Jay Wilson moving away from Diablo 3, Woo Ooo

[LK]

Jeff Kaplan seemed like a nice guy when I worked support for his team. His past along with Afrasiabi and Pardo were common knowledge. They were also remarkably good at their jobs and the first to be self-critical about mistakes made and how the game could always be better. Great guy in-person -- humble. Though I presume working on WoW and its challenges during that period of time matured him?

[Yegolev]

His full EQ name was Tigole Bitties and he was a raging douchebag back then too.

I was on Nameless with him, so yes.

[Hutch]

Jeff Kaplan seemed like a nice guy when I worked support for his team. His past along with Afrasiabi and Pardo were common knowledge. They were also remarkably good at their jobs and the first to be self-critical about mistakes made and how the game could always be better. Great guy in-person -- humble. Though I presume working on WoW and its challenges during that period of time matured him?

Or, people behave one way in a work/team environment, where poor behavior can have meaningful consequences.
Versus the way they behave when they're safely anonymous.

[Paelos]

That could be the case. However, I don't recall them doing anything similar a year after WoW released.

Tigole

I'll point out again that he left in 2009.

[waffel]

Plot twist: the new project Jay Wilson moved to was D3 on consoles.

[Paelos]

Plot twist: the new project Jay Wilson moved to was D3 on consoles.

Which is a hop, skip, and a jump from going nowhere fast.

[Ingmar]

Well, they just announced it for PS4 today, I don't know if that is nowhere.

[Yegolev]

This makes plenty of sense.

[Malakili]

At the risk of being a PC elitist, I guess this explains some of their design decisions, particularly with regards to skills.

[Ironwood]

You think it was a long game, rather than just fuck stupidity ?

[Malakili]

You think it was a long game, rather than just fuck stupidity ?

Why not both?

[waffel]

Makes you wonder...

[Ironwood]

At least we'll still have Torchlight.

[Paelos]

I can't see how D3 would play well on a console.

[Ironwood]

Really ?

[waffel]

Remember how D3 on the PC didn't have offline play?

http://www.diablofans.com/topic/86606-diablo-3-offline-play-on-playstation-3-4/

 

[Drai]

Diablo 1 actually played great on the PS1.

I am not sure why anyone would care about a D3 port to PS4 though, or tin-foil hat that the game was really designed for consoles.  The sales for the game on PC are, what, well over 10 million at this point?  No one at Blizzard is thinking the PS4/Xbox720 version of this will sell anywhere near that amount, or designed it for consoles that will be launching at least 1.5 years after the PC version.

[Paelos]

Really ?

Well it barely plays well on a PC. I mean for all the negative shit the game gets, what kind of consumer are you trying to grab that hasn't already purchased the game? The francise wasn't designed for a console before, and it's going to be well over a year out of the box.

I just don't get how the port is worth the time or money, and I'm not sure how the AH would work. Is the interface workable for a console? Is the RMAH part of that plan?

[Rokal]

I mean for all the negative shit the game gets, what kind of consumer are you trying to grab that hasn't already purchased the game? The francise wasn't designed for a console before, and it's going to be well over a year out of the box.

You could have said the same about Minecraft and that sold crazy numbers on Xbox. Granted, Minecraft was actually a good game. Still, Diablo 3 on consoles doesn't seem like a terrible idea for Blizzard.

[LK]

Blizzard (with Activision perhaps pulling the strings) has always wanted to expand into the console market, but their prolonged development cycles and the hardware cycles of the past hasn't jived. See: StarCraft: Ghost. They aren't a console company either -- their institutional knowledge was lacking but something they've been building up with past hires -- huge plus for any potential candidate to have if they want to work for Blizzard. It makes business sense that they'd throw money at an in-house team to do ports of existing PC titles before perhaps pulling the trigger on an original console title.

Hell, I wouldn't even know how you'd build a team for consoles without pulling from the global pool of existing developers who've worked on it.  Do they even teach courses on how to program for proprietary hardware? Digipen, yeah, but it seems to me in this one area you'd need to work with a console company to get the requisite training / experience.

[Paelos]

You could have said the same about Minecraft and that sold crazy numbers on Xbox. Granted, Minecraft was actually a good game. Still, Diablo 3 on consoles doesn't seem like a terrible idea for Blizzard.

