Diablo 3!

Bornakk: Welcome to the next Q&A portion of BlizzCast. We have our Diablo 3 Game Director Jay Wilson, welcome to the show!

Jay Wilson: Thank you very much.

Bornakk: We have a couple Q&A questions for you today. The first one is from Daleks on USEast. Will shrines be making a return to the world of Sanctuary in Diablo 3?

Jay Wilson: Well there are some aspects of shrines that we liked, experience shrines I think are probably the prime example everyone uses. They're fun because they drive the player forward. Monster shrines are sometimes fun because they bring out a rare that you didn’t know or weren’t expecting that could come from any direction and that’s cool. But for the most part, the pure mechanic of shrines, a random powerup that just appears in the world for no reason, we don’t really want to litteraly bring that back. What we are going to try to do is integrate a lot of the best things of shrines into our quest and event systems so that when you encounter a random quest or random event that has a story context within the game it either rewards you like a shrine would reward you or something that is actually built into the gameplay of the quest. So while technically no shrines are not coming back verbatim, we are trying to bring back kind of the best things of them in a different form.

Bornakk: So you'll still have the randomness and spontanenity of it.

Jay Wilson: Exactly, and really they are kind of there to change up the gameplay and add a little factor of randomness, but we felt that very few of the shrines actually did that – accomplish that goal...

Bornakk: Stamina shrine?

Jay Wilson: Yeah, stamina shrine lets you run a long time. Skill shrine made you a little bit more powerful. We feel like we can take the best and put them within actual events that are a lot more fun and have a lot more gameplay to them.

Bornakk: Alright, great. The next question is from David Nishball in Fairfield, Connecticut. Will buildings and towns be enterable, like Atma's Bar was from Diablo 2’s second act?

Jay Wilson: There probably will be some buildings, my guess is not too far off from how many were enterable in Diablo 2. Most towns we don’t make all the buildings enterable, it’s just a ton of art to create for very little reason. Most people tear through the towns at lightning speed, so they don’t have a desire to go into the individual buildings. But we do have some specialty buildings that I’m sure we’ll go inside of throughout the quest course of the game.

Bornakk: Okay. The next question is from James on USWest. Will there be a diverse selection of items that are viable for the end-game or will it follow the WoW-type style where there is more like one end-all-be-all set for each class?

Jay Wilson: It’s definitely diverse and it’s diverse on a lot of different fronts. When you think about Diablo 2, all the different ways you can build your character, we really expanded all the ways you can customize your character by adding in the rune system. Not only can you completely customize your skill set, much more so than you can in game like most MMOs like World of Warcraft, because of that, the items you want are based upon the skill set that you’ve chosen or the type of build that you are trying to create.

And items, one of the things we are trying to do is focus on this even greater element of defining your build. So really it's up to the player on what kind of stats they want on their character, but we're definitely not shooting for a, "oh here's the barbarian armor", there is a set and when you get the full set you're done. That's just not very Diablo and it's not really the kind of gameplay we're going for. If anything we’d like the item set to be a lot more diverse than it was in Diablo 2.

Bornakk: Always something to collect right?

Jay Wilson: Exactly, always a new build to try out.

Bornakk: Right, exactly. The last question we have today is from James Wichtowsky. Have you settled on a particular color scheme for item drops?

Jay Wilson: We've kind of gone round and round on color scheme. I know with World of Warcraft when they decided on a color scheme to fit quality, they were taking that from Diablo 2 and other MMOs, but they chose a color set that they felt was easier to read. We actually tried to emulate that for awhile, I think actually our announcement build or maybe our BlizzCon build was actually using a color scheme very similar to World of Warcraft and we generally found we just didn’t like it, it didn’t feel Diablo. So something as simple as that didn’t feel Diablo anymore.

Color scheme is pretty solid right now, it follows very closely to the Diablo 2 color scheme. We slightly shifted some of the hues to help, especially with color blindness, to try and get some of the more problematic combinations. We took out, for example, uniques were gold, we’ve changed their color I think we did purple which is a bit of a nod to World of Warcraft but the problem was gold and yellow were really close. Even though the gold lettering was unique and everything it was often very difficult to tell the two apart. So we just did that not to get away from Diablo but to try and fix that kind of readability issue. What we found is that if we try and get too far from Diablo it doesn't feel right, so right now magic items are blue, rare items are yellow, unique items I think they're purple – I'm operating off memory here but they might be different actually because I think we use purple for something else for an item type we haven’t announced yet. Then if we do set items they'll be green, we haven't made a call on set items yet.

Bornakk: Okay, well that’s all the questions we have for today, thanks for coming in Jay.

Jay Wilson: My pleasure.

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