Diablo 3

[Bulovski]

Done! Gracias.

[nash]

Sent Invite. You have seven days to tool around with the game. Enjoy

 

@Tyler - Vik can send you an invite if you want as well.

[Tyler]

^^ Need to buy the game first...

[nash]

Actually you can borrow a friend's copy and use his installer for the trial. Also I think Vik wants to sell one of his copies away.

[Tyler]

Also I think Vik wants to sell one of his copies away.

 

Hmmm, if so, I'm interested!

[Bulovski]

Actually you can borrow a friend's copy and use his installer for the trial. Also I think Vik wants to sell one of his copies away.

He has more than one???!!! That kid is just plain weird. Also, can't I just dl the client from the site?

[Bulovski]

Titan Quest is an awesome Diablo clone - but I would say the first Dungeon Siege was better. I never really got into the darker DS sequel.

[nash]

He has more than one???!!! That kid is just plain weird. Also, can't I just dl the client from the site?

 

You can but it's nearly 30 GB of game. Also Vik has one US copy and one EU copy

[Bulovski]

30 GIGS!!! Just to see low-res medieval wenches...

Hmm let's see 1mbps connection = 128 kb/sec dl speed (tops) = 64 kb / sec (actually this happens) = 230400 kb / hour = 225 mb / hr = 1800 mb / night (8 hrs) = 17 plus nights to dl 30 gig, not to mention that I am on DC Universe Crisis spree right now...

[Bulovski]

Diablo 3 Interview with lead designed Jay Wilson

 

Is there an upcoming game with a more rabid fan base than Blizzard's Diablo III? We don't think so. From the online petition over the game's art style to the outcry over the shunning of classic character classes, Diablo fans are knowledgeable, passionate and not afraid to let the internet know what they think. With that in mind we sat down with lead designer Jay Wilson and grilled him on a game that every PC owner is dribbling in anticipation for.

 

VideoGamer.com: It's been a long time since Diablo II. How have RPGs changed in the intervening period?

 

Jay Wilson: I think one of the really big differences is that people actually like them now! When the original Diablo came out it was really a dead time for role-playing games. Now you see so many of them, and so many different kinds. I mean, Diablo is an an action-RPG and that's sometimes referred to as a genre - even though it's really just a sub genre of both RPGs and action games. Then you have Bethesda's games, and Bioware's, and the Final Fantasies... and they've all got such a different flavour and such a different style. It's just a great time for role-playing games. Now you're even seeing good design principles from role-players being carried over to most other action games; it's almost hard to find a game that doesn't have some form of levelling up or character customisation. It's great to see how the RPG has not only come back, but has become a driving force in the industry.

 

VideoGamer.com: In that case, which have been the big games you've been paying attention to over the past few years?

 

JW: Obviously the MMO space is very big for us, in terms of influence. One of the reasons we started making MMOs is because we like them! So even though it's our own game, I have to say we look at World of Warcraft more than anything else. It's a game I really like, probably my favourite. I also really like City of Heroes. But I think we also take things from other stuff - Mass Effect is certainly a game I know a lot of the guys around the studio like, and one I enjoyed. Those are a few examples, but there are probably a whole bunch I've not mentioned as I'm on a dearth of RPG stuff right now, because I'm mostly just playing Diablo II.

 

VideoGamer.com: What elements have been carried over from Diablo II to Diablo III, in terms of co-operative play?

 

JW: One of the things we've carried over is just the general structure of how co-op play works, so as you're playing you can have another player drop in or leave at any time. It's very dynamic, the game simply adjusts to the number of characters present. But one of the things we've improved on is one of our prime directives is now "Thou shalt do no harm to the co-operative game." This was something that Diablo I and II didn't really follow. Many people liked the idea that players would compete against each other while being co-operative. While it was a noble concept, I think it mostly proved to make players not like each other and not want to play together. The average game size for Diablo II on Battle.net is 1.2 players, which basically means that almost everyone is playing by themselves. One of the main reasons for that is... well, why would you want to play with someone else? They can go hostile at any time and kill you, mostly in an exploitative way. It's not fair - most of the time you'll be dead before you realise they're attacking. There's a good chance they will steal all your loot, so you won't get anything valuable, and it makes the game harder - so why would you want to play?

