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Diablo III: Act Size, Battle.net 2.0, High Level Content

This is a discussion on Diablo III: Act Size, Battle.net 2.0, High Level Content within the Mac Gaming - Industry News forums, part of the Mac Gaming category; October 30, 2009 6:00 AM Diablo-Source recently published a new interview with Blizzard Entertainment 's Diablo III Lead Technical Artist ...

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Old 10-30-2009, 09:40 AM   #1 (permalink)
 
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Default Diablo III: Act Size, Battle.net 2.0, High Level Content

October 30, 2009 6:00 AM

Diablo-Source recently published a new interview with Blizzard Entertainment's Diablo III Lead Technical Artist Julian Love about the upcoming action RPG. In the interview the developer discussed a variety of topics including the new Battle.net 2.0, high level content, and the size of the game's Acts.
DS: Expansions and download-able content, are you guys - I know it's really really early in the development cycle to talk much about this, but can you talk a little bit about the plans for the higher level content and how you're going to keep players coming back? I think Jay hinted during Blizzcon that there might be updated quests to keep higher level content exciting to keep people coming back and playing again.
JL: It's not so much actually high level versus low level. I think we have a plan that facilitates high level content. What I think you're really getting at there is replayability, and what that gets down to is the way we're exercising randomness within the game. We've put a lot of focus towards what kinds of randomness are really beneficial in supporting replayability and what things are just, heh, not all that important or not all that awesome. One of the things that we have in the system that we have is something that we call - well, we have a really technical name for it - sub scenes

What it comes down to is we can sort of like create a hole in the world that's like a socket that we can fill with just about anything that we want. It could be empty ground with a bunch of monsters on it, it could be a giant canyon that a really elaborate scripted event happens, it could turn into a caravan walking across the desert that you have an escort quest on. The point being is that this hole in the earth can randomly, at any time become something totally different. It could even be a doorway to a whole new dungeon that you've never seen before. So, the fact that the world is able to change things up and actually deliver different events, stories and quests is what's really going to make the game a lot more replayable at the both the low and high ends.

DS: Have you decided on the size of an act, like compared to an act in Diablo 2?
JL: Yeah, well, what we did do is we looked at act size in general as an issue. We looked at ones that we felt were good in Diablo 2 and ones that we felt maybe went a little too far and maybe got a little stale. At this point we don't have an ideal act size. Act 1 must be this big and Act 2 must be this big and whatever. What it really comes down to is given the content that we plan to build for each act, how often can we keep that content changing for the player. The big problem will be that if the content doesn't keep changing, that's when it gets really boring. We've got to keep throwing new stuff at the player every so often in order to keep them engaged. As soon as you run out of your ability to do that, that's when it gets old. That in itself tends to dictate the act size more than say, an arbitrary decision that we might make to say "well, it must be 2 miles..." - it doesn't work like that. Really it's kind of more of the case of the tail wagging the dog.
Visit the site below to read the full interview.

Diablo-Source: Diablo III Interview
Blizzard Entertainment
Diablo III




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