Gameplay freedom. Blizzard devs talk Diablo 4 - Interview

JS: You know, I talked a little bit about how we have events in the world and in the current build you can see, you can adventuring the world, fighting monsters, encounter ambushes and then you can encounter events where someone needs help or there is ritual taking place and those are situations where you can encounter other folks. And one of the things that’s really cool about that is because the game servers are essentially saying “these 2 people are in the world doing the same thing, let’s put them together”.

It means that you are automatically paired with other people who were trying to do the same thing you are doing. Which is really nice as you are not sort of looking for other people who wanna do the same thing, as sort of naturally does that. The same applies to our PvP, which we are not talking about it. You know it’s just great example of the game world naturally puts people together in our PvP areas. You can travel to areas where you can be attacked by other players and this happen only in those particular areas. But you can just go there and there are other people who are engaged in fighting monsters, attacking other players and this is really fun time.

JS: Our story is structured in a way that it has the beginning, the middle, and the end. Everyone will go through those key points. But all along the way you can decide in what order you play everything. There’s a great example: you can play those 3 acts in any order. Which means if you make another character and you choose to play the campaign, because you have the actual ability to skip the campaign. If you don’t want to engage with it the second time. But if you want to play it again you can go back and play it in any order: you can start in Fractured Peaks or you can skip to act 3. And of course there is even more to the campaign beyond those three acts. Those acts just take you to the middle point that I referred to and campaign is continued after that.

RF: You can actually hop around. You can start act 1 one and then hop to act 2, and then start act 3. Those campaign quests stay live so you can do what you want. From narrative point it would be best to play all of act 1, all of act 2 and all of act 3. In terms of non-lineal story and what players want to do you can move around between campaign quests.

RF: Specializations are probably example for that.

JS: Yeah, so there are some kinds of side quests, some kinds of things that show up with blue arrows in the quest log and there are side quests that are used to help construct players around new systems like upgrading your potions or upgrading armor at blacksmith. One of the cool features of Diablo 4 is that each class has its own unique class mechanic, that’s add on to the gameplay you get from the skill tree, skills that you select on your skill bar. And each one is different, this is really cool. And you can see this in the demo. You know, some of the classes, when you reach the level of your character where you start to unlock these you will get send to the places in the world. As barbarian you can be send to the place which is not in the build but if you are playing sorcerer and you reach level 15 you will be able to go on the quest which unlock your mastery.

This is really cool system that allows you to use slots that you can choose from the same list of skills but these are the passive effects, that I want to trigger and combine with my build. So you have really interesting decision like well I have the fireball skill. Do I wanna use this fireball skill actively or do I want to use them as one of my sorcerers class ability slots. So, it’s really cool mechanic. And we had this on couple of classes initially early in the games development and we were like “its need to be in all of the classes”. It’s so cool, every class needs something like this.

RF: Its part of the IP. The notion of the eternal conflict, which is backtrack of everything. I’m sure you all know the eternal conflict between High Heavens and Burning Hells. Essentially Lilith and Inarius decided to break through and create Sanctuary as place to find respite from the war and hopefully bring it to its end. And those “angels versus demons” is the corest of the cores of what makes Diablo. That discussions of Lilith as a demon and discussions of Inarius as an angel I think that you see this brought more to the forefront of what is the eternal conflict and what is our role within it. So that’s the thing you see in it, but yeah in that idea of heavens versus hell. That’s the IP, that’s defining thing of Diablo.

RF: I think John would say renaissance masters, right?

JS: Yeah, our art director has some insights here. So if you gonna ask, talk to him, he will give you fantastic answer that is much better than mine, because he's directly responsible for the art. But yeah, it’s based on renaissance masters, like Rod said and by grounded art style that is inspired by some of the art you see on cathedrals and others.

