Diii.Net News

DiabloWiki.net Help Section Launched!

Leord — 1970-01-01T00:00:00+01:00

As the interest of DiabloWiki.net has increased amongst the Diablo fans after WWI 2008, the need of a properly fleshed out and organised Help Section became apparent. After much hard work of gathered wiki expertise from DiabloWiki, you can now enjoy a fully refurbished set of articles to help you with everything wiki-related!

Regardless if you are looking for what the simple "wiki codes" are used for making text bold or italic, are seeking a support page for more advanced edits or just want to look at the wiki structure, you will find solace.

The Diablo community is screaming for information for both the veteran Diablo 2 as well as the newly announced Diablo 3, and regardless if you only have time for fixing one spelling mistake per month or want to dig through it like a badger, there is plenty of friendly room in the wiki. Still, if you hit a wall of any sort, you know we got you covered. =)

Feel free to contact me or Flux if you have any questions or suggestions about the wiki, we're here to help. Below is a list of ALL the new help pages. Feel free to read them, or improve them!

Wiki Help
• Help Contents • Community Portal • Markup • Help FAQ • Wiki Support • Category Structure • DiabloWiki Policies • Help Category	• Wiki Tools • Article History • Boilerplates • Disambiguations • Moving Articles • Redirects • Stubs • Templates	• Glossary • Articles • Categories • Images • Tables • Talk Pages • Vandalism

Bashiok on Minion Control and AI

Flux — 1970-01-01T00:00:00+01:00

Bashiok added some info on minion control and AI in a forum post today. You can't exactly tell your mongrels where to go or who to fight, but there are other ways to get your pets where you want them.

	Blizzard Quote: (Source)
	Well you can make your mongrels explode, that's a pretty cool way to un-summon them... Minion management is a possibility, but that also definitely complicates the UI and use of the minions. It also seems to indicate that they must be handled with care, and not as fodder in a constant bloodbath like it should be. They're easy enough to dispatch and re-summon that you already have some interesting tactics with them. Lets say you have four mongrels out, fighting a group of monsters, and a stronger enemy flanks you. You can summon a new mongrel (or make an old one explode first) which would then take on tanking duty for the stronger enemy that was closing in. Although finer-control is a possibility, really what it comes down to is not having stupid pets and maybe more interesting ways to game their use than sit and stay commands.

Is this a confirmation that we'll see better minion AI in D3?

	Blizzard Quote: (Source)
	Hopefully it's confirmation of a much stronger player AI.

Bashiok on the Blizzcast screens

Flux — 1970-01-01T00:00:00+01:00

The lighting in the 2 new screenshots from the BlizzCast is noticeably different from previous shots. It's far from the "Necromancer's Choice" style of lighting, but it's much less green/blue WoW-like tinting. Is this a deliberate change?

	Blizzard Quote: (Source)
	Those shots are just of different areas than what was shown at WWI, and aren't hinting at some larger shift in lighting. They were taken with the specific intent to show off the range of theme and architecture that is occurring even within a single dungeon. Plus we tried to work in a bit more blood.

Bashiok also clarified the action in the female Witch Doctor shot. She's using Soul Harvest on the skeletons. As for the flaming figure to the left and the bits of debris:

	Blizzard Quote: (Source)
	No those are bits of debris flying around from the Firebomb that had just exploded on the left side of the screen.

Two new screenshots

Flux — 1970-01-01T00:00:00+01:00

Blizzard released two new screenshots (along with some photos from the WWI) with yesterday's BlizzCast #5. Interesting lightning on these; much more of a salmon or peach tinted lighting than we've seen in previous dungeon shots; perhaps these are from a newer build? [Update: Yes, but not really.]

Female Barbarian uses a warcry against some cowering Dark Cultists.

Female Witchdoctor Soul Harvests some skeletons. Firebomb to the left.

Bashiok on Art Direction Controversy. Again.

Flux — 1970-01-01T00:00:00+01:00

Whoever said a picture is worth a thousand words hadn't lived through the Diablo 3 art direction debate, in which several dozen pictures have spawned a library's worth of argument. Bashiok dove into yet another iteration of it over on the B.net forums, where he tried to desaturate some of the contrasting hues.

