Quick recap: Jay Wilson mentions at BlizzCon that Battle.net will be monetized in some way or another. Cue justified outrage.
Today, Joystiq spoke with Blizzard's Rob Pardo regarding the minor controversy to which he cleared up the issue by saying that there will be absolutely no subscription fees to play Diablo III.
So Julian (Jay) Wilson told us that you guys are looking monetize Battle.Net in some way. Is that right?
Wow, that's an evil way of putting it. Julian's turning into a business guy on me. Here's the way I would put it. We're definitely not looking at turning Diablo into a subscription based game. It's clearly not an MMO, so it's not appropriate to do a business model like that. The way we approach all of our games now, is we come up with what we think is a great game, and then we wrap the appropriate business model around it. If that's just a box price, then that's that.
With Battle.Net we're definitely looking at possible different features that we might be able to do for additional money. We're not talking about Hellgate or anything like that. We're not going to tack things on. I think World of Warcraft is a great example to look at. We charge people if they want to switch servers or if they want name changes, things that aren't core to the game experience, they're really just optional things that some people want. It takes us some development work to do it, so it makes sense to charge for it. We would never do something like say to get the full game experience, you'll have to pay extra.
Hellgate directly referenced. Flagshipping avoided.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Wizard Skill Tree Revealed - hellforge
Shacknews has posted up their write up of the demo straight from the floor at BlizzCon.
The skill trees are split into three branches, Storm, Arcane and Conjure. The frost tree is mainly made up of Cold and Lightning spells. Arcane contains various armours, a magic missile, and the old favourite teleport. Lastly Conjure, contains many fire skills including the old favourites such as Hydra and Meteor.
Blizzard
-Rank 0/1
--Mana Cost: 70
--Call down shards of ice to pelt an area dealing 6-10 cold damage per second for 3 seconds. Critical hits from cold damage freeze targets.
Teleport
-Rank 0/1
--Mana Cost: 23
--Teleport to the selected location up to 40 feet away.
Slow Time
-Rank 0/1
--Mana Cost: 20
--Warp space and time, slowing nearby monsters and projectiles. Enemy attack cooldown increase: 1 second(s)
Hydra
-Rank 0/1
--Mana Cost:
--Unknown Creates a multi-headed beast that attacks your enemies with bolts of fire.
Skill work differently from how the used to in Diablo 2. Now main skills can only have one point in them, and you can develop it further through a separate 15 point skill subspec. The subspec can then take the tree in one of three directions, letting you specialise even further.
As an example, in the Conjure skill tree, there are just two spels at level 3 so far. They both have a common subspec though, which takes them into one of three possible directions, however you could just max out all three of these and create really powerful level 3 skills.
The subspecs don't always relate to the main skills in the tree, but are rather passives that can help out all of you skill sets. To top this off, there is now runes to contend with, which are used on skills as you can see in our Q&A writeup.
As an example, if you have a lightning skill and you use a rune which multiplies it, you then get a chain lightning skill instead. Using this same rune on an illusion skill, can mean that you multiply into more than one clone of yourself.
It is worth checking out each skill tree on your own to see what I mean.
As an aside, Australian website GamesOn.net has a reporter at the show conducting a liveblog which you can read here.
The Rune System.
Runes are a random drop, used for all classes. They have a significant impact on skills - with a system that encourages experimentation. The system uses elements taken from other systems that the devs found and liked. Random drops, being the main thing - and skill customisation / crafting.
Basic Monster Deaths
Other half of the visceral equation Physical forces Damage flavoured deaths Critical deaths - "we wanted to make them noticeable... so they *have* to explode!" (different and awesome deaths, mainly - dependent on attacks, damage, and characters)
Crazy monster deaths:
Special deaths - some monsters have hand-crafted animations that are theirs specifically. Skill-driven Deaths - "you can't have a disintegrate skill if it doesn't actually disintegrate something" - so there are now locusts, acid bursts, that sort of thing. The death is very much part of the skill. Rare Deaths - Characters are full of "evil" - so when they die, obviously, they have to explode. Why? "Explosions are cool!"
