Eurogamer has posted a transcript of their sitdown with D3 Lead Designer Jay Wilson. The interview has an interesting beginning, with Jay talking about his D1 and D2 play experiences, and how those translated into his design goals for D3. The interview also touches on innovation in D3, the isometric perspective, story focus, as well as a mandatory mention of the art design controversy. Here’s a quote, with an interesting tidbit about bosses dropping sustaining health orbs mid-battle.
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| Eurogamer: I guess this is where the influences you’ve mentioned from enemy design in Zelda and World of Warcraft come into play…
Jay Wilson: Or God of War. Games like that are some of my favourite games. It would be far more interesting if we could have a boss monster that wasn’t just a giant sack of health that deals out ridiculous damage. We’ve got monsters that drop health at percentages of their damage, we also sometimes spawn monsters that are just there basically to drop health. Even there: if you have a boss that just walks around and hits you, and a bunch of smaller monsters that continually spawn and generate health, that’s already a far more interesting fight than you ever got in Diablo. And that’s just the bear minimum of what we can do. And then on the role-playing side, we’ve been focusing on more story. We want people to be able to ignore the story if they want, but we still want there to be a denser story, we want there to be a lot of scripted events that support the story, we want the story to be better formed and more interesting. Plus we want there to be some elements that allow players to feel like they’re in a role-playing game. I think that one of the differences between Blizzard North and what we sometimes call Blizzard South is that Blizzard South, led by our creative director Chris Metzen, is just a little bit more story-focused. That’s not a knock, but it can’t help but be something that gets into the game now, because it’s also a value that I have. |
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