It's a long post since Bashiok made several follow up comments: click through to read the whole thing. " "

The initial poster said that all Jay Wilson ever addresses is the color issue, and he doesn't mention the oversized shoulder pads or "goofy fantasy weapons."

	Blizzard Quote: (Source)
	There has and continues to be a very strong push towards keeping the art stylized, but realistic, and this is especially true for the size of armor and weapons. I think people see the barbarian's shoulder pads and then decide that it's an exaggerated art style, which simply isn't the case. The artists have had a very specific commitment to keeping items very much based in a realistic style, size, and appearance. Or at least as much as is appropriate for a fantasy game. Look at the hands, feet, head, facial features, etc. and you'll see that they're being kept at a very realistic proportion. If anything I think the barbarian shoulder pad size could be shrunk a bit, and maybe it will be, but a single slot on a single class really shouldn't be used to form an opinion when there are plenty of other pieces to examine that show the contrary.

This comment earns a reply in which someone asks for D3 to at least not have all the goofy, impractical weapons we see in WoW.

	Blizzard Quote: (Source)
	You try to take WoW seriously? It's ... kind of a goofy game, I mean it's filled to the brim with pop-references, over-the-top visuals, mechanical impossibilities, inter-stellar space travel... it isn't a normal fantasy game at all. It's definitely not Diablo, but I think that the ways in which it's sometimes absurd and quirky are what make it an interesting world. Also I think the crazy rotating crystals and weirdo squid-on-a-stick weapons look cool, and match that over-the-top visual and thematic style.

To that someone cites Diablo items and weapons as largely based in reality, which forces Bashiok to point to... actual D2 artwork.

	Blizzard Quote: (Source)
	I R NEED GIANT GOLD RINGS There's always going to be some amount of "hey, that looks cool" going into it. Diablo isn't grounded in reality.

Things wrap up when someone tells Bashiok he shouldn't have to defend Blizzard's artwork.

	Blizzard Quote: (Source)
	Nah, I'm not defending it, I'm just explaining that they're wrong.

Mobile Ringtones and Wallpapers From Blizzard

Leord — 1970-01-01T00:00:00+01:00

Blizzard have released WoW, Starcraft and Diablo mobile phone Ringtones and Wallpapers, available to purchase directly from Blizzard!

You can check out the wallpapers and listen to the ringtones over at the Blizzard site. Here was the announcement earlier:

	Blizzard Quote: (Source)
	Carry a little piece of Azeroth wherever your real-world travels take you with our new World of Warcraft-themed wallpapers and ringtones for your phone. They�re part of a new service that lets you download content related to your favorite Blizzard Entertainment games to supported mobile phones. Over 50 pieces of content are currently available, including ringtones of World of Warcraft�s capital city themes and the distinctive murloc gurgle, as well as wallpapers featuring character artwork, class and faction emblems, and more. Visit the new Mobile Ringtones and Wallpapers page for more information -- and while you�re there, be sure to check out our StarCraft and Diablo mobile content, too. Mobile Ringtones & Wallpapers page: http://mobile.blizzard.com/

Thanks, WorldofWar.net!

Bashiok on Health Orbs and PvP

Flux — 1970-01-01T00:00:00+01:00

Bashiok made a quick reply about Health Orbs, and a longer one about D3's PvP in the Battle.net forums today.

On Health Orbs, a poster asked if the orbs could heal party members even if the character who grabbed it was at full health already. And received some good news in reply:

	Blizzard Quote: (Source)
	That's how it works! We're also playing around with some alternate functionality for when/how they're picked up while you're at full health, as well as some visual tweaks. Regardless we're going to make sure it's as fun and balanced as possible.

As for PvP, some commenters brought up some of Jay Wilson's comments from Leipzig, in which he said that they had big plans to improve on PvP in D3, but that a return of the in-game hostility option was not among them. The initial poster agreed with that change, but these are the b.net forums we're talking about here, so you know angry, Blizzard-slamming comments were just around the corner. Amidst the slavering cries of "only losers play WoW," and "Care Bear D3!" Bashiok pointed out the fairly obvious issue with enabling PvP: only the people who can duel or want to gank are going to turn it on.

	Blizzard Quote: (Source)
	When/Why would you choose to enable PvP in your game if it was an option? Would it be before you were max or near-max level, or twinked? If not then you're essentially looking for a dueling game, and wouldn't a dedicated PvP focus provide a more logical option than a blanket PvP-on/PvP-off option which no one would enable until they were powerful enough to defend themselves?

