It’s pretty difficult to spend any significant amount of time with something you find genuinely irritating. Blizzard presented their case to fans at their Worldwide Invitational 2008 in Paris, France of how they’re going about creating appealing classes and enjoyable play styles. While they didn’t go into detail on any of the classes beyond the already announced barbarian and witch doctor, they did provide plenty of insight into their design and iteration processes.
Leonard Boyarsky, the lead world designer on Diablo III, kicked things off by talking about the importance of fusing lore into the class, both in appearance and functionality. All classes will have their own voices, will be able to engage in conversations with NPCs, and elicit class specific reactions from those they encounter. These enhanced narrative features are something Blizzard hopes will help players immerse themselves in the game world.
Boyarsky pointed out that just because there will be more developed narrative elements doesn’t mean the player will get bogged down with story. "We like to think of it as deeper and more fulfilling [story]," said Boyarsky. "We’re not going to have a longer presentation, there’s not going to be huge dialogue trees, we’re just doing a more concise, better presentation, we believe."
The barbarian, for instance, is the same barbarian from Diablo II but 20 years older, and so Blizzard went about deciding what happened to him over the course of that time period. "[These characters] are not generic. They’re not an empty void in the middle of a story," said Boyarsky. Players will find the barbarian looks worn in Diablo III and bears multiple battle scars, supposed evidence of his hardships during the time gap.
Once those kinds of ideas are set into place, lead designer Jay Wilson and his team start coming up with general categories of how a class might play. "Every class needs to have its own thing that makes it cool, that needs to be unique to them," he said. "The barbarian is a great example. He’s this pure, physical melee fighter and you could have other fighters as other classes but you wouldn’t want any of them to have his tone, you wouldn’t want any of them to have his strength, because that’s really what defines him."
General kinds of abilities are up next as the design process moves along. Wilson focused on the witch doctor class. "He raises zombies, he plays around with diseases and plagues and he likes to control people’s minds. These are what we call defining traits. These are basically just to get people’s imaginations going on these characters. If we’re not excited about them, then they’re not going to be cool."
Once those kinds of ideas are set into place, lead designer Jay Wilson and his team start coming up with general categories of how a class might play. "Every class needs to have its own thing that makes it cool, that needs to be unique to them," he said. "The barbarian is a great example. He’s this pure, physical melee fighter and you could have other fighters as other classes but you wouldn’t want any of them to have his tone, you wouldn’t want any of them to have his strength, because that’s really what defines him."
General kinds of abilities are up next as the design process moves along. Wilson focused on the witch doctor class. "He raises zombies, he plays around with diseases and plagues and he likes to control people’s minds. These are what we call defining traits. These are basically just to get people’s imaginations going on these characters. If we’re not excited about them, then they’re not going to be cool."
When moving from there to skill design, Wilson stresses the skill needs to have a unique kind of feel that meshes with the character class’ personality and lore. Trying to design a character around more invisible statistical bonuses isn’t a good idea. "We could have a skill where you do one extra percent of critical damage it’s like, oh that’s not very exciting…if that’s what you’re defining your character by, well that’s not a really awesome character. But if we say ’oh well he hits the ground so hard that everything in front of him gets completely crushed by the seismic force,’ that’s pretty awesome."
Brian Morrisroe then took over to explain how the classes’ artistic designs have evolved. To give a kind of style to the kinds of character class ideas Boyarsky and Wilson were talking about, Morrisroe and the art team looked back at some of the visual themes in the first Diablo and the three original classes. "A lot of their armor is very sharp, there’s a lot of mystery to them," he said. "In fact the wizard in this example…you can see that his feet are actually pierced with very large bones and that’s really what kind of inspired us when we were talking about how we wanted to approach our hero classes moving forward. What kind of a world do you live in where you pierce the bottom of your feet? That’s gotta be the most harsh, engaging world that you can possibly imagine to live in...What kind of a background does a guy like that have? They look a little bit sketchy, you know, a rogue, the wizard doesn’t look too happy. These guys live in a morally grey area and that’s really something that inspiration-wise we kind of latched onto as a character theme."
These kinds of themes were brought into Diablo II. "What you see with the necromancer and the assassin, I mean those names right there are downright mean. In some cases those could actually be enemies in game, not just a hero class. That’s really what we loved to think about. This universe is extremely harsh."
Brian Morrisroe then took over to explain how the classes’ artistic designs have evolved. To give a kind of style to the kinds of character class ideas Boyarsky and Wilson were talking about, Morrisroe and the art team looked back at some of the visual themes in the first Diablo and the three original classes. "A lot of their armor is very sharp, there’s a lot of mystery to them," he said. "In fact the wizard in this example…you can see that his feet are actually pierced with very large bones and that’s really what kind of inspired us when we were talking about how we wanted to approach our hero classes moving forward. What kind of a world do you live in where you pierce the bottom of your feet? That’s gotta be the most harsh, engaging world that you can possibly imagine to live in...What kind of a background does a guy like that have? They look a little bit sketchy, you know, a rogue, the wizard doesn’t look too happy. These guys live in a morally grey area and that’s really something that inspiration-wise we kind of latched onto as a character theme."
