by Whitney "Neinball" Fairchild - 9 years ago     show comments

This panel had three main segments: the Legendary Workshop, an original Diablo III postmortem, and a look into the future.

Legendary Workshop

The design process for making items, as well as skills and other game features, is called Gather, Refine, Reflect. The devs start off by gathering ideas and then work on refining these ideas into actionable mechanics. Some ideas just don’t work for one reason or another, but these rejected ideas are never thrown away. All rejected ideas go into a ‘design graveyard’ that the devs will go back to constantly to see if there are any good ones that could work within the game environment as it evolves over time.

They also gave us a brief look into the idea behind the Jade Harvester’s set. The team liked the idea of a Witch Doctor (WD) focus on Damage over Time (DoTs) and they started building the Jade Harvester set around that, but then someone had the idea, “Why don’t we make the DoTs explode?” The rest is history. A little suggestion like that can have huge impacts on the design and implementation of items.

Some ideas the devs liked but didn’t make it through the design process on stage:

A WD item that causes his head to explode in a rain of gore, bats, bugs, and things. No reason given why it didn’t make it through.

Another WD item that causes monsters caught in Grasp of the Dead to explode for damage if they die while still caught in the effect. No reason given why it didn’t make it through.

A belt that grants classes random skills from other classes. This got rejected because of a philosophy they called Concentrated Coolness. Each class is designed to have its own unique feel and skill set. Giving out specific class skills to other classes only makes the original class feel less cool than making the other classes feel cooler.

Offensive Potions – This idea got rejected because of Clarity of Intent. Potions are an innately defensive item and therefore giving it an offensive aspect would lead to players using it before combat for the damage bonus. They would then be left without their potion on cooldown when they might need it in the middle of combat.

And now the one item that did make it through – a Wizard source that rotates your skills’ elemental damage types. They really liked this because it brings back the flavor of the Wizard being the master of all elements instead of just being a Frost Wizard, for example. This item also jives well with Elemental Exposure and Tal Rasha’s set. At the end though, this mechanic lends itself well to all the classes in the game and will likely be turned into a ring or a belt so that it’s available for all classes in the game.

Diablo III Postmortem

Core Concepts

The core philosophies for the game are built around two main concepts. You should be playing an epic hero and your mission is to collect awesome loot. These were the core philosophies at launch and they are still the founding principals of the game today. Many of the design decisions that were made prior to launch didn’t line up well with these philosophies once the game actually shipped and players started to develop their own playstyles.

Randomness is King was also a core concept of the game that is still in place now, but originally the development team let it go too far. A case in point is Strength rolling on Quivers; this didn’t add anything to the game besides frustration. They’ve reigned in the majority of this frustration with the Smart Loot system so that affixes are now better weighted to your class. You don’t find Strength Quivers anymore, but there is still a degree of randomness in which affixes you’ll get.

Fantasy vs. Efficiency was a constant struggle for the team. Efficiency was always the main priority of players and this lead to boring and repetitive play experiences. Many of the changes in Reaper of Souls, such as Adventure Mode, were made to address this. They wanted to add variety into that efficiency so that players were rewarded more for just playing the game however they wanted to play.

Items

The original design of the game was built around Loot Fountains – huge explosions of items from killing enemies that fill up the screen to help give you a sense of accomplishment. This ended up not working out well because the vast majority of items you got were garbage. The team has focused on a Less is More mentality so that even though you are finding less loot, it is generally far more rewarding.

The game originally shipped with a Item Tier Overlap philosophy so that the different tiers of items (Magic, Rare, Legendary, and Set) could overlap one another in terms of power. This way a really good Magic item might be as good as a low end Rare, but this design only felt frustrating to players. It made getting better tiered items not feel as cool since that upgrade could still get replaced by something lower tiered. Now items follow a clear progression path: Magic < Rare < Legendary=Set.

It was originally very difficult to compare two items to one another due to the varying power of affixes. This lack of clear information led to the development of the comparison tooltip. The tooltip, however, was just fixing a symptom of the broken item system. Throughout the patches and into Reaper the development team focused on making item upgrades much clearer and easier to understand.

The Auction House & Gameplay

The most rewarding way of spending time in the game was browsing the Auction House (AH), not playing the game. This had to be changed, but the only way to make playing the game more rewarding was to remove the AH. Josh Mosqueira took a big risk in suggesting the removal of the AH to the higher ups at Blizzard, but everyone ended up really supporting the decision because it was what was best for the game.

Originally, Diablo III was all about flipping games for certain runs (e.g. Alkaizer runs) and the team addressed this with Adventure Mode to add more variety to the gameplay experience.

The original difficulty system of the game was very linear and scaled way too high. Most melee players spent a majority of their time killing the Butcher or getting a jump into Act IV to farm pots rather than actually being able to play through the game normally and farm what they wanted.

A Look Into the Future

Fantasy First is the new mantra going forward. If an item or skill combination is extremely powerful, the team will be less likely to nerf that item or skill. Instead, the developers will focus on buffing underperformers or adding in new items to give the player more options. They also want to design new sets around engaging gameplay. They don’t want a repeat of the Marauder’s set, which only involves dropping Sentries and running around. The new Demon Hunter (DH) set is designed to be as powerful as the M6 build, but actually involves active gameplay on the part of the DH.

New Wizard and Barbarian Sets

They will continue to make changes and improvement to old Legendaries and Sets. They want to make Legendaries more than just stat stick;, they want all the high-end items to have some sort of big mechanic that draws players to them. In addition to the images below showing off some of these changes, the devs talked about going back to all the original class sets and adding in 6-Piece set bonuses to increase their power levels and keep players interested in the older sets.

Raiment of Storms Update

Legendary Updates

New Items

We also got a brief glimpse at some future items being added into the game in Patch 2.1.2 and future patches.