It is worth noting that the liveblog also describes the rune system for skills, so is once again worth checking out.
The skill trees are split into three branches, Storm, Arcane and Conjure. The frost tree is mainly made up of Cold and Lightning spells. Arcane contains various armours, a magic missile, and the old favourite teleport. Lastly Conjure, contains many fire skills including the old favourites such as Hydra and Meteor.
Blizzard
-Rank 0/1
--Mana Cost: 70
--Call down shards of ice to pelt an area dealing 6-10 cold damage per second for 3 seconds. Critical hits from cold damage freeze targets.
Teleport
-Rank 0/1
--Mana Cost: 23
--Teleport to the selected location up to 40 feet away.
Slow Time
-Rank 0/1
--Mana Cost: 20
--Warp space and time, slowing nearby monsters and projectiles. Enemy attack cooldown increase: 1 second(s)
Hydra
-Rank 0/1
--Mana Cost:
--Unknown Creates a multi-headed beast that attacks your enemies with bolts of fire.
Skill work differently from how the used to in Diablo 2. Now main skills can only have one point in them, and you can develop it further through a separate 15 point skill subspec. The subspec can then take the tree in one of three directions, letting you specialise even further.
As an example, in the Conjure skill tree, there are just two spels at level 3 so far. They both have a common subspec though, which takes them into one of three possible directions, however you could just max out all three of these and create really powerful level 3 skills.
The subspecs don't always relate to the main skills in the tree, but are rather passives that can help out all of you skill sets. To top this off, there is now runes to contend with, which are used on skills as you can see in our Q&A writeup.
As an example, if you have a lightning skill and you use a rune which multiplies it, you then get a chain lightning skill instead. Using this same rune on an illusion skill, can mean that you multiply into more than one clone of yourself.
It is worth checking out each skill tree on your own to see what I mean.
As an aside, Australian website GamesOn.net has a reporter at the show conducting a liveblog which you can read here.
The Rune System.
Runes are a random drop, used for all classes. They have a significant impact on skills - with a system that encourages experimentation. The system uses elements taken from other systems that the devs found and liked. Random drops, being the main thing - and skill customisation / crafting.
Basic Monster Deaths
Other half of the visceral equation Physical forces Damage flavoured deaths Critical deaths - "we wanted to make them noticeable... so they *have* to explode!" (different and awesome deaths, mainly - dependent on attacks, damage, and characters)
Crazy monster deaths:
Special deaths - some monsters have hand-crafted animations that are theirs specifically. Skill-driven Deaths - "you can't have a disintegrate skill if it doesn't actually disintegrate something" - so there are now locusts, acid bursts, that sort of thing. The death is very much part of the skill. Rare Deaths - Characters are full of "evil" - so when they die, obviously, they have to explode. Why? "Explosions are cool!"
It is worth noting that the liveblog also describes the rune system for skills, so is once again worth checking out.
BlizzCon - Diablo III Gameplay Q&A - hellforge
Blizzard just finished conducting their Q&A Panel, and here are some of the things that they shared:
General:
No decision made on powerlevelling.
There will be respecs.
Classes do not have 'roles' like an MMO would. All classes are DPS classes.
There's hell, nightmare, normal modes (but we knew this already).
Deaths:
Special deaths - some monsters have hand-crafted animations that are theirs specifically.
Skill-driven Deaths - "you can't have a disintegrate skill if it doesn't actually disintegrate something" - so there are now locusts, acid bursts, that sort of thing. The death is very much part of the skill.
Rare Deaths - Characters are full of "evil" - so when they die, obviously, they have to explode. Why? "Explosions are cool!"
Basic Monster Deaths
Other half of the visceral equation Physical forces Damage flavoured deaths Critical deaths - "we wanted to make them noticeable... so they *have* to explode!" (different and awesome deaths, mainly - dependent on attacks, damage, and characters)
Runes:
Runes modify skills, and there are tier levels in runes.
You can swap runes in your skills. Runes drop frequently. Runes are solely a modification of your skills, not items like D2. Higher tier runes have a greater effect. High end runes are rare and are a big find.
