Wlck742
06-29-2008, 09:01 PM
Some new info straight from Paris about the making of classes and skills in D3.
...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....
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."
...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."
Read the whole article here. (http://pc.ign.com/articles/885/885169p1.html?RSSwhen2008-06-29_110000&RSSid=885169)
...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....
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."
...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."
Read the whole article here. (http://pc.ign.com/articles/885/885169p1.html?RSSwhen2008-06-29_110000&RSSid=885169)