Uh, no. Minecraft is a game developed by one guy's small dream company with pretty much all word of mouth advertising and groundswell. There was a legitimately untapped market for that game.

Comparing it to a game marketed and developed by one of the biggest publically traded gaming companies in the land? Who are this point is unaware of Diablo 3's existence?

[Setanta]

At least we'll still have Torchlight Path of Exile.

This ^^ I gave up on Torchlight 2 - I actually preferred the original TL. PoE is the real D3 legacy - or would be if it had some nice cinematics and a cheesy plot line as opposed to not much plot (which I don't care about - just thje hack and slash

[Yegolev]

I don't know how many of those points have true merit, but it's something less than all of them.  Still could be something behind it.  D3 gets dumbed down for WoW players, console players, or simply 201X gamers.  Likely a combination of the three.  Simple fun sells, not charts and calculations that are thicker than Gygax's neckbeard.  Anyway, that's probably why D3 is as fun as it is: explody colorful fun, and now that the PC gamers are winding up the beta test it's even becoming more casual.

Fortunately for people like me, there is a very lively independent/small-studio PC game scene.  Portal 2 and Diablo She and other crap-ass moneygrab sequels can eat fuck and die.  Babies need quality games!

[Merusk]

Really ?

Well it barely plays well on a PC. I mean for all the negative shit the game gets, what kind of consumer are you trying to grab that hasn't already purchased the game? The francise wasn't designed for a console before, and it's going to be well over a year out of the box.

I just don't get how the port is worth the time or money, and I'm not sure how the AH would work. Is the interface workable for a console? Is the RMAH part of that plan?

It barely plays well on a pc because you have to click to move and that makes targeting shit a pain in the ass as you're clicking and attacking with the same button.  It'll work well with thumbsticks.. in fact when I played I wished I had thumbsticks as I hate C2M.   The 4-button skills thing I've always felt was console-y.

And unless they changed the menu since I last played, the AH was very modern-console.  Clunky on the PC but works well with "escape to previous" buttons like consoles use.  Like the horrible, horrible Skyrim menus on PC.

RMAH?  Have you not heard of Microsoft or Playstation points?  That crowd has been ok with RMT since a time PC players were still writing long diatribes against even the implication that there might be cosmetic item RMT in a game.

Remember how D3 on the PC didn't have offline play?

http://www.diablofans.com/topic/86606-diablo-3-offline-play-on-playstation-3-4/
 

Of course it will. No way to easily pirate a console game, particularly one that has always-on requirements and will allow the developer to brick it if you fuck with the OS.

[Ironwood]

Have we said 'Fuck That Loser' recently ?

[Lantyssa]

I am not sure why anyone would care about a D3 port to PS4 though, or tin-foil hat that the game was really designed for consoles.  The sales for the game on PC are, what, well over 10 million at this point?  No one at Blizzard is thinking the PS4/Xbox720 version of this will sell anywhere near that amount, or designed it for consoles that will be launching at least 1.5 years after the PC version.

If it sells a few million more then it was worthwhile, and if it positions them to sell even more with the next iteration then it was a sound investment.

[Paelos]

I can see the console release working if they release it as a GOTY package including an expansion.

[Rokal]

A Diablo 3 game designer named Travis Day posted a very long response on the forums about problems & fixes for Diablo 3. Pretty encouraging that he actually seems to understand and acknowledge the major problems with itemization, the AH, difficulty, etc.

Thanks for taking the time to put your thoughts on paper for us. There are a lot of topics here that deserve attention and I want to share our views on them with all of you. Stay a while and listen.

Challenge

Challenge is certainly something that has value; players can’t feel a sense of accomplishment if everything in the game can be face rolled. I think many people would agree that, at launch, the game was too challenging. It was very difficult to progress through Inferno depending on your class or items and the challenge was a large part of the reason players felt like they were driven to the AH in the first place. When you present players with difficult content they will find a way to overcome it which usually means using only the most powerful items and abilities. The unfortunate side effect is it also drives players away from the play styles they feel are “just fun”. We have taken steps to improve this problem a number of ways; reducing the overall difficulty of Inferno, improving the potency of underused skills to allow players more diversity in their gameplay, and introducing Monster Power to allow players to set the game to a level which they feel is enjoyable. I think the right way to introduce challenge is to make it optional, for example having difficult content for the players that enjoy it without penalizing the players who prefer a more relaxed gameplay experience.