For example, runes can make skills cost less, or do more damage, or perform other changes to your skills (e.g. knockbacks and reflecting damage). A teleport skill with the "strike" rune does damage to nearby enemies that you teleport close to.
Skill System:
- Evolution of Diablo 2 Skill System
- Synergies integrated as new skills
- Skill Runes (new system)
- Respec (although it's not designed yet)
- Simple to understand
- Compelling earlygame and lategame (taking difficulty levels into consideration)
- Large variety of build possibilities
- Supportive of 6 active skills
Skill system has you focusing on six or so skills of your choice throughout the game. No more swapping between the same 2 skills over and over.
The problem with Diablo 2's skill system is that it really focused people into 2 or 3 main skills of the same element, so immunities were imbalancing. Immunities will be toned down.
The focus on the new system is to target six skills, and not 2 or 3.
New spells announced for Witch Doctor:
Firebat Swarm, Plague of Toads
The Wizard's Disintegrate:
Disintegrate is a ranged skill that allows you to hold down your mouse button and move your mouse around to sweep the beam everywhere. It gets stronger the longer you leave it on, but uses exponentially more energy.
Other Questions:
Will there be a Paladin / Hammerdin or similar class?
We haven't announced it yet
Does Wirt have a fourth leg?
Possibly. Post suggestions on the Official Forum on what you'd like to see, because Blizzard wants to bring him back.
Is there a secret cow level?
It's a secret.
General:
No decision made on powerlevelling.
There will be respecs.
Classes do not have 'roles' like an MMO would. All classes are DPS classes.
There's hell, nightmare, normal modes (but we knew this already).
Deaths:
Special deaths - some monsters have hand-crafted animations that are theirs specifically.
Skill-driven Deaths - "you can't have a disintegrate skill if it doesn't actually disintegrate something" - so there are now locusts, acid bursts, that sort of thing. The death is very much part of the skill.
Rare Deaths - Characters are full of "evil" - so when they die, obviously, they have to explode. Why? "Explosions are cool!"
Basic Monster Deaths
Other half of the visceral equation Physical forces Damage flavoured deaths Critical deaths - "we wanted to make them noticeable... so they *have* to explode!" (different and awesome deaths, mainly - dependent on attacks, damage, and characters)
Runes:
Runes modify skills, and there are tier levels in runes.
You can swap runes in your skills. Runes drop frequently. Runes are solely a modification of your skills, not items like D2. Higher tier runes have a greater effect. High end runes are rare and are a big find.
For example, runes can make skills cost less, or do more damage, or perform other changes to your skills (e.g. knockbacks and reflecting damage). A teleport skill with the "strike" rune does damage to nearby enemies that you teleport close to.
Skill System:
- Evolution of Diablo 2 Skill System
- Synergies integrated as new skills
- Skill Runes (new system)
- Respec (although it's not designed yet)
- Simple to understand
- Compelling earlygame and lategame (taking difficulty levels into consideration)
- Large variety of build possibilities
- Supportive of 6 active skills
Skill system has you focusing on six or so skills of your choice throughout the game. No more swapping between the same 2 skills over and over.
The problem with Diablo 2's skill system is that it really focused people into 2 or 3 main skills of the same element, so immunities were imbalancing. Immunities will be toned down.
The focus on the new system is to target six skills, and not 2 or 3.
New spells announced for Witch Doctor:
Firebat Swarm, Plague of Toads
The Wizard's Disintegrate:
Disintegrate is a ranged skill that allows you to hold down your mouse button and move your mouse around to sweep the beam everywhere. It gets stronger the longer you leave it on, but uses exponentially more energy.
Other Questions:
Will there be a Paladin / Hammerdin or similar class?
We haven't announced it yet
Does Wirt have a fourth leg?
Possibly. Post suggestions on the Official Forum on what you'd like to see, because Blizzard wants to bring him back.
Is there a secret cow level?
It's a secret.
New Class Revealed: The Wizard - hellforge
BlizzCon is well under way, and the moment that every Diablo fan has been waiting for since the game was announced barely three months ago has finally arrived: the announcement of the new class.
