Thoughts on Diablo III?

[Calis]

Still, I like Blizzards attitude about their release dates. There is a reason that until today there has been no bad game created by Blizzard. And I am not talking about personal taste but selling numbers.

 

[Rub'Rum]

Still, I like Blizzards attitude about their release dates. There is a reason that until today there has been no bad game created by Blizzard. And I am not talking about personal taste but selling numbers.

I hate it. The correct attitude would be to announce the game one year (or 2 if we want to stretch it) before it's released. Not 4-5 years ahead of time with vague release dates that make it seem like it could be released within 2 years. But what can we do, it pays off for them to act like that, so they'll just do it. A choice between "not being jerks" or "building hype and profit" is easily decided for them.

I think they're doing the right thing in proving that PC games can be released at top-notch quality. But they should just wait until they are confident about a 1-2 years to potential release before announcing a game.

May I remind people that the Empire State Building took less time to build than Diablo 3.

 

[Maniacal]

Still, I like Blizzards attitude about their release dates. There is a reason that until today there has been no bad game created by Blizzard. And I am not talking about personal taste but selling numbers.

It really isn't that good of an approach, I mean taking their time to make a solid game is good but the way they announce the "release dates" is terrible. It doesn't really build much hype except mostly from fanboys (and even then they are a fickle lot).

 

[Thrawn]

Given the choice between releasing it when they first give an estimate of the release date, when it is possibly unfinished/more buggy/less polished than they'd like, and releasing it when they're happy with it some time later, personally I'd rather the second option.

Either way people are probably going to complain heh.

 

[Rub'Rum]

This is pretty much what Calis was saying. And I agree. I admire their capacity to release a slick working game. But, AGAIN, what I'm basically saying is that they shouldn't have announced the game before 2010 or so. Of course, they have no reason not to announce it, being Blizzard and not giving a crap.

Look at Skyrim. Bethesda announced it basically less than a year before it was released. This was gorgeous. Take my money and go. Even Civ 5 was announced a little over a year before release too (estimate from memory). You can think Civ 5 sucks, but it's a major title from a major company, and they didn't go out and wave it around 4 years ahead of time when they had a couple of graphics prepared and a vague idea of the systems they were gonna implement.

 

[Thrawn]

I don't know, I think that when they announce games, they do intend to release it within a year or two, and then they don't quite have it where they want it so they delay it. I do remember watching a presentation by dustin browder where he said that they originally had sc2 penned down for a 2007/8 release, or somewhere around there.

Given that game dev is a pretty complicated process, it's quite likely they wanted to release D3 1-2 years after announcing it as well, and just didn't manage to get it to that point in time.

 

[Rashiminos]

So they live in a world where Q2 is "early 2012". I guess you should expect as much from a company that thinks "soon" can be over a year.

Q2 can mean Aprilish, which is somewhat early.

The empire state building is easier to build than diablo 3 is to code. You might try comparing a cathedral instead.

D3 has been in development since 2001.

"Screw this, I'm gonna play Hellgate London"

Amen.

 

[MobBoss]

Isn't Q2 like summer time anyway?

No, its spring, maybe early summer. Technically, April, May, June.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Q2 can mean Aprilish, which is somewhat early.

The empire state building is easier to build than diablo 3 is to code. You might try comparing a cathedral instead.

D3 has been in development since 2001.


Amen.

The Sagarda Familia was begun in march of 1882 and is expected to be finished by 2035; I'll miss that, but still hope to play Diablo 3.

 

[Calis]

But Diablo 3 is not paid with donations

 

[Rub'Rum]

Firaxis announced their new expansion for Civ 5 today, coming out this spring. I'm surprised Blizzard didn't announce their first expansion for release shortly after Diablo 3 comes (to actually come out in 2016).

 

[Rub'Rum]

Still waiting for D3

Spoiler :

 

[Calis]

Sometimes people here behave as if there is nothing else in their lives than D3. I am also looking foward to playing it. But if it takes them another 6 months. So what? there are other things. Also other games.

 

[Rub'Rum]

Sometimes people here behave as if there is nothing else in their lives than D3.

If you want to find "these people", you should go see the regular posters on the Blizzard forums.

As for here, you probably get this impression about "these people" because you "know" them from one place: a thread about Diablo 3 and only about Diablo 3 on an obscure forum. Congratulations on taking a thread from on an obscure sub-forum of CFC where I posted about Diablo 3 taking too long to be released, and extrapolating this to Diablo 3 encompassing my entire life.

 

[Calis]

If you want to find "these people", you should go see the regular posters on the Blizzard forums.