A rebuttal is offered, earning another reply from Bashiok:

	Blizzard Quote: (Source)
	"One would choose to enable PvP for the rush of not only having to defend against scary monsters lurking around corners but defend against scary players lurking around corners" Would they? Players don't generally opt-in to situations they don't think they have a chance to win.

D3 Preview in Game Informer

Flux — 1970-01-01T00:00:00+01:00

The new issue of Game Informer Magazine has a short preview of Diablo 3, which is now online... as an article in the Business and Technology Section of the Miami Herald newspaper. Yeah, that's kind of weird. There aren't any images, but if you want to read it, click through.

BlizzCast 5 Out - Diablo 3 Q&A Session

Leord — 1970-01-01T00:00:00+01:00

The latest BlizzCast is out, and Karune is introducing it as he has several times before. He shares his WWI 2008 experiences with the WoW CM Nethaera and the Diablo CM Bashiok ("Who sounds oddly familiar with Drysc." - "I do not, at all."). While these pleasantries are nice to hear from our own CMs, the Jay Wilson interview is what is really interesting. You can download the entire 35 minutes here, or read the transcript after the jump.

	Blizzard Quote:
	Jay Wilson WWI Follow up [ 07:47 ] Bashiok: Welcome everybody to BlizzCast: The WWI special edition.I'm Bashiok your Diablo community Manager, I'm here with Jay Wilson, lead designer on Diablo 3.How are you doing Jay? Jay Wilson: Hello, I'm good, How are you? [ 08:02 ] Bashiok: Very good so, you were obviously at WWI with a bunch of guys from the team Jay Wilson: Mhmm. Bashiok: What did everybody think of the announcement that was there or maybe that wasn't there, you family, friends when you came back? Jay Wilson: Well, I think everybody was really excited with the announcement.We were really happy with how it all pulled off, we had so many groups in the company supporting us and trying to make it something really special and we think, we're really happy with how it turned out and, really happy with how people received it, I mean you know we expected people to like it but, when you see something every day, and you work on it for years you don't really know how people are going to react, and the overall response was so positive, and people seemed so happy so that was really exciting for the whole team. Bashiok: Yeah I agree. The applause and cheer and everything while we were there was overwhelming. Jay Wilson: Yeah the group that was there that we presented the game to was ten, eleven thousand people. Bashiok: Right. Jay Wilson: And when ten thousand people all yell at you, in good, not angry, but happily, it's like a physical force.It's pretty amazing. Bashiok: Yeah agreed, it was a pretty powerful moment [ 09:15 ] Bashiok: While you were there was the most memorable moment for you outside of the actual announcement? Jay Wilson: I think the thing I enjoyed the most was doing the autographs; you know we had an autograph table there where we would sign posters and books. Bashiok: Yeah a signing table. Jay Wilson: They brought Diablo 2 manuals, I think they were hoping, you know they brought lots of stuff for us to sign and it was really cool to be able to like talk to people one on one.Have the whole little subsection of the team there.We had artists drawing little impromptu sketches in people's books and that was really fun. [ 09:50 ] Bashiok: Yeah, who was it that was drawing houses? Jay Wilson: Uh, Jeff Kang, one of our environment artists.He drew houses, and so I did a UI mockup because I don't really have any drawing skills. Bashiok: A skill tree, that's exciting for everyone. Jay Wilson: Yes, I did well I didn't want to do a skill tree cause you know it might end up on the net as the official skill tree for Diablo 3. laughter [ 10:07 ] Bashiok: So, everybody's back from WWI now, have been for a while.Where is the development team focused right now?What is everybody working on? Jay Wilson: Well the team's pretty big so we've got them split up on different things.Most of the art team is actually working on the second act of the game, because a lot of the team is really production focused now and we're generating content for the most part a lot of the tech and underlying engine is really solid.Most of the design team is still on Act 1 because we're refining and improving the quests and flow and some of the big game systems that we haven't really announced yet.We kind of dove back into content production fairly quickly. Bashiok: You mentioned that art has moved on to Act 2 but design is on Act 1, or kind of spread around.How much of the development time is actually charging through to new acts, and how much is actually going back and retouching old acts? Jay Wilson: We spend, we initially kind of work in a linear fashion, we've started at the beginning of the game and gone to the end and there's a lot of different ways you can do it but since so many of our systems are progression oriented it's easier to start at the beginning. Bashiok: Sure Jay Wilson: But you want your best work, which you tend to do latest in the project, to be at the beginning of the game.So what we try to do is focus.We focused on Act 1 a lot because it was just kind of the core of our game and you know, getting the game play fun and getting monsters to be cool and all of those things.Once we felt like it was good enough, we moved on to Act 2 but we'll come back to every act along the way, especially Act 1.We'll probably do a major iteration on it later in the development cycle.It's pretty much how Blizzard works; we have a tendency to iterate over and over again on everything we do.So we build something and then we rebuild it.If we haven't rebuilt something five times it really doesn't deserve to be shipped. That's pretty much our policy. [ 12:15 ] Bashiok: We're talking a lot about acts right now could you give any insight into the act distribution as compared to like Diablo 2?How many acts there would be? Jay Wilson: We were originally going to go away from an act structure but we found it fell so easily into that and so we're going to a similar structure as Diablo 