Behold...
THE WIZARD
Holy ****! Who would have figured that?
The description reads: Youthful and headstrong, the upstart Wizard manipulates the primal forces of the universe to vanquish foes.
Joining the previously revealed classes of the Barbarian and the new Witch Doctor, the Wizard is a powerful spellcaster said to manipulate the powers of the elements.
The Wizard is reminiscent of the Sorceress class from Diablo II, and comes equipped with Charged Bolt and Magic Missile spells.
Other spells known to the Sorceress, such as the Frost Nova, Tornado and Blizzard make a strong return in the newly minted Wizard.
Each of the three announced classes, the Wizard, Barbarian and Witch Doctor are playable in both male and female forms. In the demo, the male Wizard is unavailable.
The demo has the player making his or her way through the dense foliage of Tristram Woods into the Tristram Church Dungeon.
More information will be posted within this article as it becomes available!
Behold...
THE WIZARD
Holy ****! Who would have figured that?
The description reads: Youthful and headstrong, the upstart Wizard manipulates the primal forces of the universe to vanquish foes.
Joining the previously revealed classes of the Barbarian and the new Witch Doctor, the Wizard is a powerful spellcaster said to manipulate the powers of the elements.
The Wizard is reminiscent of the Sorceress class from Diablo II, and comes equipped with Charged Bolt and Magic Missile spells.
Other spells known to the Sorceress, such as the Frost Nova, Tornado and Blizzard make a strong return in the newly minted Wizard.
Each of the three announced classes, the Wizard, Barbarian and Witch Doctor are playable in both male and female forms. In the demo, the male Wizard is unavailable.
The demo has the player making his or her way through the dense foliage of Tristram Woods into the Tristram Church Dungeon.
More information will be posted within this article as it becomes available!
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
No Guns, No Spellbooks, No DX10 - hellforge
Blizzard's been saying "no" to many feature requests in the past couple of days, some of which are desirable, others less so. Sp3tSnAz has already made the initial posts regarding these topics, but I'd like to chime in on this one...
No Guns
Jay Wilson suggested not awhile back that the next announced class would be certain to make some fans of Diablo ‘very angry'. Speculation about the next class went up like fireworks with everything from gunslingers to mechanized robots being suggested by anxious fans in Diablo III's various forums, to which Blizzard's community manager, Bashiok, has posted a response:
Well, you have to realize that it's been 20 years, and in technological terms that can be a very long time. We're trying to create a world that's not static, its filled out, and with that it's an advancing world. With that amount of time, and also the loss of the Arreat Summit much of the remaining barbarian culture has focused on... nah I'm just kidding, there aren't any guns.
Cheeky! But he's not fooling anyone. I'm still adamant that the next class will be a rifle-wielding Sarah Palin who wears the skins and furs of her fallen enemies.
No Spellbooks
Spellbooks featured strongly in the original Diablo as being the only way for a character to learn new skills. Each character, regardless of class, was limited in his spellcasting abilities simply by the amount of spellbooks he or she discovered in the course of the game. This of course resulted in much imbalance and added not a small amount of tedium to the game as a whole. In short, it wasn't very well implemented; more suited to its roguelike predecessors rather than action RPGs of which Diablo was the first of its kind. Bashiok speaks:
That came back in Diablo II too eventually in the form of rune words, and I don't think it really worked out too well in the end. I do think it actually could be designed and implemented properly; balanced, etc. but...
For me the more important question though is what impact does it have on the class you're playing and also our knowledge of the Diablo world? Is a class nothing more than someone who read from a book, or is holding a specific item? No, they're very specific and very iconic figures (heroes even) from very distinct styles and backgrounds. The characters we play are these concentrated images of their cultures, beliefs, etc. Everything they do resembles who they are and where they're from, and what does it mean to then piecemeal that out to any one who just happens to throw a couple runes in to an item.
It worked better in Diablo (1) I think. Conceptually it was a bit easier to digest just because of the basic pen and paper underpinnings, and the heroes were far more generic. It was also far less obtrusive.
