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.”

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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A post regarding what Activision can and can not change about Blizzard has been posted over at Kotaku.com where they sat down with World of Warcraft game director Jeffrey Kaplan:

The development talent at Blizzard now has a new publisher and parent in Activision Blizzard. If you ask the developers, they’re enthusiastic about the change. “All game development is still completely within our Irvine headquarters,” World of Warcraft game director Jeffrey Kaplan told Kotaku during our sit-down today. “There’s no outside influence at all in the development of Diablo 3, StarCraft 2 or WoW.”

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Solivagant has written another great post about the comparison between Diablo 3 and Fallout 3 which I find to be a very nice post well worth reading and pondering upon. What do you think?

I’ve received a lot of feedback regarding a post I made on my Destructoid blog, more positive than negative so I decided to continue that line of thought and further compare Diablo 3 and Fallout 3.

I started my post by stating that everything that I’d seen on June 28 got me interested in Diablo 3. Everything that I’ve seen since then has only gotten me even more interested.

Specifically, Leonard Boyarsky’s involvement as Lead World Designer. His title means that he’s the guy in charge of making sure the storyline holds up, in charge of all the details and tales that, as I mentioned in my previous post, kept running backstage while chaos erupted in the forefront in the previous games.

While you were mass clicking some miniboss, somewhere in the gameworld an NPC kept waiting for you to come back, ready to present you with your next quest. This NPC had a name, a personality, a backstory, a personal agenda.

But you barely got to know any of it.

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I have had busy days with having a birthday (yay, I am now even OLDER than before…), taking my son for a swim and generally enjoy the good weather and of course creating the new design, so I completely forgot about my IP ban and the result my contact with Blizzard had.

On Friday the 25th I got a letter from a Blizzard employee and then a letter from WoW account management regarding my letter that I sent to both and I got the usual stockreplies about how you can get banned from rapidly logging in and out of battle.net and joining and leaving games very often and so on.

Normally I get pissed when people send me stock replies that have no relation to my letter and as this kind of information really have no point since I wrote that I had just installed the game and was blocked before I could even create an account and in the case of my letter from WoW account manager where they told me they could not help me because there was no account with the email used to send in the letter (how could there be when I could not get online to register an account?) I just shook my head at the stupidity of the people sending out these useless letters, presumably without even reading the actual letter.

The letter from David at Blizzard was also a stockreply, but there was something about it…maybe  how the reply was written or if I was just in a good mood, but I did not get angry or resignated, but sent a reply about my situation again. David was kind enough to look into the matter and while he could not say why I had been banned he could tell me that my ban would last for another 5 days, which means that I’ll be cleared to go online again on thursday. This may seem like a small thing, but for me it means that I now know when the accursed ban will end and have something to look forward to, so thank you for that David.

I fully understand that people at support drown in questions and requests as I am myself spending much time in support for my business as webhost and webdesigner, but to send out a stockreply without reading a letter or at least modify it so it fit the question or worse yet questions so that all questions get answered! Failing that you should get yourself a new job as you will only make people angy as they think you ignore or disregard them.

As you can see the new Diablo 3 wordpress theme is starting to take place and is now the default design for this website.  Things are still not 100% and I need to customize many more areas before I am happy with how things look, but at least its usable. I have taken great ains in making this design widget-ready, which is a little troublesome at first.

I will focus on some other projects for a while, but this project will have my attention as far as posting goes, even if the design bit will have to sit back for a while. I especially need to re-design the forum that I have done pretty much nothing with it so far other than just change a few things here are there.

I hope you like it so far.

IGN managed to get an interview with Leonard Boyarsky, the game’s lead world designer, on the importance of lore in the game and the decision to give the character classes voices, among other things.

Australia,  July 24, 2008 - BlizzCon is likely to be the gaming world’s next chance to see some more on the highly anticipated Diablo III, but to tide you over just a little, we had a quick chat with Leonard Boyarsky, the game’s lead world designer, on the importance of lore in the game and the decision to give the character classes voices, among other things.
IGN: What do you do as the lead world designer, and what have you worked on in the past in that respect?
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From behind the camp from the woods movement is suddenly observed. Fearing yet another attack the babrarians and the Amazons try to organise in this direction. The woods is silent and only the cries of the wounded when they are tended by the healers are heard.

Then a man comes out of the woods.
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I am going to start on the new Diablo 3 design for diabloiiiblog.com today since I feel I want to get a flying start with it. I will begin by adding the “wrapper” as soon as possible and then the actual postbit. The sidebar will be a simple version where I will try not to poke things to much so it can remain widget friendly and the footer I will ponder on later as I am sure I want to add something down there as well eventually

I am preparing some advertising spots for the future (you never know) with a 468×60 adspot below each post, a 720×90 spot in the footer, a 300×250 spot in the sidebar and I will try a plugin for random adspots as well. It may sound like a bit to much, but I want to see how it looks and if its not working I’ll remove the areas that are not working.

Feedburner get alot of attention with graphic spots for RSS for posts as well as comments along with a feedburner counter. I am also going to add Technoracti features and work on making the social services sections a bit nicer.

When its in place I’ll start working on the details a bit, like fixing the gallery and the forum so it will look nice and bland with the new design.

It will take a while to get this done since I am home with my son, but I will at least have something to show by the weekend. If you want a sneak preview, please post a comment and I’ll give you a link to see the work in progress.

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