RF: This particular quest is from the kind that teaches you about the feature. We have this emotion wheel, the ability to communicate with gestures with other players. I even run into a players yesterday and ended up with “hello” kind of thing. One of the things you do when you saw when you go the blacksmith to get upgraded, go to the potion vendor to get upgraded your potions, there is the “hey go cheer on the recruits” is meant to be a teaching moment to say “by the way there is functionality you may not know exist, which is a way to communicate”. It is meant to be a shorthand, because part of it is full cross play and cross progression.

Which mean on PC and console we need other ways to communicate except just text chatting using keyboard, because on the controller is so slow to type on virtual keyboard. So it’s meant to be “hey these are shorthands: wanna party, wanna join me up we are doing same thing” kind of stuff. So you know, it’s not gonna be succeed if you play solo, it's more social in nature. There will some cool stuff, like pet a dog and we have some other things for this as well.

JS: Yeah, absolutely. The prime example is teaching the feature. We think there is a lot of options for really cool emotes that can help players communicate, show off and do cool kind of things. And the dog petting was there, because someone jest said “why can't we pet a dog” and we had bunch of really talented animators and they just went off and so I can pet a dog.

JS: The character creation is not different depending on platforms. Experience on every supported platform is identical, you gonna have the same experience including character creation. The game is gonna look great, characters look great on every platform.

RF: I think the bureau is just more recent, because we had to cut the build weeks earlier to prepare for Q&A. I think the bureau is captured to more recent build, because we are continuing to evolve that. I think this is the discrepancies they are talking about. The bureau is newer than the game tough.

JS: And there still will be additional work to polish this.

JS: We think that there are lots of really cool things, cool opportunities for players to play together Diablo 4 and have fun. And we have built some activities that provide for that, I talked about some of the events, world bosses will naturally group you up with other players. But we also know that many of our players like playing Diablo solo. There are times, especially during campaign that other players around could be disruptive to their experience. And so the way that our campaign system works is that you can invite people to your party and anyone in your party will see what you see and they gonna be with you. But if you are playing through the campaign and you haven’t invited anyone, then you gonna experience that stuff by yourself. You gonna experience the important story bits by yourself. As you go to dungeons you won't see other people. Except when you explicitly invite people to your party. We know we have players that like to play in a lot different kind of plays, so the game put people in situations where it’s fun to be together and keeps people the opportunity to play by themselves in situations for that. That’s what we are looking for.

RF: There are two things, that you're unable to do solo. One is like PvP. You can’t kill yourself, so PvP alone is not fun. But the only other thing that is not soloable are world bosses. They are just too big. Maybe if you are way too overpowered but I don’t have an example of what you could expect of the world boss you go by yourself alone and win. That’s not mean you have to party up. You don't have to talk to anybody. But the expectation is that people in the game world come together, have a moment when they fight a world boss, everyone gets their loot and then they go back their separate ways. But in terms of pretty much everything else in the game - it's soloable. You can solo dungeons, solo story, solo side quests but you can’t solo world bosses.

RF: That sounds like speculation (laugh). The story has beginning, middle and end, we want to tell you full story. But we have the plan to support the game for years to come both through seasons and through expansions, so there will be much more to talk about in regard to it later.

P: Great. And then we have another question from Hubert.

JS: So, as we talked about main story takes over extensive campaign that has lots of cool stuff in it. On top of that there is a lot of side quests build in areas of the world that help explore more of the places, characters that are less effected by the campaign stuff. So there is lots of really cool storytelling stuff in addition to the campaign. In terms of end game and teasing of end game certainly: as you fight more monsters and you become more powerful the pace of the game does increase a bit, for sure. When we have thinking about pacing of the game in Diablo 4 we have tried to add, compare to Diablo 3 which has fluid fast gameplay. Diablo 4 combat in inspired by Diablo 3. But we slowed the pacing a little bit compared to it. It gives more opportunities for decisions in combat. If everything is coming at you incredibly fast there is less opportunities for tactical decisions. And we wanna to expand the ability for interesting decisions there a little bit with Diablo 4. And if you look at things like evade mechanic that’s an example of that.