 

On our side, we've looked at changing a lot of those things. Loot now drops on a per-player basis, so if four of us are playing a game together and you kill a monster when three of us are nearby, it'll drop an item for each of us. My items will be seen by me but not by the others - so anything I see is fair game for me. The nice thing about this is that it's a bonus. When you play Diablo II together, there are less items. You may kill slightly faster, but there's less to pick up. In Diablo III, there's more. You have your items, other players have theirs, and you can trade. The other tendency we find about this model is that when a player's bag fills up, they don't want to go back to town. They want to keep pushing forward, so they open up their bags and start throwing out things they don't want. As soon as an item hits the floor, everyone gathers around. Then they start doing the same thing, and soon you have these little pow-wows of people tossing things and picking up stuff they can use. It's these kinds of things that make co-op a positive experience.

 

VideoGamer.com: How do you balance the whole loot dynamic? You want lots of items, but you also need individual pieces to have value, right?

 

JW: Well when people talk about Diablo II they tend to say that loot just flies from the heavens in giant piles. But if you actually look at the number of drops in the game as opposed to other titles - I'll use World of Warcraft as an example, since people know it - then Diablo II gives far less loot. There's a higher percentage of magic loot, but overall there's roughly a 50 to 60 percent chance that the average monster will drop nothing in Diablo II - and they never drop more than one item. Whereas in WoW it's very uncommon for a monster to drop nothing, and often they'll have multiple items. So overall, while it's not a completely fair comparison, there's generally not as much loot in Diablo II as people think.

 

Sometimes when people are making a quantitative Diablo-style game, one of the mistakes they make is to say, "The rewards in Diablo II were so good, the only way to improve that is to add even more loot." But the reaction if you don't get that number right is that people get loot weary! Twenty magic items hit the ground, and you're like, "Whatever!". I know that there's not going to be anything interesting for me, because it's all kind of the same. So it's important that in the early game you get items that are fairly good for progression, but then you actually need to pace things out a lot more. One of the things I think Blizzard did really well in Diablo II was that for the first 10 levels you were constantly upgrading, but after that you could play five levels and see nothing. I think that's really critical, that pacing.

 

 

VideoGamer.com: Can you please clear something up for us? There's been a bit of controversy about the art style of Diablo 3, in terms of negative fan reactions online. Was there any link between this and the departure of Art Director Brian Morrisroe?

 

JW: It actually had nothing to do with the project. His leaving was amiable and we actually still speak to him fairly frequently. He left to form a start-up company outside of the games industry - he had an opportunity he couldn't pass up, a once-in-a-lifetime kind of deal. I hated to see him him go because he was so good for the team and was such good art director, but he felt that this was a fairly safe point for him to depart because our art style was fairly established and our art lead is fairly strong. So while I can't say that it's helped the project to have him leave, I think it's done as minimal damage as a departure like this could. It's certainly nothing to do with the art style controversy, and our art direction will not change.

 

VideoGamer.com: Were you surprised by the negativity?

 

JW: No We usually have a fairly good barometer of what's going to be considered and what's not, and when we found this art style it was after several other iterations that we felt didn't work. We have a show and tell event with the whole Blizzard staff every four months - the other dev teams come in, look at the projects and give us feedback. You will never find harsher critics than Blizzard developers - they are the most detail-orientated people ever! But when we first showed them this, they were ecstatic. They loved it. That was the point at which we felt we'd really found our game, and that was about a year before we announced. So yeah, were weren't surprised by some of the backlash, but we have so much confidence in the direction of the game and we know this is the right way for us to go. So it didn't really affect us that much.

 

VideoGamer.com: With Starcraft 2, a lot of the design has been primarily focused around multiplayer. Are you taking a similar approach with Diablo III, or not?

 

JW: It's a little more focused on the single-player, it's not quite the same. I've worked on RTSs before, and while I've seen things done both ways I prefer the approach where you work on multiplayer first, because you're really establishing the core game mechanics. But here the core mechanics really come out of the single-player game. That said, what we've done along the way is to have co-operative enabled from the start. People play co-op all the time, and if there's something that doesn't work for co-operative play we fix it right away. For any mechanics that need balancing or tuning, we've tried to do that simultaneously. But we do focus on single-player more.

