"Returning to the Roots". Blizzard Devs Talk Diablo 4

Joe Shelly: My name is Joe Shelly, I’m the game director for Diablo IV. My role on the project is to make sure that the game is great and the team has everything that they need and make decisions about the vision of the game.

Rod Fergusson: And I’m Rod Fergusson and I’m the general manager of all things Diablo, so I oversee all the Diablo development and then the thing around, the Diablo intellectual property.

The first question "from the audience" concerned how much the build we played would have coincided with the final vision of the game once its released.

JS: Well, it’s a pretty current build, we made it a few weeks ago. But it’s only a small part of the overall game people will get to play. Of course, we’ve talked about the game taking place over the expansive content including five zones. The area that you’re playing is just Fractured Peaks and there’s still content to be added even within Fractured Peaks. We’re adding more side quests, but it’s a good taste of what the game will be. It has a lot of features that you’ll get to see at launch, including campaign, side quests, although as I said, there will be more added; many of our open world features like strongholds, the renown system. So yeah, a lot of cool stuff.

RF: Plus, the game is very clearly in development. There’s still text to speech voiceover, there are still placeholder things. So it’s not meant to be like, hey, this is 99% done. We still have a lot of things to do there, especially from a polish and optimization standpoint. Especially like audio is always at the tail of certain development process and its true here. That’s why a lot you NPCS you meet has the actual English-speaking actors but a lot of them doesn’t. It’s text to speech in there. So, it is stuff to add.

JS: We thought we approach this in a way that the game architecture adjusts a number of players that go, that are in an area, they are running into. Based on a type of activity taking place there. So, as you are running around the town you will see other players quite frequently, because towns are ours social hubs. Game provides more players, you have opportunities to interact with other people, form groups, see cool “hustle and bustle” of the town. And there are other areas where we bring players together like for example world bosses. In those instances you will partner with other people automatically. You don’t have to party with them. It’s just a fun moment of “let's fight the world boss together.”

Now, when you are just adventuring through the world, you still run into people from time to time but the number of people that the game puts into this areas is smaller, because the number of people that makes sense to fight alongside at the same time is smaller in those areas. We don’t wann have it feel to much like everyone is out there and killing all the monsters, mining all the ores and all those kinds of things. But if you go to the area, there's a chance, you'll encounter some of the world events like caravan, where people are trapped. Game is set upped to similar kind of players to help along the way there. And in the campaign, you will see people only if you invite them directly to your party. So, lots of explanation there.

RF: I mean it’s really a reflection I think of couple of things. One it’s a bit connected to the past in terms of what Diablo used to be when we go back. And that’s kind of a way that I think about when I tried to ask people what's the elevator pitch for Diablo for them. It’s the tone of Diablo 1, dark tone. Its progression of Diablo 2. That permanence of the idea of progression. There is the visceral combat of Diablo 3 and there are innovations of Diablo 4 with the open world, freedom of choice and all the other stuff that we have for Diablo 4. And so part of that internally and even early on when we first announced the game, when we used the phrase “return to darkness”. And that was really that idea of going back to what Diablo was as a franchise in terms of the darker tones. And when you look at pop culture today, you can be mainstream and dark. We get Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, Squidgame, that's a lot of things that have much greater edge to them and still can be mainstream. So that felt like this is the right time to go back to the darker roots of Diablo.

JS: One of the things I have been really happy with in this development process is that amount of communication we have been able to do with community and players. Things like having builds of the game available through our blogs. It’s been great to be able to share the game along the way as it develops and get feedback on the game. Sets are interesting case, because as we have been building the game we really felt like we could evolve sets in a new way, relative to what we have seen in Diablo 3 for example. But we needed some more time to get them into game in the way that would work really well with the rest of Diablo 4 so you won't see sets at launch in the game.

We think sets are really cool and we wanna do them right and so there's something we are looking at for our live service. One of the things that I really like about our itemization in the game at launch is that we have lots of exciting legendary items. The legendary items themselves have this feature that you have to ability to move the power around. So you can take off legendary power of particular item move it to another item. Which means that you can solve problems like: “I have a hat with the power that I really love and I got that have different power I really love”. Well, no problem, you can move the power out of the hat and place in a different slot.

