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How Diablo 4 Reinvents Necromancers, Encourages Customization, and Deepens Endgames

How Diablo 4 Reinvents Necromancers, Encourages Customization, and Deepens Endgames

How Diablo 4 Reinvents Necromancers, Encourages Customization, and Deepens Endgames

One of the surprises at the Xbox and Bethesda game showcases was Diablo 4. The latest entry in Blizzard’s beloved action-RPG series comes just days after the launch of Diablo Immortal, which was praised for being well-played but criticized for its business model. Like it or not, Blizzard intends to push the Diablo franchise in new directions. However, Diablo 4 looks a bit more conservative than its mobile cousin.

That’s not to say it’s renovating old land — quite the opposite. Without a doubt, as you can see in the games section of the press conference, Diablo 4 aims to be the best game ever, with some smart changes and new additions, and Blizzard hopes to provide a kind of It feels both familiar and fresh, all in a dark and scary package.

We caught up with Diablo 4 director Joe Shelley and Diablo series general manager Rod Ferguson about the current state of Diablo, what their ambitions are for Diablo 4, and how the game was designed achieve these goals.

This is a big moment for Diablo. You’ve released Immortal, and now you’ve shown some Diablo 4. Lord, as the overseer of the Diablo series, can you check the temperature of the series for us? Where is it and where do you think it needs to be?

Rod Ferguson: I think now is the perfect time to be a Diablo fan and a Diablo player. We also have Diablo 3 — it’s been 10 years since its release, but even in its most recent season, Season 26, we had 150 million hours of gameplay. In fact, we just passed 65 million players playing Diablo III. In September, we had Diablo 2: Resurrection, and over 5.5 million players came back to play the 21-year-old D2:R hardcore PC game that has now been remastered and available on consoles.

Immortal just launched, our big free mobile experience. It can reach more players; reach those 3 billion gamers who might only be playing on their phones. So being free to play on mobile with no barriers to entry means hopefully more people will be able to experience Diablo. Of course, we have Diablo 4 coming soon, which is a cherry on the sundae. We’re excited to feel the return to darkness that Diablo 4 represents.

And Joe, for you [as director of Diablo 4], a momentum has built up, and now you’re the next step in Diablo’s return of the two punches. Is it stressful to know what it’s like to be in your role? How did you deal with it?

Joe Shelley: Well, it’s really exciting to work on the game and share. I kept thinking, “Okay, don’t talk about necromancers. This isn’t the time to talk about necromancers.” So I’m excited to be talking about necromancers. But it’s a very exciting time for Diablo. The world of Diablo IV is this vast shared open world. You are creating your character and jumping right into the world. You are not creating a personal game. You are living in this space, and you are traversing it into the dungeon. That’s how Diablo plays.

Speaking of the Necromancer, obviously the character has some legacy now, but I think a lot of fans will be looking forward to seeing something completely new rather than returning to the character. What’s the decision-making process for bringing back a necromancer instead of saying “is this something that’s never been seen before?”

Shirley: Well, in many ways, Diablo 4 is a love letter to our fans. We’re really focused on returning to the dark theme. And we know that when we made a Diablo game, fans had a lot of expectations for Diablo 2: R, Diablo 3, and the Diablo experience they loved before. So we know we have a lot of stuff that really needs to be there. When we looked at the lessons themselves, we wanted to make sure that the kinds of experiences players fondly remember from previous Diablo games were usable, while also bringing them to the most modern versions.

And Diablo 4 is really all about choice. You can make more choices than ever through the course. They are wider than ever. For example, even with Necromancer, you have full character customization, and you also have our unique class feature, Book of the Dead, which allows you to customize and have a lot of options for your minions to deploy on the battlefield, which minions you have, and what they are behavior. Even if you want to have minions.

Ferguson: Yes. You can sacrifice them right? Make yourself stronger like your shadow magic. That’s why I love the new Necromancer. [it’s] Really around the idea of ​​this option. I’m a big necromancer and I always say, “Oh, I have a skeleton, oh I have a mage, oh I have a golem.” But in previous versions, I controlled what I had and when I used it Their capabilities are somewhat limited. certainly.You can choose to use a sword to make things like iron golems, but Book of the Dead is a new feature – all classes in Diablo 4 have [a] That class-specific feature — the Necromancer has the Book of the Dead, and you decide, “Oh, I can have skeleton warriors. What kind of skeleton warriors do I want? Do I want aggressiveness? Defensiveness? I Want those corpses for me?” And then, “Oh, you can have mages. Well, what mages do I want to use? Oh, I can have golems, what golems do I want to use?” So you can Mix and match your warriors, mages and golls to truly create and customize the army you have. And you’ve never really had this experience before. That’s one of the things that makes Necro truly unique and interesting.