 

VideoGamer.com: Co-op is becoming an increasingly important feature for games these days. How do you think that's changed things, from a development point of view?

 

JW: I'm going to sidestep that for a second and talk about the reason why I think co-op has shown up. I think it's because developers have realised that's the way most people want to play. I think recognising that is causing a lot of developers to look back at their games so they can work out how to bring people together. In my opinion, that's nothing but a good thing, because it's one of the things that's going to start opening gaming up to a wider audience. Game developers tend to be quite competitive, a bit hardcore - they love to kill the crap out of one another - and they sometimes think that's what everybody prefers. But a large majority of the gaming audience prefers a more relaxed experience.

 

One of the best examples of the this is that if you look on Battle.net at the number of competitive games alongside the number of games played co-operatively against multiple AIs, the co-op games outnumber the competitive ones by a factor of 2 to 1. So it's a fairly large group of people who prefer co-op play, even in a game known for its competitive play. So I think that what it's doing is opening up developers' eyes to a broader audience, and that can only be a cool thing.

 

VideoGamer.com: If you could single out one feature of D3 to convince someone to by the game, what would it be? What's the coolest feature?

 

JW: The coolest announced feature? (laughter) There are a few we've not revealed yet! For me it would have to be the character classes. I know that's kind of an odd feature to pick, but one of the things that was a hallmark of D2, one of the thigns that made it a favourite game of mine, was that the character classes were extremely archetypal. They were the kind of characters that people inherently wanted to play - they were very visceral, very powerful, very satisfying. Running through the world and hitting stuff with an axe felt really good. So when we started on D3 one of our main objectives was not to match the game on that front, but to surpass it. And that's something I feel we've really accomplished when you look at the character classes, the skillset we've put on them is really imaginative, very over the top and original. We've really tried to go for classes that are not your standard warrior, rogue, mage. We're not trying to provide something that's unknown to the players, but rather classes that are not what you'd typically see.

 

VideoGamer.com: Can you confirm that the Barbarian is the only class to return from Diablo II? :cry5:

 

JW: Yes. Originally we were planning to have no classes return, but as we developed one of the classes essentially turned into the barbarian. We reached a point where we were going to call it some other name, and we realised that everyone else would just call it the barbarian anyway, so maybe we should just go with that.

 

VideoGamer.com: Can you tell us what the previous name was?

 

JW: I'd rather not, actually, as we held back a few ideas and might use them in a character further down the road.

 

VideoGamer.com: Fair enough!

 

JW: I think the barbarian was one of the classes we looked at and felt could be improved upon. One of the reasons we set this goal of not bringing back old classes was that we don't want to do a re-hash - we want to do a sequel with new gameplay and new experiences. I know a lot of people really love the classes in D2, and it's not my intention to deliberately hurt them! I love those classes too - the necromancer is my favourite - but our goal was to do new things.

 

VideoGamer.com: Have you copped a lot of flack over this?

 

JW: Yeah and we will! All the barbarian players are delighted and all the necromancers hate us. I understand, I don't begrudge them that. I would hate me too! But what I would say is that when we announce the next class, which is quite similar to a previous class, then all those players will hate us too. You can't make everybody happy, but I think when the game finally come out players will find there's a good class for them, one they will love as much as the ones that came before. And if they don't, I absolutely promise that in the expansions we'll consider bringing back old classes. We just don't want to do it with the first release. We want to establish our identity.

 

VideoGamer.com: So if people want D2, they should play D2, right?

 

JW: Well like I say, I sympathise. I understand why they want these things. But it also comes down to what inspires us as developers. Good games come out of passion, and if one of the dictates had been, "Okay, we're just going to take all the classes from D2 and re-do them," I don't think a lot of people on our team would have been that excited about it. In fact, I know they wouldn't have been. It came from the team that they didn't want to re-do the classes. So one of my jobs as lead designer is not only to steer everyone towards those choices, but also to make sure the whole team is excited by the choices we make. Sometimes that means we have to look at things and say, You know what, maybe this could be awesome, maybe the necromancer could be an awesome character for Diablo 3 - but if no-one on the team is interested in making him, he's not going to be great. He's going to be mediocre.