Items and AH

Items are a topic with a tremendous amount of depth and also a very sensitive subject, so I’ll do my best to provide some of our insights into the matter. Removing “bad” affixes is certainly a suggestion that surfaces from time to time, another suggestion is to group all the good affixes into a shared category so that they can’t all roll on the same item. I think on the surface those sound good but the reality of what they would do to the itemization isn’t what we want. I addressed the topic of the “bad” affixes in a prior post about items so I won’t go into too much more detail here, but I think it’s well within our ability to make those affixes compelling for some people, Pickup Radius and Witch Doctors are a good example of this. Specifically as it relates to Thorns, no one will disagree that in its current state is pretty lackluster, but it supports a play style that I’m sure we can capture with enough alterations to both the core mechanic and some supporting class abilities and passives.

As it relates to bucketing affixes so Crit Chance, Crit Damage, and Attack Speed are mutually exclusive, yeah that would add more choice to item selection, but it would be artificial. I think this issue has some underlying causes that we should look at before going to the extreme of preventing them from existing on the same item. One of the first reasons trifecta items are an issue isn’t that they are so good; it’s that they are the only thing that is good. Of course you want the only three stats that increase your character damage in a meaningful way on the same item, because there are ONLY three stats that increase your character damage in a meaningful way other than your primary stat. I don’t want to derail this by getting into why primary stats were introduced or debate whether they are good or bad. I do want to say that Diablo 3 has been through much iteration during which a vast number of approaches to stats and items were tested and in the end we felt primary stats were the right thing for Diablo 3. I think a better approach to this issue is to introduce more affixes that players are interested in, so there is a sense of tension over what the six affixes are on your “ideal gear”. When a perfect pair of gloves is “Core Stat, Vit, Res All, Crit Chance, Crit Dmg, Attack Speed” and you can’t even imagine another stat you would want instead of one of those, we have a bigger problem. Introducing more choice instead of less and giving players more ways to feel like they are customizing their character is what we want to see. If gloves also had the ability to roll +% School Damage, +Life on Hit, Skill specific affixes, plus a couple more things you want, than players may find themselves in a situation where trifecta isn’t as clearly defined anymore.

The “problem” with trifecta items can’t be discussed without also pointing out that it is only a problem because the AH makes obtaining these items so easy. On a basic level, I have no problem with items existing that players highly desire, but when it is a forgone conclusion that you will have those items then we have problems. If the auction house never existed, players wouldn’t be upset that trifecta exists, they would be upset that they haven’t been lucky enough to find their own trifecta items. To summarize, I think the right solution to this problem isn’t cutting trifecta items from the game, but rather it’s about getting to a point where you want more things than you can fit on an item.
I think your affix ideas are cool, and we have spent a lot of time lately talking about what kind of awesome effects we could put on items that we don’t currently have. I’d even say that as cool as some of these ideas are, we can go even further. We are putting a lot of effort into coming up with really awesome item ideas for future content. I’ll give one quick example of my personal favorite so far before moving on and also to give context to the direction we are moving in. Imagine a pair of Legendary boots that read “Makes you ethereal, allowing you to freely move through enemies”. Whether or not that idea makes the final cut is hard to say, but we want to really push the boundaries as much as we can, so legendary items become things that players can get really excited about.

Character Customization

Your system idea for Nephalem Power Stat is basically a roundabout way of suggesting we re-implement the Diablo 2 skill system. The old skill system was fun, back in the day, but I think it’s honestly dated in today’s landscape. People fondly remember making tons of characters and trying out different builds, and while I have a lot of those same fond memories, I also remember that usually the end result of my time investment in my “cool new character” was complete and utter disappointment.
Today the availability of web sites or posts about character builds would mostly overshadow any of that old character rerolling. You would read a post saying someone else tried the build that you had imagined would be amazing, only to find out it was awful, or you would find out it was great and build it also. The skill system today allows people the flexibility to try out things they enjoy without penalizing players who want to experiment with new ideas. The only difference is if their idea doesn’t pan out, you didn’t waste hours leveling a bad character.
Character customization is fun. People want more ways to feel different from their neighbor, and we want to help provide players with more options in this regard as well. There are lots of things that we have discussed and some ideas we have for long term system additions to the game to help in this regard. One of them which I mentioned in another post is the plan to eventually introduce a system to allow players to customize their character appearance more. Another system we haven’t talked about before is the long term plan to change the way the Paragon system works to allow it to offer more character customization in the form of actual power. The details of that system are still being worked out and players probably won’t get their hands on it for quite a while. We do agree that customization is important and we want more ways for players to both express themselves and differentiate themselves from their friends and other members of the community.

