More goodies from MTV’s Multiplayer blog with Diablo 3 lead designer Jay Wilson, this time he is talking about how they struggle to appease what he refer to as an “extremely broad audience”.

“Diablo” fans aren’t just those taking the time to make petitions and their own screenshots.

According to lead “Diablo III” designer Jay Wilson, the team has to appease an “extremely broad audience” as well as hardcore fans.

“Up until fairly recently, ‘Diablo II’ was Blizzard’s best-selling game,” Wilson recently told me when I asked him just who “Diablo” fans are. “‘World of Warcraft‘ has finally surpassed it, but it took it several years to do that. And part of the reason is how approachable the game is.”

Keeping the game approachable is key for Wilson. “It’s one of the reasons why we made some of the choices we made, like when we pulled out the potion system,” he said. “When we wanted to add a hot bar we knew we had to pull the potion stuff out. Every time we add something, we have to pull something out to keep the game very simple and straightforward to play.”

“One of the things that happened in ‘Diablo II’,” Wilson continued, “was the player was faster than most of the monsters and had pretty much infinite health because they would just pop as many potions as they wanted. So when you have a player who has more mobility, more health and endless power, essentially the only thing you can really do to challenge [the players] is to kill them… by just spiking the difficulty.”

But in “Diablo III,” players will have to pick up health orbs after they’ve killed enemies, which will restore their health upon contact. Wilson saw on the forums that people were worried that this might make the game “ridiculously hard.” He said that fans shouldn’t worry.

“That’s only if we tuned it like ‘Diablo II,’” he said. “When the player has similar downsides, it means we can make a lot more interesting monsters. We don’t have to kill you to challenge you. We can make a monster that affects your mobility, we can make a monster that has different kinds of attacks that are dangerous to you and that you actually have to avoid. And so it makes the combat a lot more interesting.”

While Wilson said they’ll keep the game accessible, he knows “Diablo III” has to ultimately appease their hardcore fans. He assured me that the team has kept this in mind, and is making the game progressively harder.

“A lot of the choices we make are styled towards knowing the long term,” he said. “I think that hardcore players, long-term, will find a game that has lot more depth for them but we distinctly made the choice that in the first stage of difficulty, the game’s really easy. So it’s easy to get through, it’s fun to play and you can kind of spam with one skill. But as you get further and further into the game, you start having to go, ‘Okay now I’ve really got to use this ground stomp thing to stun some monsters and get some distance from them to recover.’ That’s something that we focus on more later in the game.”

MTV Multiplayer present more from their interview with Jay Wilson and in their latest blogpost they bring out a conversation about the fate of the Necromancer and the reasons why it will not appear in Diablo 3.

Although many “Diablo” fans have expressed fondness for the Necromancer from “Diablo II,” lead “Diablo III” designer Jay Wilson confirmed to MTV Multiplayer that the character class will not appear in the initial release of the game.

When the team was choosing which classes to include in the long-awaited sequel for Blizzard’s best-selling action-RPG series, they decided to create a brand-new one — the Witch Doctor. And with only five classes in the game, “Diablo III” just didn’t have room for two curse-dealing, pet-wielding classes.

Here’s Blizzard’s explanation for why the Witch Doctor replaced the Necromancer:

“Our approach for classes in ‘Diablo III’ is that we don’t have a strong desire to bring back classes from the previous game,” Wilson told me. “The goal is to try and give people new gameplay and not just re-hash old gameplay. We’re not just making a ‘Diablo II’ with updated 3D graphics.”

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Some quick questions and answers from the community answered by Bashiok.

Will the acts be separate, or all blur together?

Act transitions haven’t really been discussed externally. It would be cool to have something a bit more engaging; however, I think the Diablo II style zoom-zoom to the next act …worked.

Can characters fall or be pushed off the edge of a level?

No. Unless it’s part of a special event or something.

Can we filter B.net games by mod being used?

We’ve never supported and don’t intend to support “mods” for Diablo II or III.

If there are forest landscapes like the Kurast jungle, can we clear them out or will they be pre-defined paths like in D2?

We haven’t announced/shown any locations beyond those on the website.

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Some quotes from Bashiok on the complaints som gloombuggers have had regarding the barbarian character being to “magical”:

I don’t get that feeling while playing one. I think the Hammer of the Ancients ability is definitely magical to some extent, he’s effectively summoning a giant hammer to smash an enemy.

I kind of fill in my own blanks as to where it’s coming from and it feels very natural to me and the Barbarian “kit”. I kind of see it as - and like the idea of - the barbarian … I guess drawing upon the power of his ancestors. It feels very Norse, very mythological, and somehow tied to a family bloodline of great and powerful warriors. Summoning the power of a giant hammer? Hell yeah! If a barb is going to do anything magical, it’s going to be so he can use a big *** ethereal hammer.

Someone responded “But if you have the magical ability to hit so hard you break the rock beneath you, WHY ARE YOU HITTING A ROCK?”" to which Bashiok unleased his response:

Because it looks cool, and it’s a very physical and apparent way to get the basic mechanic of a “crowd control” skill across.

I don’t see anything “magical” about it either. Is it realistic? No, but why should it be? Immersion and reality aren’t intrinsically tied.