 

 

VideoGamer.com: Some developers, Dennis Dyack for one, really don't like showing work-in-progress on games that are still at an early stage - but Blizzard has always been very happy to do this. Why is that? Is there a risk behind doing this?

 

JW: This is going to sound snarky, but there's only a risk to your ego. That's it. If it's good then people will recognise that it's good; if it's not good then you need to learn from that and make it better. Sometimes people clutch things close to their chest and they don't want to show off something that misrepresents them and I understand that - but the thing is, gamers only remember the last thing you showed them. So if you show them something and they say, "Oh my God, that's horrible!" the you say "Well, geez... let's go back and make it better." At least now you know why. At least now you have some information. And so one of the reasons why we actually prefer a really long window before we release a game is because we want a lot of feedback - we want to know what people like and don't like about a game. We want to give people several opportunities to play it before a release. We play our games constantly before we release them - we give them to other development teams and get feedback. We do very long betas and alphas and include a lot of people, not just from the fanbase but from the industry as a whole. And I would say look at the success of Blizzard games. If other companies think it's a risk, think it's a bad idea... obviously it's not.

 

I think it's hard for people, when they get attached to an idea. And we do this all the time. I get really attached to an idea, I really want it to work - so I don't want other people to tell me it's not working. The key is to use that feedback and not fight it, because someday the whole world is going to have it. It's going to be there someday. Do you want to make sure you give them what they want, what you know will be a great game, or do you want to take the risk that your opinion is the right opinion? It's a tough call, but for the most part I'd say "No, don't take the risk.". It's not design's job to come up with all the great ideas and figure out which is the absolute best. It's design's job to make sure that the best ideas get into the game. That's the major difference. I think a lot of people get into game design as a job because they think, "Man, I can sit around all day and come up with ideas." And it's like, "No, you can sit around all day and have your ideas torn down." And that's a lot more painful, but that's the job.

 

VideoGamer.com: You can't really show off things at early stage in the music and film industries - not in the same way, at any rate. You can demo tracks or show a rough footage, but it's not really the same thing. But it sounds as though you regard this ability as a strength...

 

JW: It's an advantage of the medium, but it's also one of the things that makes games really hard to make. The best games are made though iteration. They're so complex, and there's so little known - there's no formula for making a great game, it's always this weird alchemy! We used to have this joke at a company I used to work for, where people would come up and say, "This game's not fun! Make it fun!". And we'd be like, "Pull down the cookbook. Two of these, three of these, four of those - there we are, now we've got fun!" A lot of the time it's very touchy-feely, trying things out. It's more like cooking without a cookbook and no knowledge of the ingredients whatsoever.

 

VideoGamer.com: Last question - which games have you played over the last year that you've really enjoyed?

 

JW: Well, I'm currently playing the PS3 Ratchet & Clank, which I absolutely love. I play a lot of World of Warcraft, and a lot of RTSs - so I was playing C&C3 earlier this year. I know it took me a while to catch up to it, but I have like this laundry list! I really enjoyed GTA IV. I especially liked the way they introduced their campaign. It's funny, but we joke about GTA IV that it's like an MMO but with one quest - and how did they pull that off? If we gave people an MMO with one quest they'd skin us alive! But really it means that they get to pace their game, but give people this open-world illusion that they have complete freedom, which is wonderful. It's a great way to create a game, and it's really fun.

 

VideoGamer.com: So on the basis of those comments... Will we see car jacking missions in Diablo III?

 

JW: Oh absolutely! We just put them in last week!

 

VideoGamer.com: Thanks for your time Jay.

 

Diablo III is due out for PC when it's ready.

 

 

 

-----------

They pulled necro :cry5:. Waiting for the next class...

[reaper]

^^ no necro, no druid ... so is the witch doctor confirmed???? i think it will play like the necro ..

 

NM .. my first playthrough is going to be as a Barbarian anyway ..

[Bulovski]

Witch doctor pretty much confirmed since he was in the gameplay vid.

[Tyler]

Like everyone expected... the Witch Doctor replaces the Necro. Too bad, I love the Necromancer... but I can live with that.

 

@reaper: \My first PT will be with the Barbarian too.

[Diablo IV]

In diablo 2 , I would own with amazon . Pity she isnt continuing .

