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 continue to spit out gems from their interviews and this time its about the question if Diablo 3 is the end of the series or not…

Not much has been revealed about “Diablo III“’s storyline, but lead designer Jay Wilson did tell me that the game will round out the story arc set up by the previous two games.

The plot behind “Diablo III” was developed with Blizzard’s VP of creative development Chris Metzen, who crafted the tales for the first two games. In the first “Diablo,” the player quests to kill the Lord of Terror.

Then in “Diablo II” and its expansion, the player is an adventurer set off to discover what happened to the warrior from the first title, who became corrupted, and fight the Prime Evils, other Hell-spawned superpowers unleashed by Diablo.

Wilson also told me that in addition to fan-favorite Deckard Cain, “Diablo III” will feature other characters from “Diablo” lore.

“We also tried to focus a little more on bringing characters back, and not just from ‘Diablo II’ but from ‘Diablo I,’” he said. “We feel like a lot of the focus is on ‘Diablo II’ but ‘Diablo I’ started it all and has a lot of really good stuff on the gameplay side and on the character side. So people can expect to see characters from ‘Diablo I,’ more characters from ‘Diablo II,’ and characters from some of the books. We’re definitely going to bring a few of them in.”

And while “Diablo III” ends the trilogy, fans needn’t worry — it’s not the final curtain for “Diablo.” “We’re not saying this is the end of the ‘Diablo’ universe, but we are trying to bring this storyline to a close,” Wilson said. “It’s not just ‘Diablo III’ — we’ve got plans beyond.”

Is it too soon to start complaining about the art style of “Diablo IV“?

UGO has published a blogpost regarding their meeting with three Diablo 3 developers, of which one was Jay Wilson. Its not much news in here, as diii.com also write, but 2 tidbits are new (at least for me):

There are additional plans to streamline item-sharing between different characters, one suggestion being to allow items to be traded or sent through whispers.

And…

Pricing for the game is still being decided, but don’t expect to pay subscription fees for access to Battle.net. Sure, there’s always the possibility that different membership tiers will be introduced later on, but nothing we heard during our chat suggested that the team has anything other than a free-to-play model in mind for Diablo III’s online play.

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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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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