Too many items

I cover this topic in some depth in the upcoming Item Blog that community is in the process of getting ready for release next week. I will briefly say that we agree that too many items drop and we have plans to eventually reduce the rate that players see items, while also taking measures to improve the general quality of items you do see. The end result should be fewer items that are better instead of tons of items you don’t want.

Legendary and Set items

This is a topic I’ve touched on some in this thread and it is also a talking point of the upcoming Item Blog, so I’ll just say that we agree and we want Legendary items to feel game changing.

Finding your own gear

Whenever we talk about what the fantasy of Diablo is and what we want the core gameplay to be, never do we say “we want players to farm gold and go buy items off the auction house”. The AH definitely has made an impact on Diablo 3 and we talk about it constantly, but our conversations are usually in the context of “how can we get players to find their own loot instead of just buying it”. The new crafting recipes and Demonic Essences were added to provide a little bit of this gameplay but we have a lot of ideas for the long term about how we want to go about addressing this. At the end of the day, it is our intention that players are able to find their own items, because we feel the game is just more fun that way. There are several reason why it might not feel that way right now. One is the inherent randomness of our loot system. Another is the fact that the AH completely removes all friction between player trades. And another is when players DO find items they should be excited about, they are often disappointed because this items are not very good. All of these are very important and we hope to address them over time.

Skill Diversity

This is something we constantly strive to improve. Yes, there are a lot of runes and abilities that are lacking, but as you can see with our patches, we try over time to improve the balance of them regularly. In some cases runes are designed just to be fun or cool. In other cases, we try to make a large spectrum of runes competitive, but the math ends up favoring one over the others. In some cases, certain abilities or ability combinations are so potent that they overshadow almost every other option available. WW/Sprint/Battle Rage is a good example of this. There are some cool ideas here, but I don’t want to turn this post into a discussion about specifics of design. This is a problem that we can’t fix overnight, but we are confident that over time we can constantly improve the situation and hopefully the community can see that we are making efforts on this front with every patch we release.
Crafting
What crafting was meant to be and what it ended up being aren’t necessarily the same. Again there are a long list of reasons why it turned out to be a bit underwhelming for some people. Not the least of which is the existence of the AH. Why make random things when you can buy exactly what you are looking for? We are constantly exploring new ideas for how to make crafting more relevant and trying to carve out a more defined role for it within the scope of Diablo 3 itemization. We have discussed ideas such as letting players have some control over what stats will appear on the item they are crafting, using the crafting system to allow players to reroll the values of affixes an item already has, etc. This is a system that, with time, should be able to find a better place in the overall gameplay experience of Diablo.

Social Features

This is an area that has a lot of room for improvement. I personally used to talk about the fact that when I would play with my brother and two of my good friends, I constantly felt like they were a detriment to my ability to farm, which is at the core of my enjoyment of the Diablo series. Since then, we have made changes to improve the coop experience like reducing the health multiplier of additional players and removing the damage scaling when more players join the game. However, we need to do more to improve both the in and out of game experience. We want it to be easier for players to find other like-minded people to play with and this is a topic we are actively trying to improve in the near future.

Conclusion

Ok I’ve reread this thing enough times that my brain is starting to melt. The Diablo team is incredibly passionate and constantly striving to make the game we love even better. I hope this post helps clear the air about where we stand on a lot of these topics and I also hope I never find myself never feeling the need to write a post this long again lol.