[Tyler]

Blizzard reveals the new WIZARD class.

 

[gt]41303[/gt]

[Bulovski]

URL for same video - I think every site in the world must have embedded that video hence they stopped allowing embeds.

[Bulovski]

Barbarian - the beefy character, Witch Doctor - weird Nature / Death combo, Wizard - pure magic. My guess on the other two would be a Rogue kinda character - mix of Amazon and Assassin, and maybe a Paladin clone - the all round character.

 

Also - chain lightning is back - yayyyyyyyyyy. I remember the ridiculous amount of damage the sorceress could dish out in high levels

[Bulovski]

Q&A: Blizzard's Executive Vice President of Game Design Rob Pardo

By Earnest Cavalli October 15, 2008 | 12:00:00 PMCategories: Blizzcon 2008

 

ANAHEIM -- Blizzard's executive vice president of game design Rob Pardo has his hand in just about everything the company does, so though I was scheduled to speak to him specifically about Diablo III, our conversation meanders a bit.

We start off discussing the newly-revealed Wizard class the firm had only that morning revealed as a part of the latest Diablo title, but soon we're covering everything from Blizzard's efforts to stem the tide of cheaters in their online games to the company's efforts to bring their games to the silver screen.

This marks the third interview in my series of talks from Blizzcon 2008 which includes chats with World of Warcraft lead producer J. Allen Brack and StarCraft II lead designer Dustin Browder. The final part, an interview with Blizzard CEO and co-founder Mike Morhaime on the company's current and future plans, should appear soon.

Wired: You guys just announced the Wizard. Can you tell us about that?

 

Rob Pardo: [Laughter]

 

Wired: Ok, how about a general overview of the class. What does it ... ok, say, what in Diablo II would it most closely relate to?

 

Pardo: The Wizard’s probably most analogous to the Sorceress. Yeah, so the Wizard is definitely our most traditional mage, magic class. The Wizard, you’re going to see -- this is the class that’s going to cast the Magic Missile, have the Chain Lightning abilities. He also has kind of "time manipulation, reality distortion" abilities. Things like that.

 

Wired: You’d say this is a more area-attack-focused class than, say, the Barbarian?

 

Pardo: Well one of the things about Diablo is that every class has to have area effect abilities, because it really is a game of “you against many creatures.” So I’d say that all the classes really have target abilities and area effect abilities because it's really important -- its not a game like WoW.

WoW is a game that really focuses on interdependency, so we assume, especially in a dungeon, that classes will have other classes to kind of work with. In Diablo we have to take the paradigm that “you're on your own.” So every class has to be self-sufficient. Of course we have synergies and ways that we can play co-op, but every class really does have to be self-sufficient.

 

Wired: So there isn’t going to be ... a lot of people have been concerned that because World of Warcraft has been so ridiculously successful for you guys that Diablo III is going to push towards becoming more of an MMO where you’re going to see more of a focus on playing the online component, having parties of people, that kind of thing. Is that the direction you’re going with it?

 

Pardo: We wanna make Diablo III even better for online play for sure but that doesn't necessarily mean we want it to be an MMO. I mean, we’ve been a company focused on multiplayer gameplay for a really long time now, so its something like WoW is just an expression of that philosophy and belief.

With Diablo III we certainly want to make co-op a lot more fun, we wanna make PvP a lot more fun, but its not an MMO in the sense of WoW at all.

 

Wired: Speaking of it being online, with Diablo II and the first Diablo, really quickly after the game was released and, again, after every patch, there is this huge amount of people who hack the game, find ways to work around the system. What are you guys doing in Diablo III to prevent that? Obviously that makes playing less fun for people who aren’t cheating.

 

Pardo: With online games it’s definitely challenging to keep people from modifying the game, or hacking the game, but it’s something we take very seriously. It’s something that, you look at a lot of our efforts in our other games and -- we have a full-blown Hacks Team now at Blizzard -- we’ve developed our own kinda anti-hack software called “Warden” which we use in World of Warcraft to try to detect a whole variety of known hacks. We’ve put technology in all of our games to help with a whole variety of those sort of hacks and to detect those sort of things. We keep it pretty serious.

 

There’s nothing specific that we're doing just for Diablo III, it’s kinda more of a Blizzard effort to prevent cheating across the board.