RF: It’s just created with our theme of choice like more combinatorial aspect to the legendaries. Sets, when you look at Diablo 3 it works like this: “oh I wanna be this type of sorc with this set, I wanna be this type of barbarian when I wear this set” and you can a lot of similarities across classes. Because you don’t have sets in Diablo 4, we find that everything is placed individually and the fact that you can move it around. Plus of course the skill tree, plus the paragon tree, plus specializations within the class. Like there is a lot of things that make your character unique. For example you and I are both bleed barbarians, but we can still be different barbarians.

JS: For me one of the things that is really cool about Diablo 4 is it’s the first time. In Diablo 3 and Diablo 2, when you are in the game, you are sitting in the menu and you are deciding “oh here is difficulty I wanna play, I wanna play with these other people and all of that. In Diablo 4 all of that takes place in the world. You are sitting in the middle of town, there is a snow coming down, while you can change difficulty through the UI, but there is actually a statue in the middle of a town. You can run over to the statue and you switch your world tier from Adventure to Veteran and our later world tiers that are up here available for high level characters. I think it's so cool that we are able to build this huge expansive world of Sanctuary, so all of that Diablo gameplay and tone, that Robert was talking about, take places in this real area that you can run and ride across.

RF: Yeah, there is a lot. I was trying which one of these do I narrow just to one, because I know what the open world is supposed to be. That’s because it is one of the things that really is different from other games of the series - you have the open world. And that’s obviously important innovation for us, for the Diablo franchise and inside the Diablo IP. But there is also bunch of things that really excites me as a player. While Joe was talking about ability to take out your legendary affixes and move them around. Before it was like: I have this ability, I love that’s on my boots so when I get more powerful boots, I have to make this tradeoff to keep the ability or new ability to it. Now I can say: I’m gonna take that off those boots and I’m gonna put this on my helmet so I can keep using it and I can move my stuff around so I keep my build optimized longer. That really excites me.

We didn’t have that amount of freedom before to be able to move affixes around. In fact, you can move around legendary affix and then put it on to a rare (yellow) item, which turns them into the legendary. I just did this in the build you are playing. I completed a dungeon, I got a codex of power aspect, I took that aspect, I didn’t have any legendries because I’m about level 10, and I went to a craftsman and I put it on one of my yellow pieces of armor, it became a legendary and now I have this barrier that appear every 10 seconds to protect for 50 points of damage. So that idea of being able to “make your own legendary” or move your legendary affixes around. It really changes, how you play, and this is something I love.

One more thing is a shared progression for all the characters on your account. It's now huge innovation because it’s like a list of things but the renown system and how you play the game and want to explore and how its impact your alts to me it’s like another one of those, because I’m a player, I love this, because I told you about this all the time, because you go in and now have, because sometimes sandbox can be paralyzing, because if you give players too much or so much freedom that they don’t know what to do next. So if you done the campaign and you don’t know where to go, to do, you have this renown system that says “you know, one more stronghold and you get new scope point or one more dungeon and you get another potion charge” and what’s great about this is that it’s a guide that tells you “hey, there is whole world out there, things you can go do” but the rewards are across your account.

So now you have a great time and you play your barbarian. And I just did this even if we can go only to the level 25 in the current build. I got sorcerer all the way to level 20 and I got extra potion charge I got extra scope point for the renown system in Fractured Peaks. So, I rolled my barbarian and started with 6 potion charges and skill I can apply even if I didn’t move out of the first cave yet. I know that notion of being able to carry progress through from playing other beta test server, where we go much deeper. I have started as a level 1 with 12 skill points to spend. And that felt amazing as a whole to go out, I’m going back to the world and I have all those amazing abilities. And so I love that sort of freedom to be able to play all statweight and be able to not only write progression to the character you are playing but provide progression to your account essentially.

JS: Local coop supports 2 players.

Maxim Samoylenko: I don’t think we can comment on the specs for the launch version of the game which still has way to go.