Keith Lee Talks About Diablo III
Keith Lee, the Lead Producer of Diablo 3 sat down to have an interview with our good friends over at inDiablo at the Blizzard Worldwide Initiative last week which can be read in German. Blizzard Guru would like to thank inDiablo for providing us with an exclusive on the English version of their interview, which follows after the jump:
Keith, let us talk a bit about Diablo 3 and we used the last night to collect some questions from our community and so I would like to ask you how will the storyline of Diablo III connect to the ending of (Diablo 2) Lord of Destruction, especially considering the destruction of the World Stone.
So for at the start of Diablo III, the events happened twenty years after all the events that occur in Diablo 2. And so, it’s been twenty years since Diablo 2, and really the beginning of the story is that evil is starting to stir in Tristram, and maybe, potentially, one of the first victims will be Deckard Cain. That’s really where we start.
Will Diablo 3 again be divided into different acts as Diablo 2, and can you make any estimate on how long it would take to play the whole game?
You know, it’s really tough to say that because in terms of game development nothing is really linear, there’s no way for us to say that we’re 20% there, because once you’re… you spend a lot of time working and iterating on the game and one of the things about our games is that we focus a lot about the quality and just ensuring that we’re happy with the product as well as all of our fans.
And so we may end up spending more or less time on it but ultimately we will want to ship it when its ready. We feel that we generated a lot of great content and we are excited to share more with you in the future.
Will you focus more on small groups of players playing on Battle.net or bigger groups of players playing, perhaps, a limited number of games on Battle.net?
One of the core philosophies of our game of course is the fact that we will want to have a great cooperative experience and we will want to ensure that all the heroes and all the characters that you play contribute and also compliment all the other hero classes.
And so we’ve been spending a lot of time trying to find the sweet spot that we feel would really work in terms of having a really great experience and so we actually feel that having a smaller group of people would be more effective because that way every person that plays can really contribute and exercise their unique skills for their heroes.
In the trailer that we saw yesterday it was hinted that potions won’t appear in Diablo 3. Will there be some kind of healer class instead?
You know, that’s something we spend a lot of time thinking about and one of the things that we’ve always focused on is the fact that Diablo 3 is very fast paced, and we feel that potion spamming actually prevents you from being able to use a lot of different skills that you might want to have and we want to actually develop each class so that they are unique.
We may not necessarily have a pure healing class. I don’t think that’s ever been a philosophy of the Diablo series. But more importantly than that, we want to allow you to use your skills to find ways to get out of a situation and we don’t want to always have you depend on potions.
That’s an interesting idea. Well, speaking of healing classes and things like that, will there be a higher focus on party play or will it be possible to complete the game completely alone as in Diablo 2?
I think that one of the things that’s very important to us and that’s a very core philosophy of all Blizzard games is the fact that we want you to be able to play by yourself as well to finish the single player experience. But of course our priority is cooperative play. There’s nothing more fun than playing with a group of your friends and so want to make sure that you have an awesome time. And I think that all the classes by playing together helps to compliment all the skills that you’re using such that it’s a lot of fun to play with your friends.
About a year ago there was a thread on the official Battle.net forum asking users for their opinion considering changes and new stuff for Diablo 2. Was any of the information gathered in this thread used for the Diablo 3 development?
Actually, I’m not very clear on the thread itself. One of the things that we do is that we do care a lot about our customers and just kind of our fan base but you know there’s just so much stuff out there on the internet; it’s really hard to follow everything that happens. But, maybe you can give me more details…?
Well, sorry. But no, I don’t really have the details. But perhaps you can answer the question if there’s still a Diablo 2 team, and that they might patch something in there? Especially if we see the new Battle.net during the next year or something like that there might be a small patch with some changes for Diablo 2?
Oh, absolutely. I think one thing Blizzard is very focused on ensuring that we have a very supported… We support all of our games and as long as there are people playing, we will continue to make it better. As well balanced as possible to give everyone the best experience possible, and if that means for us to improve and iterate and add another patch, then that’s something we’d love to do.
It was announced that dropped items are automatically shared between players in a party. How will this be implemented. Will it be random or have you developed some kind of system behind it?
That’s one of the things that in terms of Diablo we do have randomized loot and the fact that it is different, because in World of Warcraft the loot drops are deterministic and that means that it’s more predictable in the sense that you know what to expect when you join a raid and go into a dungeon.
In terms of our actual back-end systems of how we do the loot dropping, we’re still spending a lot of time tuning it and I think that’s one of the key core areas that we’ll be spending a lot of time working on until the end of development. So to answer your question, I think that there’s a lot more stuff that’s involved in that and I think that we can reveal a bit more later down the line.
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This entry was posted on Sunday, July 6th, 2008 at 8:11 am and is filed under Blizzard, Diablo 3. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
