Diablo III Interview On the importance of lore and compelling character classes. by IGN Staff 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? Leonard Boyarsky: As lead world designer I'm responsible for the lore of the game, the history, the story. I work with a quest designer named Michael Chu, who's had a lot of experience in the RPG industry. We make sure that through the quests the story's being conveyed to the player. We also work very closely with the art department to make sure - y'know, they'll come to us and say to us 'what's going on with this civilisation or that civilisation, what's the history?' Because there's a lot of ruins and building up on cities that have been around for a long time. So, building a world – the way we're building this world – from the ground up and with a lot of history, really informs the art. And it's a back and forth thing too, the artists will sometimes come up with really cool concepts and we'll work that back into the lore. So that's basically what we do there. Brian was upset that his backstory included two years of tap, when in actuality it was more like three. I started out as just an artist, and after that I was the art director on Fallout, where I was more the creative director, and really fleshed out that world in terms of the feeling of the world, the mood of the world, and then I progressed on that project to designer, and then, before leaving to start my own company, we designed Fallout 2. And then I started my own company with a couple of guys called Troika, and we made Arcanum and Vampire. I did way too many jobs on those games, from world design to animation, to texturing, to drawing, to concepting, to producing, but my love has always been the world creation part of it… and you've really got to choose. If you want to do it well you've got to pick your specialty, but it's really great because I get to work with art directors like Brian [Morrisroe]… he's really fantastic, and he wants to hear [what other people have to say]. Sometimes artists really just want to go in their own direction, but at Blizzard they're really into the back and forth. Everybody has good ideas, so it's been a really great experience. IGN: How much has the lore changed and evolved over the development process? Leonard Boyarsky: Well, there are certain things that are set in stone because they've been in the previous games, but – I guess this is on the good side – I think there's a lot of potential that hasn't been tapped. Looking at it from that level, we haven't been boxed in as much as we could have, because we didn't dig as deep in the past as we could have. That's given us a lot of wiggle room. It changes – it's a very fluid thing and it took a little while to get used to, because no one wants to throw out stuff that they've worked on, but the philosophy is that the best idea wins, it doesn't matter if it comes from the top or it comes from the bottom, or it comes from wherever, so… it's a process… but it works really well. IGN: How much do you have to consider making sure that the world works and it's coherent for the hardcore versus the average player? Are they even going to care about this? How do you factor that in to how you build the world, and introduce the player to the world? Leonard Boyarsky: I think that's what's really great about – I feel like such a cheerleader – working at Blizzard, because they could have easily put out another Diablo game and very lightly skimmed the surface of these kind of things, and it would have sold very well, but Chris Metzen – he's the creative director of the whole company - is a very big champion of the lore and the story and that stuff, and that is what the really hardcore players care about. [While] a lot of other people don't – and it can't be allowed to impede on the fun of the game… but if we take it into account when we're developing the game, I think it comes across in the feel and the mood. A lot of what I've done in my past games - even though they've had a lot more dialogue and hardcore RPG stuff than we're going to have in this game - the thing I'm always trying to do is to create a mood for the player first and foremost, and that's going to hopefully colour the player's experience from the minute he steps into the game; the way people talk or the environment he's running through… Diablo 1 had this really haunted, horror mood, Diablo 2 lost a little bit of that, and we really looked at the difference of those two things, so that's the kind of thing that we're trying to get the players to experience. And when we get deeper into it, it's kind of an opt-in kind of thing. We're not shoving things in the players' way that they have to decipher or go into these huge dialogues or read 15 different lore books or research the novels outside the game to understand this stuff, but it's there for the more hardcore people if they want to search it out inside the game. One of the things we're using the Adventures for is to hopefully intrigue people about this world. Y'know, if we have this knowledge about all this stuff that goes on, we can create intriguing little mysteries for people playing the game, and plus, this is a game that people play a lot. If you look at the Diablo series, people play these games for years and years, there's a lot of replayability, so maybe you ignore the story the first time through, but on the fifth time through you see something that finally piques your interest… IGN: What would be that thing that would pique someone's interest? What are you building in that could draw someone's interest and make them want to know more about the lore? Leonard Boyarsky: What we're thinking is that there are certain things you can see or have happen, that - if I run across a scripted event or I see two people fighting or a conversation that I can overhear as I'm running by that gives me a piece of information that I can use later, but I don't need it. The hardcore action guys, they are first and foremost number crunchers, they're loot crunchers, they want the best gaming experience in terms of, like, how to maximise those areas, so if we can drop clues into the story as to how they can maximise their loot and maximise their armour, that would intrigue, I think, the hardcore action player to maybe look more into that. Obviously that wouldn't be the only way, and the minute the game comes out all that stuff is going to be available on the website anyway. There's going to be some people who just want to play it as an action game and that's fine. Our goal isn't to impede that at all, it's just – we want it there for the people that really want it. A sparkler is a dangerous weapon in