2.It just seemed natural, it felt right.Right now we're focusing on about the same length, about the same number of acts.I don't want to solidify because of course; you never know what'll happen.But right now we're going for about the same. [ 12:50 ] Bashiok: Talking about Diablo 2, everybody that played Diablo 2, or plays it – I think a lot of people are going back and playing it, since the announcement – they sort of understand the economy of Diablo 2 as a barter item based kind of system, the gold that was dropped in Diablo 2 wasn't worth much.How do you see the economy in Diablo 3 developing?And are there going to be any goals to establish trade systems? Jay Wilson: Well, Diablo, at its core is basically a trader's game.If you look at other types of progression based RPG games, World of Warcraft is a great example.In World of Warcraft the best items are you know, held by the raiders.In Diablo the best items are really held by the traders.You know those people that are really good at trading with other people.We have no intention of destroying that design or that group of players.That being said a bartering system is actually a very exclusionary trading system; it essentially favors a very small group of elite people and it's not just that those people have entry into it.It's that anyone who wants to gain entry to that system, anybody who wants to just trade items with people, they have this huge barrier to entry, they just can't get into because they don't the value of items, they don't know what's worth what, they don't know what they need.So an elite trader would probably say, ‘Oh well, I like that I have this exclusive knowledge,' but he's actually denying himself customers essentially because there's no common language.A currency really provides a common language: that's the point of a currency.So we do want to support some kind of currency, we don't want to do some of the stuff that Diablo 2 did where they kind of actively devalued gold.We really do want to make gold, or potentially another currency – it may not have to be gold – a valuable commodity that players can use to be able to trade items.That being said it doesn't really prohibit item trading like people can use items as a currency.We have no intention of adding a Bind on Pickup or Bind on Equip, if we did it would probably be for like quest items not for actual functional, like items which people use to hack down monsters and stuff.There's nothing that's stopping bartering in that system but it does give people at least some kind of language you know if you've got two items and ones like a little bit more valuable, you can pad it with currency as well. Bashiok: Right Jay Wilson: Really we're trying to allow more people to get into the trading game because the more people that are in it the more fun it will be. [ 15:41 ] Bashiok: Of Course.So moving on to the coolest thing about Diablo – the abilities – your hero class, what you're destroying monsters with at WWI there was a lot of emphasis on art and design coming together to create a cohesive ability, you need the effect to make it look cool but you also need the design to make it function in a way that's interesting.But aside from the cool effects for the abilities; what really comes from design to request or need an ability for a class? From a design perspective what are you thinking about when you ask for an ability? Jay Wilson: Well there are a lot of factors that go into ability selection.Some abilities satisfy those factors a little differently and that's fine.You mentioned cool factor that's an important one, you want an ability to be cool, you want a class to be cool, so if he's going to be cool his actions define that.So if he's does cool stuff he's going to be a cool class.The next one is you really want him to be archetypal.A great example with the Barbarian is we really wanted him to be all about physical force so we made some of his choices, like the changes we made to leap attack: it's a lot more forceful, it does AOE damage instead of single target damage.We did those types of things to enforce the fact that he's a very physical character.You know the next one would be we want each class to be unique.What happens is a lot of players will request ‘Can we have 20 or 30 classes?'The answer would be yes but a lot of them are going to be really similar and we don't want that.We want each class to feel unique, to have unique abilities that are key to them.But the one that probably defines them all is really function and challenge, as we create new enemies and new challenges for the players to face, a lot of times giving the player the tools to face those challenges is in the form of an ability.If we introduce a character or an enemy who is really good at controlling the player, say he's got crazy slow attacks that make it really hard to face him, especially if you're a Barbarian, maybe the Barbarian needs some kind of way to counter that, maybe he needs an ability prevents him from being slowed or allows him to get good hits.D2, Diablo 2, had abilities like that as well, like concentration and things like that.So function is one thing, the challenge of enemies, keeping a class archetypal, all those different things [ 18:30 ] Bashiok: Very Cool.So would you say that monster designs somewhat influences ability design or does it greatly influence ability design? Jay Wilson: Greatly.Monster design and ability design go hand in hand.A lot of the times, creation of a particular monster will incite the need for a new ability or a new kind of capability on the characters and vice versa.A lot of times when we think about what monsters we want to put in the game, we think about, ‘Well what can the player do?' ‘How can we challenge them in a way given what we know about their strengths and weaknesses?' So yeah they go hand-in-hand. [ 19:03 ] Bashiok: So would you say that the iteration process just goes right up until the end? Jay Wilson: Yep, as long as we're adding new enemies we're pretty much thinking about new abilities for the classes and that becomes even a greater factor as we're approaching the game in a linear fashion and a