[Malakili]

As it relates to bucketing affixes so Crit Chance, Crit Damage, and Attack Speed are mutually exclusive, yeah that would add more choice to item selection, but it would be artificial. I think this issue has some underlying causes that we should look at before going to the extreme of preventing them from existing on the same item. One of the first reasons trifecta items are an issue isn’t that they are so good; it’s that they are the only thing that is good. Of course you want the only three stats that increase your character damage in a meaningful way on the same item, because there are ONLY three stats that increase your character damage in a meaningful way other than your primary stat. I don’t want to derail this by getting into why primary stats were introduced or debate whether they are good or bad. I do want to say that Diablo 3 has been through much iteration during which a vast number of approaches to stats and items were tested and in the end we felt primary stats were the right thing for Diablo 3. I think a better approach to this issue is to introduce more affixes that players are interested in, so there is a sense of tension over what the six affixes are on your “ideal gear”. When a perfect pair of gloves is “Core Stat, Vit, Res All, Crit Chance, Crit Dmg, Attack Speed” and you can’t even imagine another stat you would want instead of one of those, we have a bigger problem. Introducing more choice instead of less and giving players more ways to feel like they are customizing their character is what we want to see. If gloves also had the ability to roll +% School Damage, +Life on Hit, Skill specific affixes, plus a couple more things you want, than players may find themselves in a situation where trifecta isn’t as clearly defined anymore.

The “problem” with trifecta items can’t be discussed without also pointing out that it is only a problem because the AH makes obtaining these items so easy. On a basic level, I have no problem with items existing that players highly desire, but when it is a forgone conclusion that you will have those items then we have problems. If the auction house never existed, players wouldn’t be upset that trifecta exists, they would be upset that they haven’t been lucky enough to find their own trifecta items. To summarize, I think the right solution to this problem isn’t cutting trifecta items from the game, but rather it’s about getting to a point where you want more things than you can fit on an item.
I think your affix ideas are cool, and we have spent a lot of time lately talking about what kind of awesome effects we could put on items that we don’t currently have. I’d even say that as cool as some of these ideas are, we can go even further. We are putting a lot of effort into coming up with really awesome item ideas for future content. I’ll give one quick example of my personal favorite so far before moving on and also to give context to the direction we are moving in. Imagine a pair of Legendary boots that read “Makes you ethereal, allowing you to freely move through enemies”.

I think this is the most important bit honestly.  The itemization is sorely lacking for these reasons, and we've said them all here on F13 before...    I think the other issue is that Set and Legendary items are good not based on what their special thing is (which some of them have) but based on the fact that they are usually guaranteed several decent roles.  For example, the reason people wanted Vile Ward for so long (before the craftables) was because you got high main stat + all resist for free, and then you only have to hope 3 random rolls were good enough.

Some of them are good, like Inna's pants and belt, because they have crit change on pieces that don't have a lot of crit chance pieces (they might be the only pants).  So you see a lot of classes desiring those pants... Also because you need to cobble 24% move speed together, and Inna's pants mean you can drop your Lacuni's or your Boots for a better piece.

It all adds up to their being very simple "best" choices which just means you are using the best rolled stats you have found or bought so far, and you are likely just going to replace that piece with the same piece but with slightly improved rolls on the stats.  At least they seem to realize the issue.

[Ironwood]

To be honest, that's the first thing I've read that shows they understand where they went wrong.

Can they fix it ?  I actually don't think so.

In related news, my very first Legendary dropped yesterday.  The brief excitement was instantly cunted by having a brief look on the AH and realising there were thousands better, at about 20k buyout.

 

[Malakili]

To be honest, that's the first thing I've read that shows they understand where they went wrong.

Can they fix it ?  I actually don't think so.

In related news, my very first Legendary dropped yesterday.  The brief excitement was instantly cunted by having a brief look on the AH and realising there were thousands better, at about 20k buyout.

 

At least Brimstone are useful now.

[Polysorbate80]

Running Arreat crater from the start thru Azmodan or starting midway and going to Rakanoth usually gets me one rare/legendary.  80% of them have been essentially worthless, but I've sold a few for 300k-1.5million.

Too bad upgrading anything costs a minimum of 6 million at this point.

[Venkman]

I can see the console release working if they release it as a GOTY package including an expansion.

According to PAR: PS3 will have offline play, local multiplayer, no item shop.

[Tannhauser]

Is our Blizzard learning?

[Ingmar]

Is our Blizzard learning?

Learning what a pain in the ass the PSN is for developers, maybe.