These kinds of themes were brought into Diablo II. "What you see with the necromancer and the assassin, I mean those names right there are downright mean. In some cases those could actually be enemies in game, not just a hero class. That’s really what we loved to think about. This universe is extremely harsh."
Tying that into Diablo III, Morrisroe highlighted the witch doctor as exemplary of this philosophy. "We wanted him to be that guy that you’re not quite sure if you like him or not. You’re not quite sure if he’s a happy guy, if he’s nice or whatever…He’s a great example of a contrast to the barbarian. He’s old and frail, he’s not going to go out there and start smashing dudes over the head with a hammer…He’s learned the tricks, he’s been there, he’s been hit in the head, he knows he doesn’t like it. So what he does is he goes out there and he says ’hey man, I’m just going to mess with their heads from now on.’ And he starts throwing powders in their face, he starts messing with people’s minds so they fight against each other, he summons zombie hordes…what kind of a character do you have to be to summon a wall of zombies?"
The art and design ideas come together in something Wilson called signature skills. These are meant to be a single skill that defines what a character class is about and, if it works, helps to determine what other kinds of skills a class will have. "When we start working on a character coming up with skills it’s really easy to come up with…we could probably sit in a room and come up with one hundred skills. Coming up with ideas for them is not hard. But we don’t decide we’re going to make one hundred skills, we decide what one is really cool and really defining for us."
Blizzard says they adhere to a rule of not balancing things too soon when deciding on possible skills. "The goal here is not to create a skill that’s going to make for really fair, balanced gameplay. The goal is to make a skill that’s going to make people go ’woah, that was really awesome.’…I don’t mean to trivialize balance, balance is really important, but it comes at a certain phase and the beginning is not where it comes."
The art and design ideas come together in something Wilson called signature skills. These are meant to be a single skill that defines what a character class is about and, if it works, helps to determine what other kinds of skills a class will have. "When we start working on a character coming up with skills it’s really easy to come up with…we could probably sit in a room and come up with one hundred skills. Coming up with ideas for them is not hard. But we don’t decide we’re going to make one hundred skills, we decide what one is really cool and really defining for us."
Blizzard says they adhere to a rule of not balancing things too soon when deciding on possible skills. "The goal here is not to create a skill that’s going to make for really fair, balanced gameplay. The goal is to make a skill that’s going to make people go ’woah, that was really awesome.’…I don’t mean to trivialize balance, balance is really important, but it comes at a certain phase and the beginning is not where it comes."
Wilson highlighted two particular signature skills, one for the barbarian and one for the witch doctor. Affecting a cone in front of the character model, the barbarian’s seismic slam was the first skill Blizzard created for the class. "It took a lot longer to make this skill than it takes to make most skills. We did a lot of iteration in the animation department in particular…if you want a game that plays really fast and feels responsive, you want the movements to be really fast. And so getting that balance of fast movements with a really powerful feel was a big challenge and we had to try a bunch of different ways to animate to get that right."
Even after going through all those stages of development, Wilson found his team still didn’t like the skill. "It wasn’t until we actually got sound on the skill that we thought, wow, this skill is really awesome…The key to that is it takes a lot of faith to get through this process, but once you do…all the skills that come after that come much quicker."
The witch doctor’s fire bomb spell, which right now acts as a kind of arcing explosive projectile, was originally designed as a more traditional, direct-line fireball. "The problem was, and it wasn’t really a problem it’s a cool skill, but we’ve all seen it. What the artists came back and said was ’well we didn’t really didn’t imagine the witch doctor like this guy, we imagined his magic being more physical. So we thought maybe you’d be concocting some kind of magical alchemical thing, stick it inside a skull, and that would be the bomb. That would be what would explode.’ Once it was a physical projectile, we didn’t want it to travel in a straight line anymore. We wanted to have it thrown like a projectile. It became an arcing projectile, it could be thrown over walls, but that really changes the gameplay a lot. You have to be a little more predictive with its location but it’s got some advantages in that you can avoid obstacles and hit the exact target you want."
"It’s a great example of how art and design can work together to iterate really well to make a very original, very cool skill."
Even after going through all those stages of development, Wilson found his team still didn’t like the skill. "It wasn’t until we actually got sound on the skill that we thought, wow, this skill is really awesome…The key to that is it takes a lot of faith to get through this process, but once you do…all the skills that come after that come much quicker."
The witch doctor’s fire bomb spell, which right now acts as a kind of arcing explosive projectile, was originally designed as a more traditional, direct-line fireball. "The problem was, and it wasn’t really a problem it’s a cool skill, but we’ve all seen it. What the artists came back and said was ’well we didn’t really didn’t imagine the witch doctor like this guy, we imagined his magic being more physical. So we thought maybe you’d be concocting some kind of magical alchemical thing, stick it inside a skull, and that would be the bomb. That would be what would explode.’ Once it was a physical projectile, we didn’t want it to travel in a straight line anymore. We wanted to have it thrown like a projectile. It became an arcing projectile, it could be thrown over walls, but that really changes the gameplay a lot. You have to be a little more predictive with its location but it’s got some advantages in that you can avoid obstacles and hit the exact target you want."
"It’s a great example of how art and design can work together to iterate really well to make a very original, very cool skill."
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