In our interview with the executives of the Diablo 4 developer team, we asked what we were wondering about the game.
Shortly before the release of Diablo 4, we had the opportunity to ask developer Blizzard what we were wondering about the game. Executive Class Designer Adam Z. Jackson and Executive UI Designer Dorottya Kollo answered our questions. Since our time was limited, we did not have the chance to send too many questions. However, you can find what we are curious about below.
Diablo 4 Interview: Classes and gameplay
How do you choose the classes you want to use in a game like this, and also is it hard to say goodbye to classes like Witch Doctor or Monk that we will miss in Diablo 3? Is it difficult to turn over a new page and start over?
I can’t say goodbye to any of the classes we’ve chosen to support this game for a long time, and I want you to know that you never know what’s coming from where. Deciding what to start with is always a choice and our team is really focused on that for the launch of Diablo 4.
We’ve focused on all the different classes of a standard RPG you’d expect to see like the Barbarian. The barbarian is your ruthless physical warrior, and you also have a mage. So our goal was to cover all the basics classes. This is how we decided on the classes we set for the release of Diablo 4. We want to make sure that most players’ types tend to go towards a standard, and we know we want to own our game. We wanted to come out with these first to make sure we had a wide range of great playstyles.
Diablo 4 Interview: Adam Z. Jackson
How has the process worked to ensure players enjoy it over the years and still enjoy the game while you play?
It’s a difficult subject. Because we are trying to balance two contradictory things. Think of many things in current design classes, imagine a spectrum like the letter Y. At one end it’s really weak, almost no power, at the other end it’s like endgame where you get your full power fantasy of your playstyle ratio. Where you start on this line is actually very important. Because as you said, we need to give you some power when you first start the game and enter the game. At first we are extremely weak and as you know you have a weapon and nothing else, you cannot cast spells, you cannot do anything. We leave you there for a long time, then you can’t do anything. You may think that you have nothing of your own. If we start you towards the end of the spectrum then you may have already seen all the great things and then still want to leave. Because you can say, “I can’t. I’ve seen everything. I really can’t get that big, I’m leaving.”
I’m alluding to figuring out the point where we start you off and how your core skills are and you know we’ve had some complaints about Druid in the open beta before and what a big deal we’ve made out of it. We don’t feel good enough about the skills early on, so we need to adjust strength and other things to make it feel good. Because we know that the last abilities are already quite strong.
We’ve talked a lot about skills, far beyond just following your character’s build. It looks like a story chasing legendary powers, skill tree, paragon levels. It contains many different structures. We want the story of the characters you create to be a little different within their playstyle.
As you know, there are a lot of bot users to farm items easily in the Diablo series. What precautions and protections do you have against them?
It’s not our area of expertise, but I’ve been talking to people working on it. I know we can’t really give our internal processes away because you know it’s harder to catch any kind of challenge. But we have something to catch bot users. We had some experience from World of Warcraft and many different tools. In Diablo 4 we have more to make sure the game is bot free. We can control behavior. We have some form of protection when controlled accounts try to move things between them. It’s a fight, a fight we’re going to fight.
Diablo 4 Interview: Doro Kollo
When the game was first announced, it was stated that there would be runes. Also, some of the new runes were announced. We have not heard from them in the intervening time. What are the odds that runes will be back in the game?
Whenever we decide what features and things to put in, the farther we will go. We often have to make tough decisions. Diablo 4 already has a huge scope of lots of systems, lots of crafting, lots of powers and unique items. What we decide to put on launch depends on what we think we can deliver the quality we want to be, and so sometimes “Hey, you know. Baby, it’s the fourth game. It’s not just runewords”. We actually have some other ideas that we’re pretty sure are going to be a huge hit that will be really fun and awesome. But we need to give them some time, play them properly and make sure everything works well. We don’t want to let go of ideas and systems that will be good for the game, not completely unearthed before we put them in our game. Our team has a list of things that are great, but we need to focus on high quality classes. It’s always about balancing when we put it into play.