I doubt that will be the last we will hear about this, the gloombuggers tend to go on for ever with their nags…

This comes from diii.com as well and they report the news that is posted on MTV’s multiplayer where Jay Wilson goes over the modified screenshots that the petition-nuts have be spamming all over the place to show their bleak view of their Diablo 3 wet dreams…

D3 lead designer Jay Wilson sat down with the folks over at Mtv’s Multiplayer to go through some examples of player-modified D3 screenshots. Jay talks about how the effects were created, how they resemble earlier art design passes on D3, and what’s wrong with using that darker, grittier, desaturated style of art for the final game. It’s a fascinating read, and here’s one example, with Jay’s comment above the shot in question:

	Blizzard Quote:
	Jay Wilson, Designer of “Diablo III”: The key thing to remember here is that this has been Photoshopped. This isn’t created by the engine. Though it looks really cool, it’s almost impossible to do in a 3D engine because you can’t have lighting that smart and run on systems that are reasonable. If we could do that, we probably would in a few of the dungeons. Now in terms of the actual texturing, this texturing, where they grayed out everything and it’s very flat and the monsters are all kind of a similar tone — that does not play well. It’s very boring to run through more than a couple of times, and it’s very difficult to tell creatures apart and pop them out of the environment. So those things don’t really work for us. A lot of the lighting stuff I think is very cool, but it’s also not very doable for us.

One other interesting tidbit, when discussing this shot. Emphasis added:

	Blizzard Quote:
	Wilson: A lot of this change is adding noise to the screen. If [the characters] weren’t centered on the screen — like find the witch doctor. Especially think about him as a friend [in co-op play]. Standing over there, you can’t even tell the difference between him and the zombie. And that’s another player, and when you can’t tell the player apart from the creature, that’s horrible. You’ve got to think that there’s potentially up to seven other people in addition to yourself, and several dozen monsters. All that noise just translates into unplayable, especially when this starts moving. This texturing was actually very similar to one of our previous art styles. But when you started moving and the whole screen just kind of shimmers, you can’t really tell anything that’s going on.

Slip of the tongue, or confirmation of 8 players in the game? The designers said it would likely be just 4-5, for better gameplay/party size, during the WWI panels.

A three page preview with lots and lots of information and even a full page with Questions for Jay Wilson has been posted on Gamesradar and while its quite a long read, it has some nice tidbits that i recommed you check out. Here is the short questions and answer section for you, but make sure you read the rest of this article as well on the Gamesradar website.

Q&A with Jay Wilson, Lead Designer

We cornered Wilson and forced him to reveal why the devil made him do it.

PC Gamer: How has working on World of Warcraft affected Diablo III’s development?

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The somewhat ridiculous outcry regarding the art direction of Daiblo 3 that has resulted in 52.000 names on a petition to change the direction of the artwork in Diablo 3 was adressed by lead designer Jay Wilson when doing an interview with MTV Games.

Don’t like “Diablo III“’s colorful art direction? Too bad. We were told today that it’s not going anywhere.

Lead “Diablo III” designer Jay Wilson told me that even though 52,000 “Diablo” fans have signed a petition asking Blizzard to return to the darker, more gothic look of the old “Diablo” games, the new, vibrant art style is here to stay.
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A recent thread regarding playing in singleplayer or multiplayer first led to this response from Bashiok, the always present Blizzard representative:

One thing that seems to be a fairly consistent experience for a lot of people when they first picked up Diablo II was their introduction to Battle.net. And it wasn’t generally a positive one.

Most people, including myself, went home and installed the game and started playing. Over maybe a few weeks or months they’ve finished the game maybe a few times, they had a ton of fun, but they keep playing and trying to find more items.

One day while loading up the game they notice the “Battle.net” button and decide to click it… and, their characters aren’t there. They have to start over. Any of us would have gladly played on Battle.net (in passworded games if necessary) just to have that online/trading option for their character available to them. It felt like a lot of wasted time to find the actual game, which was on Battle.net.

While “starting over” is something almost every Diablo II player is going to do any way, the lack of on-screen instruction or indication as to what the different systems meant left a bad taste.

To help avoid that type of situation we’re going to try to find ways to encourage Battle.net character creation first and foremost.

A topic regarding the possibility to add weapons markers on bosses as one fight them to make it more fun and enjoyable was replied to by Bashiok. The answer was neither positive or negative, regardless which side of the discussion you belonged.

For boss fights we don’t really want to just start throwing “damage decals” on them. It can very easily be too subtle if you’re fighting a smaller boss or one that has odd geometry to it, and it can also end up that no matter the flavor, style, and cool look to a boss you just end up fighting a big gory mess.

Also we think that we can go a lot further than just simple decals and get something much cooler out of a boss fight. So what we hope to do for at least the bosses where it makes sense is to show more apparent and visually noticeable damage states. Instead of a blood splatter they may actually lose a limb, or a piece or armor, or - like the Thousand Pounder - may transform in some dramatic way changing how the fight progresses. We want to go a lot further than just showing sword slashes and instead use dramatic and noticeable (which can be difficult in a game like this) ways to indicate a boss’ current state.

Speaking of battle damage though, and I don’t think this came across in the gameplay video or any of the screenshots as of yet, but when an enemy dies a critical death it actually drenches your hero in blood if you’re within proximity of the spray. It’s awesome.

After a member commented on the effects on loosing a limb and how it might make the boss easier to fight he quickly replied:

It was just an example I made up, I don’t know if the loss of a limb would actually happen or make sense for a fight.

This is the second part of the extensive article regarding the lore of Diablo 3. The first part is called “An Examination of Diablo 3 lore- Part 1 : Background“. Original source is StarCraft 2 armory.

Half the images which follow are cut off. Please just control click them and view them in a new window till I can make them smaller. I’ll also post links under them if I can.

So, now your caught up, we can start the article, I plan to cover the following subjects in no particular order.

1) What was the meteor in Tristram? What signifigance does it bear?
2) Is Tyrael corrupted or what?
3) Who are the real bad guys?
4) What are the ramifications of the destruction of the worldstone
5) What about the Nephalem, Lilith, and Inarius?
6) Where are the brothers?
7) What does Izuals speech mean (and other prophecies?)

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