 

Wired: Is it going to be the exact same “Warden” software in Diablo III as in World of Warcraft?

 

Pardo: It will be adapted, but it’s something that was made for all of our games.

 

Wired: Along with that, there’s a huge segment of the fanbase and a huge segment of the media who came down on EA recently when they released Spore and it had that ridiculous DRM system that only allowed you to put it on three computers. There was a huge uproar. Obviously you need some kind of DRM otherwise people would just blatantly pirate your game over and over again. What kind of solutions are you guys looking at for Diablo III?

 

Pardo: The thing that I think helps us, is that since our games have such a huge multiplayer component, Battle.net really is our most effective DRM.

If you wanna play online on Battle.net with other players you’re going to have to have a legitimate copy. That’s really kinda been the thing that’s always saved us from a lot of the PC piracy that I think hurts a lot of other single-player-only games.

 

Wired: You’re not going to have something where the game has to phone home every time you turn it on?

 

Pardo: No, there’s no particular plans for that. We do now have the online store where we’re doing digital distribution on your account. In those particular cases you have to be online to actually download the game, but once you have it, you're fine.

 

I think our approach -- if you want to use an analogy -- we take an approach that’s more similar to Steam than EA, let’s say.

 

Wired: Speaking of which, Steam has been a huge success. Do you have any plans of releasing your games through their system, or is it going to be one of these things where you say: “We’re a big enough company, we can do it ourselves?”

 

Pardo: I think we’re probably currently in the mindset that we’re going to digitally distribute just on Battle.net. I don’t know if our strategy will change in the future. I think it’s something that we’re just trying to get really good at doing ourselves for now.

 

Wired: When Diablo II came out, I remember, I first bought it and the computer I had had like 128MB of RAM, which was over the system requirements, but I didn’t really feel like I got the full experience of the game running perfectly until I had something like 2GB of RAM.

It seems that the Diablo series is very RAM-dependent, traditionally. Is that going to be the case with Diablo III? Are we going to need 6GB of RAM to run it at full everything?

 

Pardo: I don’t know if my memory serves me well enough to speak too intelligently on that, but I don’t think there’s anything actually about Diablo that’s particularly RAM-dependent. I think all of our games ... one of the philosophies we have is to always try to cater to a pretty low system spec. We really wanna make sure that as many gamers as possible can play our games, and I think that’s really the trick to being successful on PC anyway. If you’re only catering to the upper two percent of systems then you’ve really narrowed down your userbase. We always try to appeal broadly.

 

Now, at the same time, we want a lot of our graphics and all of our features to look good, so it really depends on what features you're gonna enable and what kind of system you have for what kind of experience you’re going to get.

 

Wired: Do you guys have any idea what the system requirements are going to look like?

Pardo: Ohhh ... Why do I forget the answer to this question? We do. I’m not sure what we’ve released. I can totally get that information to you in the future though.

Wired: That would be great.

Pardo: But I can’t remember and I don’t wanna misquote.

Wired: Absolutely, yeah. Diablo II introduced the Horardric Cube. It was a big success. Everybody likes the crafting component.

Pardo: Mmhmm.

Wired: Is Diablo III going to have an equivalent crafting system?

Pardo: I wouldn’t say “equivalent.” I mean there’s things that were cool about the Horardric Cube, there’s things that were kinda silly about it, but we certainly want to have some features in the game that allow people to do some sort of crafting.

I wanna leave that intentionally vague because it’s kind of a ... there are some features that we’ll be going into in the future. We’ll talk more succinctly about “what are we doing instead of the Horardic Cube?”

Wired: I was just at the StarCraft II panel and they revealed that StarCraft II is going to be released as a trilogy ...

Pardo: “They?” It was me!

Wired: Yeah! You can see what the scheduling is doing to my memory.

So, it’s going to be released as a trilogy. The Diablo series has always had expansions. Are you guys going the same route? The trilogy? At least one expansion? I’m assuming at least one expansion.

Pardo: We haven’t decided those sorts of things yet. I would probably assume the same thing. At least an expansion or something, but we haven’t, to be honest, decided anything like that yet.

It’s a similar sort of development in StarCraft II. We didn’t decide out of the gate that we were gonna do the trilogy idea. We haven’t really got to the point yet with Diablo III to discuss what future products are going to look like.

