Diablo Iii Developer Diaries, Part Five

Continuing from our last installment, the devs share some concluding remarks and insight as launch approaches. This is the candid interview... Part Five: Conclusion March 21, 2012 2:00PM Enjoying Diablo III Well we've been playing a lot of inferno towards the end which is the highest difficulty in the game. We've been doing it in four player co-op and we have a bunch of rare boss monsters that appear throughout the game. We call them rares and champions and We gave them all these new powers. We had a bunch, but we gave them a whole bunch of new ones. One of them is a power called "waller". Basically, they create these big rock walls. And inferno's really hard. So we're running in and we run into this group of crazy champions that have a whole bunch of powers including waller and we're all running away top speed and BAM! Wall right in front of us. Oh, no! Where do we go!? They're just trapped and surrounded by a wall. Seeing all of those things come together, there are so many elements that you design and you put it on paper and you go ok I think this is the way it's going to work. We think these are the ways these things are going to interact. Sometimes you think that somethings going to work and when you play it, it's just so awesome. It brings you so much joy to play it. There's one time when I was playing, just testing the game out, I saw a rare monster named "monster" on screen and I killed it. As soon as I did, I got an achievement and it felt so good! So good to just get that achievement. I rushed over to Jay's office "Jay! I got the achievement!" You'd think that after working on the game for so long that those little things would be lost on us, but they're just as enjoyable for us as for everybody that actually gets the game. That's really exciting for us I think, to realize that after working on it for this many years we actually still really fall in love with it all over again. It's really exciting and the team loves playing it too. That's also really awesome and exciting for us. There are guys out there on our team who are coming in early just to play the game. They're staying late to play the game, they're coming in early to play the game and do some runs through stuff. It's pretty awesome. Getting yelled at by the producers for playing the game too much. Yeah, that's a good sign. What are you most looking forward to after release? Vacation, maybe? Sleep for you, maybe? Yeah, a little bit of sleeping on my end. I think this might sound weird, but I think I'm really excited about sharing it with everybody. Everybody's put so much time and effort. We've agonized over the smallest things to try to get it as perfect as we could possibly think of making it. Putting it out there for everyone to enjoy, that's the really exciting part for me. I can't wait till day one and roll that barbarian and hit "go" on public game and join a bunch of people who are just as excited about playing the game as we were to make it and start stomping some punks. And know that your character's not going to get wiped. And know that my character's not going to get wiped, Jason! Sorry! Speaking of stomping punks, what's up with pvp? It's on its way. Pvp is. I sat down at BlizzCon and played pvp for a few hours against random people and just had a blast doing it. We owned some fools! It was awesome! Yeah. Or got owned. It was good. No, no. Jason and I were wrecking machines. No, no. I got owned. No, no. Of course you got killed. Yeah, you got killed. He's got no skills. I think it was really hard for us to see pvp get pushed. It's not something that we really wanted to do because we had a lot of fun playing it ourselves. So, I'm really excited for when it's going to be coming out. Yeah, there's nothing for us that's more important than pvp right now. It's our top priority. There are some people that would argue that the core of the previous Diablo games was pvp. I would argue, no it wasn't at all. There were no formal modes. There were no supporting systems. There was nothing. That was something we really wanted to change with Diablo III. We wanted to say, you know what, there are people who really love pvp, and we want to make sure we support them. So, because that was important to us, we felt it was critical that, just like everything else, when we put pvp out, that we do it right and we'd like to get it out as soon as possible. Any final thoughts? You know, for us, this is the end of a long, long road. For some of us, longer than others. We're really aware of the hard work that everybody put in. The entire team has been very passionate about making this game as good as possible. Working long hours to put the extra effort into it. I think the main message that I'd want to say to the community is that I think a lot of times the release of the game is almost kind of like an end. For us, Diablo III is the beginning. The day it comes out, that's when we get to start. There are so many things that people are excited about, nervous about, concerned about. Those are things we're all going to discover with the community. Yeah, it's a huge thank you to the community. Without the community support, without that player base being out there just waiting to play the game. Some of those long evenings and long nights would have been really tough to pull off. For us, that's a huge, huge deal. The community is just amazing. We're very fortunate in that regard. To all the players out there. Thank you for being so patient along the road. It's just going to feel amazing once this actually hits the store shelves. I look forward to being able to play against everybody online. It's been a long time coming, but I think you'll find it's worth it.