body parts.