lot of the monsters right now, they're fairly simple, fairly easy to contend with.You pretty much run through the first act and one-shot everything because you're learning the game.But even going in to act 2 and act 3 which we already have a lot of monsters planned the monsters are a lot more difficult, a lot more challenging, a lot more varied and as a result, once we get in to those monsters really heavily it's going to have a big impact on what we do with the classes. [ 19:47 ] Bashiok: Cool. Changing gears onto the inventory, I think a lot of people noticed that the inventory management system is changing from the, I guess you call it the “Tetris” style grid system to a one-slot system where each item only takes up one slot. What were the reasons for changing the inventory system? Jay Wilson: They're actually pretty simple. I know there is a contingent of players who absolutely love the grid system, but for the most part, it's pretty un-popular with players. With the team in general we have a lot more people who dislike it than like it. In general feedback we've gotten, there's a lot more people who are happy that it's gone than, you know, wish that it was still there. That being said, we recognize that the real purpose for the grid-based system, really one of the coolest things was that it made the items feel a little more real, because they were larger, when you were interacting with them in your inventory. So, we tried to keep that in mind and really change how the look of the items and look of the icons so when you open up your inventory the items feel more real. We're actually not even happy with that; like, some of the feedback we got on just what people saw and, the fact that there were people who were unhappy with it. It made us really go back and revisit that. Right now, we're actually trying to design a new inventory that has even larger-sized icons and, again, makes the items feel very real, and you know, that's a focus we're trying to get the best of both worlds, but ultimately we made the decision because it's not a very popular feature. [ 21:25 ] Bashiok: Could you comment the actually bag system? Some people saw the actual, small bags drop in the demo. Jay Wilson: Currently, in the game we have a system where you have one inventory page and its got, I think, I can't remember exactly how many, sixteen slots I think or twelve, you know, that's how many you start with, and then you have four bag slots, and each one of those slots you can add items and as you do, it expands the number of items on that page. But we're actually; that's one of the things we are potentially going to revisit as well and we're kicking around a lot of ideas like, you know, bags that are item specific; they hold specific types of things but generally, we want people to kind of be able to upgrade their personal inventory in some way, either by removing things from their core inventory through these kind of additional bags or just expanding the inventory overall. But, none of that's final, we're actually right in the middle of a big redesign on that whole system. [ 22:27 ] Bashiok: Cool. On the same vein of item storage, anybody that played Diablo II, to a great extent, or maybe a medium extent probably had item mules, which were characters specifically created just to hold items for your main characters. What are your thoughts on mules? Are those going to be coming back? Do we see a need for them in future Diablo titles? Jay Wilson: Well, I think as long as there is limited inventory space, which pretty much as long as there's limited hard drive space there's going to be limited inventory space, you're going to have people who are going to want to mule, like, you want to store items. Storing items is fun, like collecting items is fun; that being said, the way that people had to do it in Diablo II was not fun at all. So, what we're going to be looking at is, you know, generally we don't want to encourage mulling, we don't want to make it the way people want to do- simply because the way it was done in Diablo II wasn't fun. So, we're going to make a lot of changes overall to how inventory's done. One of the first probably- I think all these changes will actually be quite popular, which is one of them is going to be we're going to give people more inventory in general- just a little bit bigger inventory. It's also easier with a one-slot system actually, because you don't have the items eating up so much screen real estate, you don't have the risk of an especially large item just destroying the inventory space, but creating tons and tons of room for lots of little items. So, we have a lot more control with that. The other one is we're going to give people lots of ways to expand and deal with your inventory and… more info on that, coming in the future. And then, the last one is we really want to make it easier for you to be able to share and trade items with other people and other characters on the same account. We've talked about ideas like a shared stash, or a mail system like World of Warcraft has, and we haven't nailed down exactly which one of those we want to do, but we're definitely going to do something like that, that's going to make it really easy for you if you've got, a witch doctor and a barbarian character, and you find that awesome witch doctor drop and you want to share it, it'll be super-easy to do that. [ 24:37 ] Bashiok: so in other words, I won't have to worry about my game closing after... Jay Wilson: No, no more opening up a game, dropping items on the ground, and you know, hoping that the game stays open or getting a friend to help out, no more of that. You should be able to do it on your own. [ 24:48 ] Bashiok: Awesome. Some fans of the, grid-based system though, argue that the size of the item in your inventory kind of equated to its value to some degree- if it was a huge item, it was, I guess it would offset some of the power of the item. So you had like, a grand charm, it took up three slots so you know, it was kind of like you were weighing the advantage of holding the item in your inventory. What do you think of people that, I guess, hold that