Diablo 4, Season 4 Interview

We recently interviewed Lead Class Designer Adam Jackson and Lead Game Producer Timothy Ismay, who are on Blizzard’s Diabl team, for Season 4 of Diablo 4. We are passing on the information given here to you. Although we did not get as much in-depth information about the new season as we wanted, we got answers to the questions we had.

Diablo 4, Season 4 Interview with Adam Jackson and Timothy Ismay

– When the fourth season is released, almost a year will have passed since the game was released. How would you rate the state of the game in season four compared to launch a year ago?

Many seasons since launch we’ve either brought a temporary new feature to the table or added some things that are usually more permanent. I think season two was probably our second biggest season where we changed the combat math and a lot of other things underneath the structure. That was a pretty big deal, but you know, season four is going to be a little bigger because it changes more fundamental parts of the game. Most players can reach the mid game point, and some players can reach the end game where they see end game bosses and things like that.

Like season four, item and loot updates will impact how everyone uses the game. Your fantasies, your character changes, your cunning changes and even more subtle things like how often you go back to town, how often you spend your loot. You will feel a little different. I think it’s a lot better than it was in the past, so I think it represents a pretty big change and we’re pretty happy.

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– In line with all these developments and gameplay, do you think that those who are new to the game or those who return will have difficulties in adapting?

When we decided how to make these changes, we were trying to make the game simpler on the front end because it’s actually easier to understand when you first interact with it because a lot of the complaints we got was that things were really confusing, especially when you look at the item and there’s tons of them. There are many conditions on how to get better stats. Things that give you any objectives actually simplify the game. Actually, the reason it took us so long to get this out was to figure out how to balance the deconstructing elements in a really good way.

Now we’ve simplified many of these statistics. We just kept all the simple things like power or luck and all the more complex or cooler things. We’ve got a bunch of new things that you think about our crafting system, the temporary system where once you equip your outfits you realize it’s really cool. You’ll have to do less looking at complicated stats than you did before as you try to understand the loot you’re getting. In general, you still live with complex operations, but you do it much less frequently. This means, in my opinion, that the game is much easier to understand overall.

– When the new season is announced you want people to be excited about what’s coming to the classes they play in, so I’m curious how you get people excited for one or more classes each season.

This is something we talk about with the team often, with an eye on making sure the classes always stay fresh and everyone has something new to look forward to, always maintaining balance to keep the gameplay right. We also slightly change the functionality of things that don’t really work or reside with humans. So they need strength skill upgrades for the skills on the paragon board. When we find items that are obviously better, we improve them.

Another thing we try to do every season is add some new content, meaning we add a bunch of legendary powers that are unique to each class. So people come back every time. They look forward to something new that doesn’t exist in the game before relocating existing pieces or adding some pieces, and finally, as a team we try to create some classes for higher level themes like one to two, maybe even three. This thing is really different, really attractive and really new.

I’ll use the example of the wizard from season three and season four. Season three is one of those things and the mage we wanted was like a new way to play meteor, so we came up with stuff called Starfall Cornet. In the third season, a group that used the meteor skill and resources turned to the cold skill after a while. So you had a kind of new way of playing. When we place this situation for the wizard in the fourth season, we get what we want.

– I guess you’re getting a lot of questions about Diablo 2. Why is Blizzard resisting bringing some of the elements that made Diablo 2 great to Diablo 4? For example, Runewords or Paladins.

We’re not resistant to the fact that some people view something they’re really passionate about in Diablo as “this is a cool feature.” The truth is, why hasn’t this been in Diablo before? It takes time to build things, so we agree with you in most cases, which is really great, but we need to prioritize like what to put in the game, because it takes development time to get everything nice and stable.

If it is a new class for players to interact with, there have been active discussions about it for a long time. I can assure you that if there was something you were excited about at your previous job, we talk about whether it might make sense to bring it in the future. So it’s good to talk about it. If you have such a suggestion, Diablo 3 or Diablo 2 definitely bring it up. We look at everything as a possibility to bring back, but we try to make sure we make a list of the things we think will be most exciting for our players. We will definitely always find the truth.

Maybe we should have worked on it before, like this item change, I think it would have been a huge benefit. If we had started working on it earlier, everything could have been revealed early in the season. But if we can’t find them, they have to tell us if there really is something from the previous Diablo game that they think is missing. I’m sure we’ve talked about it, but please keep talking about the things you think we should bring back.