"Hang on to Your Cow Campaign Items!" - Diablo 4 Interview Summaries

Diablo IV Posted 10 days ago by Tharid

IGN Interview (Tiffany Wat and Joe Piepiora)

New class (with a brand new fantasy) introduced with Vessel of Hatred that has never been seen before in the Diablo universe.

Nahantu is going to feel very distinct from what we have seen in Diablo 4 so far (dark jungle environment).

The team's design philosophy for Diablo 4 when designing a new class is as follows: They want classes to have a strong and rich fantasy that Blizzard can build upon mechanically. Blizzard also thinks about the gameplay elements that haven't been explored at all or as much as they want to in Diablo 4 when designing a new class. They want to avoid too much overlap between the classes as they want to further build upon existing classes in the future.

Game design often talks about having the game be 1/3 old, 1/3 adapted, and 1/3 new - building upon the foundation of Diablo has been really exciting for the developers.

The team intends to further build upon existing classes in the future.

When Blizzard looked at the original lineup of classes for Diablo 4, they really wanted to embrace the legacy and those core themes, but now they have the opportunity to explore something new.

Players will get to revisit the region of Nahantu (e.g., the docks of Kurast and Travincal) that we first visited in Diablo 2 and see what happened in those last 72 years since then.

Showing a road map for the future of Diablo 4 is something to think about (this was given as a response to the question if Diablo 4 will eventually go the same route as WoW which teases multiple years into the future what is being worked on).

Blizzard has teams working on multiple expansions and multiple Seasons right now.

Blizzard remains very committed to making Diablo 4 as good as possible with the help of player feedback.

" was the biggest launch that Blizzard has ever had."

"The goal is not to make Diablo 4 a good game. The goal of Diablo 4 is to make it the best Diablo game you've played."

"If people have picked up any items from their cow campaign they should hang on to those."

Kripparrian Interview (Joe Piepiora)

There is room to improve training dummies in the future by providing more granularity and feedback to players as they are using the training dummies, Blizzard wanted to get the feature to players as soon as possible for now (that way, they can start collecting valuable feedback).

The Abattoir of Zir is a seasonal update to find out how players enjoy this kind of difficult endgame content.

Abattoir of Zir will not test you by having one-shot abilities or escalating monster damage (like Echo of Lilith) but by pushing the limits of what is available in gear.

Blizzard is aware that it is currently relatively easy to stack damage mitigation through various sources.

Item affixes are something that the developers are working on improving, providing more meaningful choices, but not in the way that you are either glass cannon or don't take any damage at all (example given when it comes to defenses).

Caps for stats can be good (e.g. resistances), but the devs also want to try and be as loose with them as possible so that players can build into things that they like. In practical reality some caps are necessary to protect the overall gameplay experience for players (the example given was that a very high amount of attack speed could lead to stuttering for the player).

If there are caps for certain stats in Diablo 4, the devs want to make those clearer to the players on how to get to that cap—this was done with the recent resistance rework, for example.

The goal is that new seasons add meaningfully and transformationally to the experience of the game.

ARPGs can change dramatically to make players reconsider the problems that they are typically used to solving to conquer new challenges in the game.

Blizzard wants to make sure that the meta in seasons feels fresh and different each time.

One balance that the developers have to think about is not adding too much power within a season so that players don't feel that build diversity/creativity is taken away from them when a season ends.

While Malignant Powers in S1 were good, many of them being class-focused made it difficult to feel the variety after playing for a longer time. It was pretty clear which the best ones were for each class, which meant that players didn't have to make many decisions after a while.

Season 2's Vampiric Powers try to combat this by encouraging players to experiment at the beginning (with the powers being class-agnostic) and settling on whatever they like after that. This is the direction they want to keep heading in for future seasons.

Creating more depth and diversity of choice within the core systems of the game is the goal when the developers bring powers from seasons into the main game, not just carrying over season systems 1 to 1 (which is why Malignant Powers were turned into Unique rings).

Vampiric Powers help certain classes and builds account for a lack of certain tools (e.g. Metamorphosis makes it so that Sorcerers don't have to necessarily rely on Frost Nova for Vulnerable). The developers want to make sure that e.g. new Legendary Aspects and Uniques take care of these problems in the long run.

There is a balance when adding new seasonal powers. Clear powers like +X to Firewall are good for some players and clearer to grasp, while +X% Damage Over Time is more interesting for other players but less clearer at first glance.

The developers have a lot of ideas and things they want to do with itemization and item modification in the game. They are currently working on a lot of these changes already.