IGN: Diablo’s Future, Console Seasons, and PvP?
by Whitney "Neinball" Fairchild - 9 years ago show comments
Luke Karmali of IGN UK recently had the opportunity to chat with Senior Game Producer Rob Foote and Senior Technical Game Designer Wyatt Cheng about Diablo III’s future. In the article Luke gives a brief overview of some new features coming in Patch 2.3, but the most interesting parts come from the questions he asks about what’s coming next.
Console players may be excited to hear that Blizzard’s stance on bringing Seasons to the consoles is changing. No longer do the devs feel that Seasons are only about the Leaderboards, but they’re seeing that more and more players are trying out Seasons due to the draw of starting fresh. It is always an enjoyable experience feeling the rush of excitement that a new Season brings about and the challenges you face in trying to scavenge gear together in the first few days to even begin to attempt the early Torment difficulties. We’re not sure if Leaderboards will make any appearance at all in console Seasons, but you can bet the new Seasonal Journey feature is a major push towards making Seasonal content a reality for Playstation 4 and Xbox One players.
Another interesting tidbit that came from this article is the brief discussion on PvP. Sadly, it’s not looking good for PvP’s future in Diablo III.
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“The best part about Diablo is the PvE,” he says. “I think we’ve really had a lot of focus on making sure that it’s the best it can be. When we try to incorporate PvP, when we made more effort on that, PvE suffered I think. There were a lot of ideas for Legendary ideas that simply would never have happened if we had to do PvP balancing as well. Now we did introduce PvP brawling and we invited players to go into the Arena, do it and try it, and I think what you find when you go into the brawling arena that the Legendary powers that are amazing and make you feel so awesome when you’re attacking monsters making PvP no fun at all.”
Is there room for PvP with all the PvE balancing going around? I look to another Blizzard title for insight into this question. The dev team for WoW has gone through many, many iterations while trying to ‘perfect’ their PvP system. WoW’s PvP system is getting completely overhauled in the upcoming Legion expansion due to the difficulties presented with trying to balance PvP through gear alone. The WoW team has been very reluctant to balance skills separately for PvE and PvP, but they are finally giving it a try and seeing how well it’s receive by the community. This experiment in changing one of their fundamental design philosophy’s for WoW (skills should always function the same way in PvE and PvP to not make it confusing to the player) may pave the way for the future of PvP in Diablo. Right now Brawling is non-existent in Diablo because of how high damage scales vs survivability. Devs could easily increase passive damage resistances in the Brawling Arena, but with power creep they’d be having to readjust this value constantly, even between patches with how fast our damage can increase when new builds or combos are discovered.
PvP is one of the last big requests from the community that the devs have held off on (the other being stash space) and I’m hoping that they might bring some massive system redesign for PvP in a possible expansion or future content patch. Speaking of future content, when Luke asked the Rob and Wyatt about the possibility of another expansion the duo became a little evasive saying:
“We’ve always been thinking about making sure Diablo has a strong legacy and what amazing features we could have in the game. I think we’ve shown since the beginning of Reaper of Souls our commitment to the community here with 2.1 and Greater Rifts, Seasons and now Kunai’s Cube. We’re scoping out more for the future… but unfortunately I can’t talk about any of that.”
Patch 2.3 is the single largest content patch for Diablo III, but it is definitely not the last. What more could the future hold for us? More zones? More end game? Higher difficulties? Another Act?
The whole article is a good read and you can find it here.
What are your thoughts on all this? Are you a console player eagerly awaiting getting a fresh start with the possibility of Seasonal play? Are you still longing for Patch 1.1 and PvP content? Are you excited about what content could be unveiled at this year’s Blizzcon?
“When we try to incorporate PvP, when we made more effort on that, PvE suffered I think.”
And it still suffers. Wizards for example are the worst because half of the skills are pvp oriented. For example, wizards have a lot of defense oriented skills like shields, mirror image, ray of frost – single target skill that slows down enemies.. Instead of spamming different type of damage dealing skills, we have a bunch of shields that are in no use in the current meta.
I don’t really think they’re suffering though. They seem to be keeping up with other classes in solo greater rifts. Also many top tier 4 player groups are utilizing the Wizard in their composition. I agree there are a lot of defensive skills, but everyone has a different playstyle and might still use those skills. Are there room for improvements? Sure. Are they suffering? I really don’t think so.