stigma? Jay Wilson: I think there's some truth to that, primarily with charms, but then I think anybody who looked at the charm system would probably say, ‘yeah but I don't want a bunch of charms taking up my inventory. Like, inventory is for inventory, charms should be separate.” But, as far as other items, like, “I'm not going to carry this suit of armor because it's really big and I can carry rings that sell for more,” that's not really much of a choice and it's pretty obvious what the best choice there is- to just carry smaller items. So, there is some game play to that, but, you know, I don't want to dismiss it, and like any other design decision there's a tradeoff, but ultimately, so many people disliked the grid system overall that the benefits of it just did not outweigh that general kind of aggravation that people had with it. [ 26:13 ] Bashiok: So, from my viewpoint, probably from a lot of people's viewpoint, the announcement was extremely positive. But it seems like a lot of the Diablo II players, or at least the hardcore Diablo II players want to see the necromancer come back or perhaps other classes coming back. Obviously, the barbarian's one of the ones you're bringing from Diablo II. What are your generally feelings on bringing classes back the previous games? Jay Wilson: Well, for the core game, you know, the kind of initial release of Diablo III, we really want to establish our own identity, like we don't want to just remake Diablo II or Diablo I, we want to provide a unique game experience for people. So, on that front we're really only going to consider bringing back classes that we feel we can improve-the necromancer is an awesome class, actually my favorite class, from Diablo 2, and the class I'm currently playing the most of- its not that we just dislike him, he love the necromancer, but part of his, you know, the issue we have is, he was so well-designed, I mean, you've got your corpse explosion, you've got your skeleton sum, pets and you know, hordes of those guys running around and killing things, you've got curses, like, it's across the board a very well-designed class and there's certainly some things we could do a little differently, but do we feel like we can make him so much better,and change his core gameplay experience. If anything, we'd say we really don't want to, like he plays too well. Whereas with the barbarian, we really looked at the class and he's cool but he could be a lot cooler and he could have a lot more that he does, over the previous game. So, you know, that's why the necromancer is not being seen. A lot of people have looked at the witch doctor and said “oh, the witch doctor is so similar to the necromancer, he's not going to be there, there's no chance for the necromancer ever.” I wouldn't go that far, we are trying to make sure that the witch doctor, while he has a lot of similarities is very different overall. One of the core differences is that the witch doctor is very attack oriented- people remember back to the gameplay video, almost all the monsters that got taken out were taken out by the witch doctor, not by his pets. So that's kind of a key difference between him and the necromancer, is that the necromancer was very often, his pets were critical to his damage output, whereas the witch doctor uses his pets as a distraction and a utility. So we try to keep them different that there's the possibility down the road, but that would maybe be an expansion or something like that after we felt like we've kind of established core Diablo III game. That being said, I wouldn't expect, I would tell people not to expect any other Diablo II or Diablo I classes appear you, know, in the exact same form that they did- if we did bring back another class it would be a radical change. [ 29:18 ] Bashiok: And lastly, we're moving on to something that's created a bit of a stir, was critiques of the art style for Diablo III. People feel that the tone isn't dark enough, it's too bright and colorful, there's a rainbow- what do you feel the team's feelings on the sort of critiques that we've received? Jay Wilson: Ah, the art question. This one's pretty complex, um, so you know, I can first say that the response from the team has been, that really what we've heard is kind of an overwhelmingly positive response. We know that there are some people that are very concerned with the overall tone of the game and tone of the art, and, kind of what we wish we could do is take them through the last two and a half years of, you know, where we basically, created and dumped two complete art style directions. So, I'll kind of go through and explain all the reasons that we went into this decision. So, the original two art styles that we did were probably more in line with what some of the sample shots that people put up online of what they were hoping the game would look like, and, you know, they were very dark, they were very monotone, a lot of grays, a lot of brown, not a lot of color. And the problem we had was that it just didn't produce a very good game for us. Diablo is game that you spend hundreds of hours in as opposed to, if you look at a lot of the current round of very realistic, very grim, gritty games, you know, a lot of those are five, six hour games. So, a gray-brown environment, gets old very quickly when you're playing it for, tens or twenty, you know, a hundred hours potentially. So really, environment change was a critical part of Diablo II. What made Diablo II so compelling was, the environments changed drastically very often. So, if your environments are all kind of grey-brown it doesn't work. So the other one was that we, it was actually not very easy to play the game; Diablo is a game where you fight a lot of monsters and not just a high number of monsters, but a lot of different types at once and you're facing, three, four, five different types of enemies at a time. So being able to identify those enemies was critical. And what we found was, again, when we made the enemies that very realistic dark, gritty look, like the environment, they all just kind of blended together, and again, it made the game not very fun. So, at