the right hands. IGN: In terms of drawing people into the game, you've introduced voices for the player characters. What was the process behind that decision? On one hand, with a player character that doesn't talk, you embody that role, whereas there's a danger that the player is distanced from a character with a defined personality. Leonard Boyarsky: We went back and forth a lot on that. First we wanted to do it, then we didn't want to do it, then we wanted to do it. The reason we decided we wanted to do it was because it really enables us to have your player drive the action more. IGN: How much choice do you have as a player to shape your character's persona? Dialogue trees or anything like that? Leonard Boyarsky: There won't be any dialogue trees per se, but we're working on ways of your player affecting things. That's all I'll really say about that right now. We do want your player to feel like he's driving the story, and we looked at it more like a character that you can watch develop and identify with, as if, a bit more like a book you're reading or a movie you're watching, you know, a character you can identify with and be fired up to be that character, be excited to be that character. And it remains to be seen whether people get behind that or not. It is a risk… IGN: Is it a matter of having enough classes that there's going to be a character that everyone wants to play? Leonard Boyarsky: I think so, and it falls on us to make these guys compelling and to make them characters that people want to find out about. The one thing is that when you have a character that doesn't have a voice it always felt to me like you can't really put anything on that character of any substance. I can't have any history as a character – we kind of make the character a void so you can project all that into it, but the downside of that is that I can't have your character know anything, so therefore the other characters have to explain a lot. If you have a conversation between two people who supposedly know something, the player can pick up through context a lot more information in a lot shorter a period of time. It actually helps to tell the story in a much more succinct fashion. You don't have to listen to someone go on for five minutes about the history of the temple you're going to raid or whatever. So it helps us in a lot of ways that I think will make the story in the game more compelling, and it also allows us to have the mystery of 'what is your character's past?', 'why did he come to this place?' so that's another mystery that you can delve into deeper, or not. IGN UK
Im sure a lot of peoples grades are going to drop as soon as the game comes out and not going back up for a long while
It's all just a balancing act. Play until you drop from exhaustion, and then, when you wake up 10 minutes before your test, you frantically go through everything, while running to class. See! A balancing act! : P
I dont know where Ill be when it comes out because I dont know when it comes out, I wish it was sooner than it will be
Can anyone enlighten me as to why PKing was such a good thing that the self-proclaimed "pros" have come out of the woodwork to QQ at Blizzard's apparent interest in separating the PvM and PvP parts of the game, like pretty much every competitive game since has done?
There is intense bitching, in between the spam floods, on the battle.net Diablo 3 forums about "carebears" wanting to remove their sacred cow from the game. This really only came up after Bashiok's post (referred to here) relating to the topic, although it didn't make it particularly clear what Blizzard were thinking of. This probably means they haven't decided yet themselves, though.
Battle.net Changes Rumour I received this tip from a long time site reader, who read it in a private forum. The names are removed and this is strictly a rumor; we're not saying it's true, or that we think it's true. Just read it and be entertained and/or amused. It is known that Blizzard has a huge customer service and internal support division in Austin. Also, during the various Diablo III panels at the WWI, the D3 team frequently remarked on the major structural changes coming to Battle.net with Starcraft 2, changes that Diablo 3 would be utilizing and adding to. And the Blizzard Authenticator is already in service for WoW. So it's a reasonable rumor, so far as rumors go. diii.net --------------------------------- Interview with Rob Pardo It sometimes feels like the games industry is backing away from the PC, yet Blizzard have the most successful game around, and it's a PC exclusive. What's going wrong? Rob Pardo: I totally understand why so many companies aren't developing on the PC... From a hardware perspective, you're developing for a moving target, it's becoming more and more expensive to develop technology, and you have to be careful with system requirements... From a financial point of view, you get more money back from PC games, but you also have to spend more money on marketing and getting shelf space: you need to be working with a strong publisher. Something else that's been well documented, but I think depends on the game, is the whole piracy element... But I don't subscribe to the notion that the PC is dead. Until consoles have the same sort of inputs as a PC, I see no reason for it to go away. PCs have the biggest install base of any game system. As long as that remains the case, you're going to see a lot of PC games. It just might be a different business model. A WoW dungeon isn't just a cave with monsters, it's always a temple for someone who's been kicked out, or the bottom layers are occupied... is that a carefully considered template? Rob: It's not, actually. We have an organic model for game development. The lore informs the game mechanics, and the game mechanics inform the lore... we get a lot of back and forth. We come up with many ideas that we don't present to the players, but it makes our job easier, and ultimately delivers a better product, because it feels cohesive. Even if you don't know the lore behind a dungeon, at least it feels like there is lore. That there's a story behind it. It feels like someone really considered why these different factions are inside the dungeon and why these bad guys live in this room... We don't expect every player to read up on every quest, and read up on all the lore of, say, Auchindoun. I still really believe, though, that it comes across if you don't read a single word of text. You have around 140 people working on WoW now... Rob: It is big... Every time we go to a new tier of team size it does cause us ripples for a time. We have to come up with a new way to build a