JS: Yeah, I think there are really 2 vectors there. First off, you know when you think about our skill tree and our end game character advancement systems like paragon we have work hard to create a lot of different builds and sub builds and variations of builds so you know we both have barbarians but they will be different, build is gonna be different. So the way you are engaging in combat with the monsters is more vary. And on the monsters side, you know, when we design monsters for Diablo 4 one of the things, I talked a little bit about the pacing, that we did is we thought carefully about the number of abilities that monsters bring to the table and we tried focus each monster on a particular.

Yeah, monster needs some basic attack, but in addition to that we focused on having a single ability that the monster does, that’s meaningful. And this allows monsters to be closely identify with particular combat actions. Combining that with the pace of combat it provides more opportunities for more actions to actually be meaningful in terms of the combat model. In addition to this as the players progresses through the game and high world tiers there is intensity system that allow monsters to take actions more frequently and to take more aggressive actions. And you see that as well with some of the boss mechanics even in the build that you are playing, you know, it’s evident as you fighting some of those bosses you may notice that as you get toward the end of the boss fight, boss reaches lower HP the frequency of attacks and number of things you deal with goes up. So, it’s really a process of giving time for there to be interesting tactical moments in combat and then giving interesting tactical moments.

RF: Leaks are always unfortunate, there always undermine our hard work as a team and I think they kind of steal joy from players and steal a moment to be surprised, steal important moment when you can do that. Yeah, it’s always disappointing, but the team is dedicated, there is a lot of passion, we really loves what we are working on and we are excited to bring this to the fans. So there wasn’t any influence on development at all.

JS: So you get 1 skill point per level up to level 50. And in addition to that as Rod mention earlier through the renowned system you can gain additional skill points on top of that. So I think it’s another 15 or so, I can’t say exact number of additional skill points. On top of that of course our maximum level in the game is 100 and as you are leveling up from 50 to 100 you are exposed to paragon system. Which is our end game progression system. It comes in level 50 in addition to the skill tree that you have seen in the build today and you earn 4 paragon points per level, and they can be used to explore this vast paragon system that has all kinds of cool adapts, clips and arts. It’s incredible. It’s not in the build you are playing today, but it’s part of our endgame systems.

RF: Because we give you skills on your gear you can actually gain additional “temporary“ skill points to put in. So you can get like staff with +2 Hydra on it and that’s another 2 skill points essentially going into that skill. In sort of points you can allocate, there is fixed amount something like 65 but can get through temporary boost or boost through the gear to increase your skills.

JS: Yeah, that’s such a great point Rod. One of the things so cool about those item affixes is you can actually overlevel. So you know, if look into skill tree you got skill like Barrage in Rogue and you can put 5 points into it right. But you can actually exceed that cap by getting +1 to Barrage or +1 to core skills. So this is a lot of really cool options to overlevel your skills within the skill tree.

JS: The question contains the answer in fact. We have reworked it into paragon system. Which is pretty cool. You can also acquire stat points there.

RF: Rocket launchers, I really wanted rocket launchers.

JS: Well, the tone of the game, when we talk about Lilith and Inarius. Inarius doesn’t have rocket launcher so it’s a tough one, that was hard decision. One of things that we were really excited about Diablo 4 is the opportunity to add things to the game as we go on through our live service.

RF: Yeah and its one of those questions where game devs don’t really answer, because one of the things you end up with is as soon we say something players want this. Did you ever cut anything? What did you want to put in the game? You say rocket launcher and now they really want rocket launchers, when will be rocket launcher, can we talk how can we earn rocket launcher in the game? And we are like: let’s talk about what is in the game and what is really great for us and when I started making games 22 years ago, when you make a cut for scope or you couldn’t figure it out, you couldn’t find the fun, whatever reason they were cut, that will never make the game. And now here we are in 2022 game as live service means you talk more about postpone than about cutting out. That’s a really cool idea, we want more time to flash that out, spend more time finding the fun, making more time for high polish and quality. So we actual look on what postlaunch can do and what we can get into those seasonal and expansions and other things. So there is a lot fewer of those like never more kind of cuts. If it’s really cool idea it will find its time, it’s just not be able to do at launch.