Wired: And are you guys worried that the fans are going to see -- specifically with StarCraft II -- that they’re going to see it and say “Oh! They’re coming out with an expansion so they must’ve held back content from the original release to put in the expansion!” Is there a concern that you’re going to be upsetting your fans that way?

Pardo: With StarCraft?

Wired: Yeah.

Pardo: Well I guess it’s really the way you look at it: If you really think that we could do a 90-mission campaign then, I guess you could view it as we’re holding something back, but if you look at the fact that we’ve never done a campaign of that size before within a shipping product ... I mean, the Terran campaign is gonna be as big as any of our full-blown RTS campaigns with all the races from the past. So, I really definitely don’t look at it as holding back anything. We’re really just trying to deliver a bigger story across three games.

Wired: I’ve got my MacBook Pro here, as I already told you, I love it, I’m totally down with the whole Apple zealotry.

 

Pardo: [Laughter]

 

Wired: You guys have been huge supporters of gaming on the Mac for a long time. You’ve been one of the only computer gaming companies that supports this stuff. Diablo III? Going to be Mac and PC? Released at the same time?

 

Pardo: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.

 

Wired: And also, do you guys have any plans to do iPhone stuff?

 

Pardo: We have no concrete plans right now to do anything on the iPhone. We are starting to talk about doing some things on mobile but it isn't something that’s a big primary strategy of ours right now.

 

Wired: World of Warcraft, when it was released ... obviously people saw a lot of parallels between that and the Diablo series, for instance, the entire item system. A lot of ideas that originated in Diablo then carried over into World of Warcraft. Is there going to be any crossing back over from WoW to Diablo III? Are you borrowing ideas from the World of Warcraft system for Diablo III?

 

Pardo: I don’t know if I would look at it quite like that. Yeah, they’re both within the RPG genre which is typically a very item-based sort of game.

I think with each of our games, we always look for ideas from our games, we look for ideas from other games; a lot of times we even find ideas that don’t even come from the obvious game genres. I can’t think of anything specific that’s carrying over from WoW into Diablo III’s item system, but ...

 

Wired: You guys aren’t going to have Murlocs popping up as enemies? That kind of thing?

 

Pardo: [Laughter] That’d be cool actually. That’s a cool idea. Murlocs could fit within the Diablo universe.

 

Wired: They fit everywhere! Absolutely!

 

Pardo: Yeah, you’ve just gotta make sure you get the sound right.

 

Wired: Exactly. That’s key.

I have no idea if you guys are even remotely close to knowing this, but when -- broad, ballpark estimate -- can we expect to see Diablo III on retail shelves?

 

Pardo: When it’s ready.

 

Wired: Ok ... alright ...

 

Pardo: [Laughter]

 

Wired: Is that like 2 years from now? A decade from now?

 

Pardo: I don’t ... I don’t know how far out it is, but it’s still fairly early in development. I think when people see it, it feels so polished and so finished, but the reality is we have a very small portion of the game done right now.

A lot of the way we develop is: We wanna make sure the game is really fun and the visual fidelity we want ... we wanna make sure we have a small area that feels really done so we know what to build. So even though it looks really complete a lot of the content is just not there. We have a long ways to go to build each of the different acts in the game and put in all the quests and all the different monsters. We have a lot of development ahead of us before it will be something ... It will definitely be out after StarCraft II.

 

Wired: [Laughter] So “sometime in the future” is what we’re looking at.

 

Pardo: Yeah. It’s too far out to really say for sure. It’s a ways out.

 

Wired: Speaking of these "acts," are we going to be following the traditional Diablo II "four acts" system?

 

Pardo: We’re definitely doing an acts system ...

 

Wired: With entirely new worlds?

 

Pardo: Yeah. I don’t think we’ve announced how many there are because we’re still talking about it.

 

Wired: And total gameplay? What are you guys shooting for? 40 hours? 60 hours?

 

Pardo: It’s really hard, I think, with a lot of our games to look at it like that.

