Blizzcast Episode 8 Diablo 3 Notes

As many of you may know, the 8th episode of Blizzard’s podcast aptly named Blizzcast was released recently.  These podcasts are a great way to get to know your favorite key Blizzard developers and artists.  This episode had a lot of juicy Diablo 3 information, check below for notes and if you haven’t heard it yet I recommend you take a listen.

Here’s a link to it:  Blizzcast Episode 8

Starting off Jay Wilson answered a few Diablo 3 questions from players:

Bornakk: We have a couple Q&A questions for you today. The first one is from Daleks on USEast. Will shrines be making a return to the world of Sanctuary in Diablo 3?

Jay Wilson: Well there are some aspects of shrines that we liked, experience shrines I think are probably the prime example everyone uses. They’re fun because they drive the player forward. Monster shrines are sometimes fun because they bring out a rare that you didn’t know or weren’t expecting that could come from any direction and that’s cool. But for the most part, the pure mechanic of shrines, a random powerup that just appears in the world for no reason, we don’t really want to litteraly bring that back. What we are going to try to do is integrate a lot of the best things of shrines into our quest and event systems so that when you encounter a random quest or random event that has a story context within the game it either rewards you like a shrine would reward you or something that is actually built into the gameplay of the quest. So while technically no shrines are not coming back verbatim, we are trying to bring back kind of the best things of them in a different form.

Bornakk: So you’ll still have the randomness and spontanenity of it.

Jay Wilson: Exactly, and really they are kind of there to change up the gameplay and add a little factor of randomness, but we felt that very few of the shrines actually did that – accomplish that goal…

Bornakk: Stamina shrine?

Jay Wilson: Yeah, stamina shrine lets you run a long time. Skill shrine made you a little bit more powerful. We feel like we can take the best and put them within actual events that are a lot more fun and have a lot more gameplay to them.

This will be pretty interesting to see how shrines could tie in to different events in the game. To me in Diablo 2 shrines really didn’t do much for me, unless it was an Experience shrine, Monster shrine, or Gem shrine. The rest of them were kinda just there which is kinda inline with what Jay was saying above. Shrine revamp will hopefully be pretty cool.

Here’s the next question:

Bornakk: Alright, great. The next question is from David Nishball in Fairfield, Connecticut. Will buildings and towns be enterable, like Atma’s Bar was from Diablo 2’s second act?

Jay Wilson: There probably will be some buildings, my guess is not too far off from how many were enterable in Diablo 2. Most towns we don’t make all the buildings enterable, it’s just a ton of art to create for very little reason. Most people tear through the towns at lightning speed, so they don’t have a desire to go into the individual buildings. But we do have some specialty buildings that I’m sure we’ll go inside of throughout the quest course of the game.

Interesting question but I’m glad they are not planning on opening up more buildings. It would really get annoying fast trying to navigate in them just to get to a vendor or quest NPC. Jay did make a really good point: I don’t want to be in town long, I wanna get back to the killing!

Next question:

Bornakk: Okay. The next question is from James on USWest. Will there be a diverse selection of items that are viable for the end-game or will it follow the WoW-type style where there is more like one end-all-be-all set for each class?

Jay Wilson: It’s definitely diverse and it’s diverse on a lot of different fronts. When you think about Diablo 2, all the different ways you can build your character, we really expanded all the ways you can customize your character by adding in the rune system. Not only can you completely customize your skill set, much more so than you can in game like most MMOs like World of Warcraft, because of that, the items you want are based upon the skill set that you’ve chosen or the type of build that you are trying to create.

And items, one of the things we are trying to do is focus on this even greater element of defining your build. So really it’s up to the player on what kind of stats they want on their character, but we’re definitely not shooting for a, “oh here’s the barbarian armor”, there is a set and when you get the full set you’re done. That’s just not very Diablo and it’s not really the kind of gameplay we’re going for. If anything we’d like the item set to be a lot more diverse than it was in Diablo 2.

Bornakk: Always something to collect right?

Jay Wilson: Exactly, always a new build to try out.

It makes me shudder just thinking of the items being like they are in WoW, not that it’s bad but it would probably ruin Diablo. Being able to greatly define your build even more sounds great and hopefully it will get away from the locked-in build sets that we have seen in Diablo 2. No, not all Paladins have to be hammerdins or smiters!