JS: When we think about cool things from previous Diablo games that could work in Diablo 4 there is no mercenaries in the game at launch.

JS: So the arsenal system is part of the barbarians unique class mechanic. As I mentioned the selection, is combined with expertise system and expertise system takes you to the right steps. One of the things we think is that barbarian is our weapon master, so one of the things when we were building the barbarian to begin with and we were really excited about is having the barbarian wielding multiple weapons at the same time. And so you see that through the arsenal system and there are really cool opportunities there. First of course, because you have more weapons equipped at the same time, all of those weapons can have legendary powers. You can mess with them, which is super cool. At top of that, because when you use a skill, for example Whirlwind, he uses specific weapons for that skill.

So you say “I wanna whirlwind with my two-hand blunt weapon” or “I wanna whirlwind with my two-hand slashing weapon”, “I wanna whirlwind with my dual-wielding weapon”. You can actually choose through arsenal system. Of course, game will automatically look through weapons and use with the highest damage by default. But you can actually overwrite that and say “No, I wanna use my dual-wield weapons for whirlwind, because I have some really cool procs on my dual-wield weapons and whirlwind hits a lot of enemies really quickly, so that will be awesome for procing.”. There is really a lot of depth build into that system. In fact with the barbarian when we made that idea real we applied similar technique to the rogue, which you can also play in the build when rogue can have both melee and ranged weapons equipped at the same time, so it’s very easy for players to make the build that is melee or ranged or combination of both skills in the same build.

RF: You are not restricted. Even as a druid, which is not in the build, he has the ability to switch from werebear to werewolf based on which skills you wanna use, you are not locked. It’s the same with barbarian. Literally last night I played my barbarian that, is dual wielding frenzy so I’m just chopping things up, then I go into Upheaval and when I go into Upheaval I use my two-handed weapon. I don’t have to worry about stop, changing my weapon or changing my slots. I have 4 weapons and I use them based on attacks I want to use, I’m not limited. And that's the same thing with the rogue and the same thing with the druid. You are able to take advantage of all your skills without being limited to “oh what I have in my hand right now”. No. What do you have at your disposal right now and that’s what barbarian can pick: blunt two-handed weapon, two-handed slashing, dual-wield and base on your use you grow expertise with this weapon. So it makes it a lot more fluid and let you take advantage of those weapons.

JS: I will answer this quickly. As you level up you will see more legendary items in the build that you are playing. Now you are at low level, so you are seeing more blue and yellow items. Of course, you can upgrade rare and yellow into legendary items. You can move affixes around, like we have talked about here. In order to do that we need decent number of legendary item dropping, because they are part of your character build. A lot of your character power comes from character itself through skill tree and paragon system and the other component of that comes from through your gear, loadout and legendaries. So in order to all that system to work well legendaries need to drop frequently but Diablo 4 is balanced so that rares and other items can be part of a loot system as well, so you are not simply going “with only legendaries”.

RF: And on top of that not only legendaries provide you the power. They provide you with the currency what you can do with your legendaries. So you have to salvage legendaries to be able to move affixes around, to apply different aspects. We wanna make sure we have enough of them. You are not only gain power as you want, but you also have the currency to move those powers around.

Hubert Sosnowski (Gamepressure): Probably that is something we all need and must hear. Is there a Cow Level?

JS: Right. So, we never comment if there's a Cow Level or not in general in Diablo. I will say that our emphasis right now has been on setting the tone for the game. You know it is much more grounded game than we have seen in the past. But the game that we are making its just the beginning of it. We have planned a lot of stuff.