As for here, you probably get this impression about "these people" because you "know" them from one place: a thread about Diablo 3 and only about Diablo 3 on an obscure forum. Congratulations on taking a thread from on an obscure sub-forum of CFC where I posted about Diablo 3 taking too long to be released, and extrapolating this to Diablo 3 encompassing my entire life.

Is there also a Heart of the Swarm thread, where I can find you?

I do not intend to be offensive. Just giving harmless comments, friend.

 

[Thrawn]

Won myself a beta key yesterday, pity my pc sucks so I can only run it at around 20-30fps heh. Still fairly playable though.

 

[Rub'Rum]

Diablo 3 beta is getting a major patch as we are speaking, implementing the new skill system. Jay Wilson explains the new skill system here.

Spoiler :

Last August we held a Diablo III press tour, and it was with a small group of fansites that I first revealed significant changes were still in store for the rune system. Since then, we’ve been hard at work on the rune and skill systems, and today we’d like to share details on the changes you’ll see in Beta patch 13. We’re confident that these changes will make Diablo III a better game, and to help illustrate why, I'll start with a high-level explanation of our goals for these systems as well as the feedback we were responding to in making these changes.

I'll start with the skill system. Our high-level goal with this system has always been to give players a great degree of power to customize their characters. We believe we accomplished that early on by abolishing skill trees and moving toward an open-ended system where skills, rune variants, and passives are chosen at-will by the player in a flexible customization system.

That goal and the system have been great successes, but the amount of customization we have available doesn’t mean anything if it’s not useful in combat situations. Combat depth is another one of our goals; Diablo III is designed to be a modern action game, built on the mantra of “easy to learn, difficult to master.” What that means for the player is picking a set of skills and abilities that work together, and then executing them in ways that lead to success: the wholesale slaughter of the demonic invasion. With that combat-depth goal in mind, we’ve been internally categorizing the skills since the inception of the system. Many of you could probably identify what these categories were if we asked, and some players have even mapped out what they are fairly accurately.

For every class we essentially created three common types of abilities, and then a handful of class-specific ability types. All classes have skills that fit into categories we call Primary Attack, Secondary Attack, and Defensive. Primary Attack skills are frequently used abilities that typically generate resources. Secondary Attacks are more powerful attacks that are limited in use through resource cost or cooldown. Defensive abilities are used to escape or control the flow of combat. Beyond that, classes have unique categories, like armor spells for the wizard or mantras for the monk. We used this methodology to help us design the classes and their skills, but we weren’t exposing this to the player despite the fact that these categories would give the player, like they did our own team, a better understanding of how the classes work.

One of our other goals is to ensure our game controls and interfaces are easy to use so that players spend their time trying to master game mechanics rather than fighting an interface. Giving players complete freedom to choose “anything” with no direction as to how our systems are intended to work was a failure in our design. There was also a detached relationship between the bottom-bar UI and the skill system. We have six skill slots, and six spots to put skills, but the two interfaces didn't really interact, and stocking abilities in your interface felt awkward.

To fix these issues, we focused on two core changes: (1) exposing the skill design intent by categorizing the skills and (2) linking skill selection directly to the bottom-bar UI to make assigning skills a clearer process. When viewing the skill screen, you’ll be presented with your six skill selection slots; each of these correspond directly to your bottom bar, and each will provide a specific list of skills from which to choose. By providing a clear-cut guide on how to best maximize your build potential, we hope to cover that “easy to learn” half of the mantra.

You may already be fuming because you’re a “difficult to master” type of person, but before you run to the forums, we have you covered. In the Gameplay options, we’ve added an ‘Elective Mode’ for the skill system. With this checkbox ticked you’ll be able to place any skill in any skill slot, as freely as you could before. The Elective Mode option is available at any time with no requirements or need to unlock it. We hope the new, more guided interface will give you an in-game heads up as to the intent of each skill -- and maybe even be the way you play through the game in Normal -- but if you eventually have a build that simply can’t be accomplished the way we’ve laid things out, you’re free to pop on Elective Mode and take the skills you want.

While the skill system is largely unchanged save for some UI improvements and the helpful new (but optional) skill categories, we’ve been working to make some rather intense changes to the runestone system. Before we get too far, it’s probably best to clarify our terms: First, they’re now called skill runes, and they’re called skill runes because they’re no longer a physical item, but built directly into the skill system. Let’s back up, though, and go through some of the problems we were encountering and how this final design is intended to resolve those issues.

Our goal with the rune system has always been to provide additional character customization by allowing players to augment or completely alter their skills in new and significant ways. Originally, we tied this in to the itemization system because it felt like a good fit, as Diablo is all about the item drops. But with around 120 base skills, that meant there were around 600 rune variants; on top of that, each variant had five quality levels each, meaning ultimately there would be something like 3,000 different runes in the game… and we knew we were heading toward a problem.