that point, after we had done this twice and gone, “wow, we really don't like the results here, we started going back to Diablo II in particular and looking at it, trying to figure out what Diablo II did, that worked so well. What we found was that a lot of the ideas that made Diablo II work well, just didn't translate well to 3D. We also found a very different game than a lot of us remember, even though a lot of us played the game still, like a lot of us are still big Diablo II players, we still have kind of this idealized vision of it where we really remember, like, Durance of Hate and act I dungeons and we kind of conveniently forget, you know, the act II desert and the really bright lava hell levels and the things like that that are filled with a lot of color. And we saw that and we were kind of surprised. We were like, “wow, look at how green the fields are in act I, look at how much color there is in this world.” We also were kind of surprised by the monsters, the monsters are really almost garish in Diablo II, they're very, very bright. And this makes them, you know, you'll have like a bright red fallen next to a bright blue, I think they're called blood hawks, somebody's going to lambast me for not getting the name right. And you've got a corrupt rogue who's bright white and then you've got these, you know, big, hulking windigos that are brown and, you've got all these different color palettes all at once, and they're all very, kind of out there and garish; the reason is so you can tell each one apart. You've got a big guy who's brown, you've got humanoid person who's white, you've got a squat humanoid who's red, you've got a bird figure who's blue, like each one has a different profile, each one has a different color and they all really stand out. So, we tried that idea, and it didn't work. Once you took that idea of very bright, very garish monsters and put them into a 3D environment, it was almost like taking a comic book character from the pages of a comic book, and putting them in a movie- the suits don't translate, those primary colors don't work. And so, with the higher resolution, and things like that, so we had to explore other options. And essentially, that's what brought us to this current art style, where we really focused on, well, a couple things. One, we decided that we really didn't want to make- we did want to make a kind of a realistic-looking world, but we also decided that realistic just does not equal gray and brown. The real world's filled with all kinds of colors. We also decided that we didn't want to make, while we wanted to make a more realistic world, we didn't want to make a photo-realistic world. Again, a lot of games are doing that, it's not what Blizzard is about. We wanted to see if we could create a game that visually had an art style that was unique- that's stylized without being cartoony. So, I know that's kind of a lot of information, but it's probably our biggest struggle with Diablo, was Diablo III was trying to the art style right, and we're really proud of how it turned out and so, that's just kind of my effort to explain how we got to where we are. [ 35:18 ] Bashiok: Perfect. I think also, something that I heard around the office, we've been talking about the reaction to some degree; one of the things that I thought was really interesting was, I guess, tone in context. Can you explain it to people listening just what that kind of means? Jay Wilson: Well, you know, there have been some great comments that we've seen on the forums that, some people have commented, for example, after fight's over, the bodies fade away, and this is done for physics- I mean, physics systems pretty much, you know, if you want to keep a game running fast, you can't keep too many physics objects in the world, but then, you know, it's a good point that, where's the massacre? You know, I just killed a bunch of monsters, and, it makes the game feel like the tone is not quite right. So we're actually working on a different way to handle bodies that we're hoping will result in that same level of carnage. But yeah, it's all about getting that tone right, and that's something we focus a lot on. We really want to make sure that the tone of the game is right, that its dark, that its foreboding. And that's something that I think when people actually play the game, they're not going to have any doubt that it's a Diablo game. Every person we've sat down in front of it, for the first time, hasn't seen anything and started playing it they were like, “yeah, this is dark, because this feels right.” But, for the game play sake, we wanted an art style that supported, you know, all the kind of game play that we wanted. It's also worth mentioning that, what we showed at WWI really is a very early game content, you know, it's first act, first act dungeon, first act environments. And, we've made a conscious effort to make sure that the tone gets worse- one of the things that we really want to tell a story of, basically, the coming apocalypse, and it works best if there's a contrast, you know, if things get worse in act two and act three, and act four, and visually, as well as just story-wise then it makes a big difference in kind of, how the tone feels, it feels like you get the nice contrast, or contrast between an idyllic world even though I wouldn't call any Diablo world that we've created, idyllic. But, for Diablo, it's probably idyllic, and then you know, at the end, just hell let loose. That doesn't mean we're going to back off from color, it doesn't mean that we're going to back off from the stylization that we're going for, but it does mean that yeah, people are probably going to see some environments that feel, tone-wise, a lot more, menacing than what we've shown so far. [ 38:01 ] Bashiok: Perfect. And I think people are going to look forward to, Blizzcon's coming up, obviously we're going to be showing something new there; what it will be, I don't know. But, I wanted to thank Jay, for coming out and talking to us Jay Wilson: No problem Bashiok: This has been Bashiok, for the special edition Blizzcast, wrapping up, WWI. Thanks for listening!