creative and organisational structure for the team. Certainly, the creative process for a 140 person team is vastly different from a 20 person team. Who has the final say, then? Who is the boss? Rob: Here's the funny thing. When I bring people from certain types of cultures, it takes them time to understand the answer to that question. Everyone on the team has the power to veto. It's the team that's approving the game. If I veto something or approve something by myself it's only if the team allows it to happen. On one of my games, I had one of my designers kept coming to me to approve stuff. I had to say, "Yeah, I like it, but you should talk to person a, b, and c, to see if they like it." He replied "But you like it, can't I just put it in the game?" I said "you can, but it's at your own peril, because if they don't like it, we'll go back and change it." That doesn't necessarily mean that every single decision is one that everyone loves: that way, we wouldn't get anything done. What I am saying is that there's different people on the team that look at games in many different ways. If you come up with ideas that appeal to those different perspectives, then you really hit on the gold mine. It depends, too, on the team's dynamics. I've worked with the Starcraft II team for nearly ten years, and I know who the creative and social cliques are, and I know which groups I should bounce ideas off of. I know that if I have a user-interface idea, I know who on the team cares about that. I know who's going to complain if it's not good... so I go to those people... If I have an idea for a new dungeon encounter in WoW, you start to learn who on the team is going to care most about it, and so you go to them... Just make sure you're talking to the people who are passionate about the areas of the game. In most places I've been to, a lot of the design is laid down early in a long design document, and everything fits into that. Rob: We don't start with a monolithic design doc. We come up with "what are the fundamentals of this game? What are the top three or four things that this game should be about?" We know that as soon as you can start running a character about on a screen, change is going to happen. We just prepare for that, and prepare our people for that, as best we can. We playtest, get opinions, get feedback, iterate... and then 10,000 times later, we'll ship a game. Can you remember the first game you ever designed? Rob: It depends on how you want to classify that. I used to master my Dungeons & Dragons campaigns for my friends - that was probably the first time that I was doing game design. Did you know then that you wanted to do game design? Rob: No. Definitely not. That was when computer games were first coming around. I got into them fairly early on. It was something I enjoyed, but there wasn't a game industry per se. There was the film industry, the music industry, the law profession... but when I thought of all the things to do when I grew up, it didn't occur to me until later on in life. University courses have sprung up around the games industry - and I know you've given a few lectures. Do you think such courses are valuable? Rob: I think the schools are getting a lot better. This isn't a criticism of any particular school, but one of the things I've noticed in the newer game design programs in particular is that they tend to teach skills that are more useful for a lead game designer, rather than getting an entry level design position in the games industry. I've seen curricula and topics that ask students to think about the overall game mechanics and how to construct an entire game: I think that's appropriate for a entry level course on game design, but the more advanced courses should be teaching you how to be a level designer in RTS, or a quest designer, or something like that. What I think is happening is that kids would come out of their programs with a four year degree with not many more skills than what a mod-maker has. They should be far, far superior to someone who is just learning on their own, and that's just not the case at the minute. Have you hired anyone from these courses? Rob: We've brought in interns. I don't think we've hired anyone with a degree from one of these colleges. I've hired people from the mod community, and I've also hired people straight out of college, but never from a dedicated place like Digipen. There's a quote from Raph Koster that 'the singleplayer game is an aberration.' Historically, games have always been played together. Rob: I think that's wishful thinking on his part. I think when you look at Raph, all the games he's worked on have been multiplayer games. I think maybe, to him, that might be true. But I don't see any sort of trend that leads me to believe that we're not going to see Half-Life 3, or God of War 3, or any of those kinds of games. Those games are awesome, amazing experiences. For me, games become exponentially more entertaining when experienced together. Rob: Don't get me wrong, I love multiplayer games, and from a Blizzard perspective, all of our games have a hefty multiplayer component, but I just don't see them as mutually exclusive. Even games that are traditionally singleplayer, like Super Mario. Nintendo added some pretty interesting co-op gameplay to Galaxy. I totally see that there's going to be more and more multiplayer functionality in games. To say that 'singleplayer epic games are going to disappear because of MMOs...' I think that's a reach. We actually ban our writers from using the word 'gameplay'. We think we can make a better and more precise point than that. Do you agree? Rob: To me, a game mechanic is something that's in the game that allows players to have fun. But gameplay is 'what a player does'. It's where they derive fun from the game design. There's lots of things that people enjoy in games. It might be technology, it might be the photorealism, it might be the visceral mechanic... gameplay is just one of those things. Gameplay means quite a bit to me as a game designer... It's really interesting too. I think a lot of people think the way you do: younger designers often come in and I'll ask them, "what do you think was fun in that game?" and they'll talk about things I wouldn't consider to actually be gameplay. So can you describe what gameplay actually is? Rob: It's the player's interaction with the game mechanics. Computer and Video Games
http://www.blizzard.com/store/details.xml?id=1100000182 They have these for WoW. I think it's a really good idea if you're concerned with account security.
I found this: Source: http://www.battle.net/forums/thread.aspx?fn=d3-general&t=310419&p=1&#post310419