With Diablo particularly, how long is it going to take you if you do it all in one sitting and don’t replay with all the optional stuff? I don’t know. Hopefully it’s a similar scope to Diablo II, whatever that mapped out to. With that much content. But the thing about Diablo is: We really want it to be replayable. We don’t want it to feel like “oh, it’s a 25 hour experience” we want it to feel like “it's 25 to 500 hours depending on how much you wanna play.”

 

Wired: Yeah, I’ve got hundreds of hours in Diablo II.

 

Pardo: Exactly. That’s really how we wanna look at it.

 

Wired: The first Diablo was released on the original PlayStation. It was ported to the original PlayStation.

 

Pardo: Oh that’s right! It was huh?

 

Wired: Yeah, it was a while ago since you guys have done any console stuff, but with these new consoles, the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 it's theoretically possible for you to port these new games, and there’s good money in that. Are you guys looking at that?

 

Pardo: It’s definitely something that we’re evaluating. It’s something that ... right now we’re really focused on making the game on PC. It’s something that I do think -- just kinda talkin’ -- Diablo, out of our different franchises that are currently in development, would be the one that probably could actually go to consoles, but we don’t have any current plans right now to do that.

 

Wired: There’s been a big push in Hollywood lately to ...

Pardo: Really? [Laughter]

Wired: Yeah, I know. ... to take games, make them into movies. They’re never good movies ...

Pardo: Yeah.

Wired: ... but they make money, apparently. There’s been talk of a Diablo movie and a WarCraft movie, just murmurings about this, for years ...

Pardo: Murmurs? You haven’t heard about the World of Warcraft movie in development?

Wired: Well, I’ve heard, but until I see something concrete I’m still going to consider it sorta “out there.”

Pardo: Ok.

Wired: Are you guys actively looking to go in that direction?

Pardo: With World of Warcraft absolutely. That’s what I mean: It’s not really a murmur with that one. With that one we ... as a matter of fact, at our last Blizzcon we even did a panel on the World of Warcraft movie that had Legendary Pictures up on stage talking about it. So it’s something we’re actively developing right now: To try to get a World of Warcraft movie.

One of the reasons, I mean we’ve had opportunities to do movies way before now, people will pay us the money to do it, but ...

Wired: Like a Lost Vikings movie?

Pardo: [Laughter] Yeah. We don’t want to make a “videogame movie.” We want to make a great movie.

Until Legendary came to us we didn’t really feel like we had the opportunity to do that. We felt like, before them, we had the opportunity to make a “videogame movie,” and that’s not what we want to make.

But with Legendary in the picture, I mean, they’re a really great group. This is a group that makes some phenomenal movies that are out there, and they're very geeky movies. I don’t know if ... you’ve seen The Dark Knight, right?

Wired: Yeah. Totally.

Pardo: That movie was amazing. That’s the group that’s making our movie, and we’re really excited about it.

Wired: That’s your benchmark for quality? The Dark Knight? You’re setting the bar kinda high.

Pardo: That’s where we start. [Laughter]

Wired: [Laughter] Fair enough.

Pardo: No, I mean, I would be thrilled if it was to that quality. For sure. That movie was probably the best movie of the last five years or so, at least. They obviously know how to make great movies. They also did 300, they did Superman Returns, they did Batman Begins, so they’ve got a great track record not only making great movies, but making movies that really sing to us.

Wired: Right.

Pardo: We really feel like these are the guys that could make a great movie in a videogame license.

Wired: Why not -- you guys have been known as the masters of CGI cinemas in your games for years -- so why not just do that? You’ve obviously got the team who can do that.

Pardo: Um ... we’ve got a fraction of a team that could do that. [Laughter]

Our Blizzard film department is a fraction of, let’s say, a Pixar. We have some really talented guys, but if we wanted to make a movie we’d have to make a movie studio which would be very different from making a game studio.

And on top of that, if they’re going to do that, who’s going to make the videos for our games?

Wired: That’s a good point. How many people do you guys have working in your video department?

Pardo: I think we’re about 100 people.

Wired: Really?

Pardo: Yeah, but I think Pixar employs up to 3 to 400 people to make one movie. We’re very small by comparison.

Images courtesy Blizzard Entertainment

 

---------------

Awesome interview if you want to know about the Blizzard mindset, and kick in the face for EA about the whole DRM fiasco

[john117]

a WoW movie .. yippee...

[TRMNTR]

RTS!