Diablo is certainly about the items, but later in the game, having to juggle all of those various runes was not only un-fun, it was a serious and tedious inventory problem. We went through a number of different iterations, some of which we fully implemented and tested, to try to solve these fundamental issues while still keeping the customization intact. Ultimately we developed, implemented, and have been playing and testing a new system which we’re confident hits all of the desired mechanics and solves all of the related issues – and that’s what I’m going to talk about today and what you’ll see in Beta patch 13.

With the new skill rune system, you’ll be unlocking new skills as you level up just like you always have… but in addition you’ll also be unlocking skill runes. Now, when you open the skill window, you’ll choose which skills you want in which slots, the skill rune variants you’d like, and your passives. All of this is done directly through the UI, and all of the options from the skill, skill rune, and passive systems are unlocked through character leveling progression, leading to a cleaner overall integration of these systems. Just as we set different skills to unlock at specific levels, skill rune choices unlock at different levels as well.

Another thing we strive for in our games is “concentrated coolness,” and while rune quality levels made sense when we were attempting to itemize them throughout the game, they make far less sense as runes are unlocked through the UI. We didn’t want to get back into a situation where you’re clicking a button to pump points into skills. It’s far more concentrated (and cool) when your rune choices have a single and powerful benefit to your skill choice. The new skill rune system does not have ranks, and we’ve instead made each around the equivalent to what the rank 4 or 5 rune was previously. One click, you make your rune choice, and you get an explosive benefit to that skill. That feels a lot cooler.

Runes have been by far the biggest design hurdle we’ve had in the game, and as you know we’ve been continually iterating on them. We fully expect that some of you will be disappointed that runes won’t be part of the itemization system. Internally, it took us a long time to let go of that notion too and stop trying to force them into being items, and instead embrace the intent of the system. Integrating runes with the skill system directly gave us a bunch of great benefits, and even without runes we’re launching with more item types than Diablo II had. We knew we were making the right choice by letting go of runes as items and focusing on the core objective of the system: to customize your skills in awesome ways.


Before I wrap up, I did want to cover that one of the added benefits of the new system is that you’ll be unlocking something every level all the way up to the level cap (60). Now, with each level you’ll unlock at least one new skill or rune, and in most cases you’ll be unlocking three or four. The most immediately exciting part of that system is that skill runes begin unlocking at level 6, which means that players in the beta test will finally be able to play around with some rune variants.


Phew. Well, there you have it -- the new skill and rune systems! We strongly believe that these changes are going to make for a better Diablo III, and we’re looking forward to you trying it out in patch 13, which should be live any minute now (if it isn’t already). As always, we’d love to hear your feedback on your experiences with these changes. To help center the conversation on these changes to a single location, we’re going to lock comments on this blog and encourage you to post in a thread we’re specifically making to discuss this: Skill and Rune Changes Discussion.

Thanks for reading.

Jay Wilson is Game Director for Diablo III and won first place in the team’s chili cook-off competition. Recipe available upon request.

At first sight, I'm not liking it. To me, it sounds like another aspect of character customization has gone out the window with this. The itemized rune system made you want to commit to a kind of build and hunt for runes that related to the skills you had decided to work with. Now though, everybody can swap skills AND runes at any time.

I used to use the old rune system as a way to convince people that unique character builds with some level of commitment into them would still exist in Diablo 3. Now I feel I even lost that argument. Is gear all that will differentiate characters? And will it? When every barbarian is using the same armor at the same level like in WoW?

I guess I'll see in the beta, at least we can actually try runes this time. Maybe there's something I'm not seeing. They will have to do something either with gear or I don't know what.

 

[GrayingGamer]

I'm glad Bliz releases polished products.

Any follower of Bliz and their games is being ridiculous when they think any release dates, official or not, will be strictly adhered to. It's been "we'll release it when it's done" forever, not sure why'd you ever assume otherwise.

 

[Thrawn]

D3 shipping without PvP. PvP to come in a patch.

Doesn't really bother me in the slightest as I probably wouldn't be doing pvp at all, but I'm sure it'll probably frustrate some people alot.

edit: And it recently became active in battle.net for those who signed up to the WoW annual pass, so it can't be too far off release.

 

[Rub'Rum]

Some people have managed to "lag out" past the gate that stays closed and prevents people from exploring new content in the beta. They apparently unplugged their modems, lagged out past the gate, and replugged the modems, or something like that. Screenshots are being posted on various websites. Blizzard isn't pleased, as usual.

The sources of pics are varied, just look it up, here's an examples:

The next few waypoints:

Spoiler :

Why is it people always take tiny crap screenshots of interesting stuff:

Spoiler :