Can you elaborate on the player’s choice? You talked about customization, but that seems to be one of the core design principles of Diablo IV more broadly. What is the butterfly effect?

Shirley: This is. Yes. It really manifests in every different aspect of the game. So when you create your character, you have an unprecedented amount of player choice. You can almost think of your class selection as a job rather than a career, rather than a role identity-defining characteristic. We still have very strong classes, Necromancer is a great example, but you can be whoever you want, whoever you can imagine can be a Necromancer. Then the idea of ​​player choice permeates the game’s open world as well. You can travel anywhere in the world, decide what you want to do, whether you want to run a campaign or not, and it’s a 35-hour experience full of truly human stories and characters that you can really connect on an emotional level. We put a lot of effort into the campaign in Diablo 4, and we’re very proud of its development.

Ferguson: one thing from previous Diablo games [is] You’ve worked with iconic characters, so it’s like, “Oh, you’re this barbarian you know from history or game lore.” Now with the player customization you’ve created Your barbarian. You can choose their look, gender, hairstyle, makeup – everything you want to do to really make it your savage. So you can create your own backstory and then choose your skills from that, you can choose very different skills and really make it your own. Kind of like Diablo 3, it’s great, but it ties a lot of what you do to your gear. So if you want to change your abilities, you just change your gear. This is not the case in D4. Obviously, gear is still very important to your build, but what really defines you is your skill choices, and then you bring those choices into the game.

Stories are non-linear, so you can choose how to play them. You’re in a shared open world, and you can choose to explore instead of story if you want. You can go anywhere you want within the sanctuary, go to dungeons, or do other things, fight world bosses, or go to local events, so you have options.

Then you have PvE and PvP. So do you want to take on the content of the story campaign or do you want to fight other players?it is [in] One of our PvP areas. Then who you want to play with is a choice, right? You can play solo. It’s a great single player game, but you can party. You can join a clan. So it’s all about you deciding what you want to do along the way.That’s why we’re talking about D4 [being] Regarding choice, because there are things you have agency over at almost every step of the process, you can decide how you want to play the game.

Can you talk about the construction and design of the dungeons, since there are over a hundred so the natural question becomes: is it reconfigured with over a hundred of the same dungeons, or is there a hundred handcrafted dungeons with and without The reason for the meaning goes there?

Shirley: So one of the things that’s really exciting about Diablo 4 is that because we have this shared open world that’s in the form of templates, the dungeons are actually somewhere in the world that you’re going to explore, and [that gives] Dungeon a real sense of place. So when you go into a particular dungeon, you see tiles associated with that dungeon, that kind of art. We have a wide variety of artworks. You will also see monsters living in it.

But when the dungeon is scrolled, it is randomly generated within these parameters. Monsters will have different configurations, you will see different heroes, you will see different affixes, you will see different layouts of dungeons. On top of that, every dungeon has a dungeon objective, so when you enter, you might have a goal of killing a boss, but you might have a goal of tracking down three fallen idols and disabling them. Therefore, dungeon completion objectives are also unique to each dungeon.

Ferguson: In Diablo, dungeons are famous for [them] Procedurally generated, the experience will be slightly different each time you enter it. One of the things I really like when we play is you go in and you don’t know the goal. There is no magical person at the door to tell you why. How you do this, is that you have to go in and find the goal, which is really interesting. Dungeons actually played really well in our endgame. When you play regularly, not only do you have dungeons you’re doing, like new gear or specific things, but at the end, all of a sudden you have nightmare dungeons.

Shirley: So because dungeons exist in the world, they are real places. While you’re at the end of the campaign, there’s more to choose from in Whisper, from Nightmare Dungeon to the expanded Paragon system, we’ve revealed some sneak peeks in the video. You can upgrade dungeons with these sigils, making them nightmare dungeons and they become more dangerous. Additional affixes are applied to them, making monsters more dangerous and even giving you an advantage.

You’ll get all sorts of sigils with all sorts of different affixes on them. So again, the player can choose which imprint you want to do. If you get a sigil for a dungeon that you don’t think fits your class, you skip that sigil – make a different sigil.

Ferguson: Nightmare dungeons is our take on Rifts, so if you’ve played Diablo 3, there’s a…

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Wilbert Wood
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