You can also see older BlizzCasts on the Official BlizzCast page.

BlizzCon Tickets!

Leord — 1970-01-01T00:00:00+01:00

The ticket drawings of 1500 tickets is now concluded, and the lucky people who were drawn can now buy up to two tickets each for BlizzCon (the mathematically gifted can count that 1500 x 2 = 3000 promised tickets). For tickets not bought where people only buy one, or where people forget to check their mail, more names will be drawn from the same pool. No word on exactly when though, not even in the BlizzCon FAQ...

	Blizzard Quote:
	BlizzCon Ticket Drawing Winners Selected The winners of the BlizzCon 2008 Ticket Drawing have been chosen. We�ve sent emails to 1,500 randomly selected eligible Blizzard Account holders containing instructions for purchasing up to two tickets to the show. For your security, please note that in this email we are not asking winners to email us credit card information directly, nor are we asking winners to call Blizzard for any reason. If we still have tickets remaining after this initial round, we will select more winners from the original opt-in pool. We will make an announcement on our websites once all tickets available have been sold.

For everyone who didn't get an e-mail from Blizzard, there is always the chance of winning a ticket.

	Blizzard Quote:
	Our friends at SteelSeries, Jinx, Upper Deck, and BradyGames have just launched the Win a Trip to BlizzCon Sweepstakes. The grand prize winner will receive a trip for two to Anaheim, California, along with two free tickets to attend BlizzCon 2008. For more information or to enter the contest, visit www.blizzconsweepstakes.com.

In case you missed it, BlizzCon is one of the seven Games Conventions you should visit before kicking the bucket.