Bornakk: Right, exactly. The last question we have today is from James Wichtowsky. Have you settled on a particular color scheme for item drops?

Jay Wilson: We’ve kind of gone round and round on color scheme. I know with World of Warcraft when they decided on a color scheme to fit quality, they were taking that from Diablo 2 and other MMOs, but they chose a color set that they felt was easier to read. We actually tried to emulate that for awhile, I think actually our announcement build or maybe our BlizzCon build was actually using a color scheme very similar to World of Warcraft and we generally found we just didn’t like it, it didn’t feel Diablo. So something as simple as that didn’t feel Diablo anymore.

Color scheme is pretty solid right now, it follows very closely to the Diablo 2 color scheme. We slightly shifted some of the hues to help, especially with color blindness, to try and get some of the more problematic combinations. We took out, for example, uniques were gold, we’ve changed their color I think we did purple which is a bit of a nod to World of Warcraft but the problem was gold and yellow were really close. Even though the gold lettering was unique and everything it was often very difficult to tell the two apart. So we just did that not to get away from Diablo but to try and fix that kind of readability issue. What we found is that if we try and get too far from Diablo it doesn’t feel right, so right now magic items are blue, rare items are yellow, unique items I think they’re purple – I’m operating off memory here but they might be different actually because I think we use purple for something else for an item type we haven’t announced yet. Then if we do set items they’ll be green, we haven’t made a call on set items yet.

It is good they have made the color scheme between rare and unique items are bit more different because sometimes when I play Diablo 2 on one of my older monitors I can’t really tell the difference in color between the rares and uniques without looking VERY closely. I bet a lot of you know what I’m talking about. The color schemes are not particularly interesting to talk about but let’s see if you caught this little gem:

unique items I think they’re purple – I’m operating off memory here but they might be different actually because I think we use purple for something else for an item type we haven’t announced yet.

Yeah, that would be it. A new item type that is being placed in the game. It’s also interesting above to note that he doesn’t include what color they are using for sets, maybe they have taken out sets in Diablo 3 and replacing it with this new unannounced item type? It still might be too early to tell exactly but, knowing Blizzard it should be pretty cool whatever it is.

That covers the player questions section.

Other interesting things to note:

Blizzard has revamped the way the inventory works since last year’s Blizzcon.

Mike Nicholson: While it was more efficient to go with a WoW style one size fits all icon, which is what most people have seen, we really wanted to see what we could do and so we went back and reevaluated the system and we’ve decided split it into large and small objects.

Don’t worry, they still have a way to get rid of the “tetris inventory”, which for some people, myself included, seemed to be more of a mini-game inside of Diablo 2. They have split up the inventory into seperate tabs. You will have a tab for large items, small items, and a tab for quest items. Sounds a bit confusing I know so here’s a screenshot to help: (click on the picture for larger image)

The discussion took a turn next to the way the skill trees have been setup in Diablo 3. Yes, they are extremely similiar to World of Warcraft but still nicely done in my opinion.

Finally they ended up explaining a bit about the Barbarian fury system they want to use instead of having the same old mana pool for Barbarians. It seems at the moment the way you would build up your fury is to keep on killing more and more monsters which increases your “fury bar” (for lack of better term). It works kinda like a reverse mana pool if you will. Here’s how Mike explained what it would look like:

Mike: Let’s see… if I had to use a cruel comment, one that I made myself as I was making it, oh “It’s the fury traffic light”. Because it’s three spheres stacked vertically, and no we’re not making them three different colors, but you know as I was doing it I was like oh great, it pretty much well assures us that we are not doing different colors because it will well indeed look like a traffic light. But that’s the gist of it, because when you’re playing hopefully your vision is in the center of the screen, and this is going to be to your right and down below. So you need to see a very bright graphic that kind of flashes to let you know, that even if you flick your eyes down there you’ll see I’ve got two or three of whatever that is to spend. Really that was the goal. Hopefully Julian and his team will ramp it up, so that, because we want it to catch your eye while you’re doing it, but not be a distraction.

You can also see what it looks like by visiting the BlizzCast link at the top of this post. Blizzard put in a short video showing how it looks and is expected to work.

That does it for this LONG post. Didn’t mean for it to become this long but there was just so much good stuff to cover. Keep checking back here for more great Diablo 3 news and information.