In Diablo II though, for me anyway, it always undermined the uniqueness of playing a specific class, and also what it meant to be that character. Aside from everything else it caused.
Ouch.
No DX10
Overhyped, poor-performing and completely unnecessary, DirectX 10, a technological advancement originally hailed as the bringer of Next-Generation Graphics has since been trumped by ingenuity and clever, engine-based innovation in games like Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.
Newly minted titles like Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning have even dropped their support for DirectX 10 in light of the problems and performance issues it delivers. With only high-end games like Crysis and World in Conflict featuring it in its full form, DX10 has very little to showcase.
A number of complete failures like Hellgate: London and Age of Conan to which poor performance and unnecessary lengths of QA were wasted upon can be owed entirely to their implementation of DX10, it would not surprise me if Blizzard decided not to opt in for its use, either:
We haven't announced any final support for DirectX versions/system requirements. I'll say that right now we're not using any DirectX10 features, but we potentially could.
It seems unlikely that DX10 will ever make it in, especially since they plan to release Diablo III on the Mac as well as the PC.
No Guns
Jay Wilson suggested not awhile back that the next announced class would be certain to make some fans of Diablo ‘very angry'. Speculation about the next class went up like fireworks with everything from gunslingers to mechanized robots being suggested by anxious fans in Diablo III's various forums, to which Blizzard's community manager, Bashiok, has posted a response:
Well, you have to realize that it's been 20 years, and in technological terms that can be a very long time. We're trying to create a world that's not static, its filled out, and with that it's an advancing world. With that amount of time, and also the loss of the Arreat Summit much of the remaining barbarian culture has focused on... nah I'm just kidding, there aren't any guns.
Cheeky! But he's not fooling anyone. I'm still adamant that the next class will be a rifle-wielding Sarah Palin who wears the skins and furs of her fallen enemies.
No Spellbooks
Spellbooks featured strongly in the original Diablo as being the only way for a character to learn new skills. Each character, regardless of class, was limited in his spellcasting abilities simply by the amount of spellbooks he or she discovered in the course of the game. This of course resulted in much imbalance and added not a small amount of tedium to the game as a whole. In short, it wasn't very well implemented; more suited to its roguelike predecessors rather than action RPGs of which Diablo was the first of its kind. Bashiok speaks:
That came back in Diablo II too eventually in the form of rune words, and I don't think it really worked out too well in the end. I do think it actually could be designed and implemented properly; balanced, etc. but...
For me the more important question though is what impact does it have on the class you're playing and also our knowledge of the Diablo world? Is a class nothing more than someone who read from a book, or is holding a specific item? No, they're very specific and very iconic figures (heroes even) from very distinct styles and backgrounds. The characters we play are these concentrated images of their cultures, beliefs, etc. Everything they do resembles who they are and where they're from, and what does it mean to then piecemeal that out to any one who just happens to throw a couple runes in to an item.
It worked better in Diablo (1) I think. Conceptually it was a bit easier to digest just because of the basic pen and paper underpinnings, and the heroes were far more generic. It was also far less obtrusive.
In Diablo II though, for me anyway, it always undermined the uniqueness of playing a specific class, and also what it meant to be that character. Aside from everything else it caused.
Ouch.
No DX10
Overhyped, poor-performing and completely unnecessary, DirectX 10, a technological advancement originally hailed as the bringer of Next-Generation Graphics has since been trumped by ingenuity and clever, engine-based innovation in games like Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.
Newly minted titles like Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning have even dropped their support for DirectX 10 in light of the problems and performance issues it delivers. With only high-end games like Crysis and World in Conflict featuring it in its full form, DX10 has very little to showcase.
A number of complete failures like Hellgate: London and Age of Conan to which poor performance and unnecessary lengths of QA were wasted upon can be owed entirely to their implementation of DX10, it would not surprise me if Blizzard decided not to opt in for its use, either:
We haven't announced any final support for DirectX versions/system requirements. I'll say that right now we're not using any DirectX10 features, but we potentially could.
It seems unlikely that DX10 will ever make it in, especially since they plan to release Diablo III on the Mac as well as the PC.
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