I think it's an interesting juxtaposition: having that claustrophobia but also seeing other players. In this video Blizzard discusses the Diablo 4 story and setting. But when I did, sometimes it was an event space and I was like, oh, this is great because I'm getting the loot faster, which was I think a good interaction. When I was out in Fractured Peaks, I didn't really come across a lot of players. It makes me curious about what they might be doing. I might be out exploring and I'll come across somebody and I'm like, oh, that's a player. John Mueller: I tend to get curious when I see people, more than annoyed. We want you to feel that the experience is king, as you're progressing. But that's not a requirement for gameplay to be successful. Online RPGs create opportunities for relationships to be formed, for you to meet people and to build those bonds. We talk about it like, two players will collide with each other, but then they kind of bounce off and continue on their own journeys, as opposed to, they come together, they did a thing, and now they absolutely are going to be a party together and go do everything together from that point forward. Every time you come across another player, we want that to be a positive interaction, but not feel mandatory as you're progressing through. It feels good in the moment.īut we aren't trying to create a number of experiences that are, you need to go find a party to go do this thing. We love the idea that as you wander through a region, you're killing like an elite monster or something, another player can like ride along on a horse and jump off and attack that monster to help you kill it. We're doing that specifically because we want to ensure we have created a certain sensibility around the experience as you're progressing through. So in places where we really do want a number of players to be available or a higher number of players, we will relax our zone caps in those spaces to account for that.īut beyond that, when you're just wandering around in places like the tundra in the Fractured Peaks when you're doing a side quest or whatever it is, it is much less likely for you to come across other players because the caps for those regions are lower.Īnd we're not doing that for a technical consideration. We don't allow for a very high number of players to exist in the regular regions around the world. Particularly when you're not in cities, the likelihood of you coming across other players is fairly low. Joe Piepiora: From the design side, it is important to us that the player feels they are isolated as they wander around the world. How have you tried to retain that traditional sense of what Diablo feels like to play with these light MMO elements, where you get these social experiences? Watch on YouTube Newscast: After Redfall's launch woes, where next for Xbox? So how has Blizzard tuned Diablo 4 to retain that single-player feel despite these MMO-lite elements? Will Diablo 4 ever force players to group up to obtain certain rewards? And what about class roles for raid-style boss fights? I put those questions to Diablo 4 art director John Mueller and associate game director Joe Piepiora in a recent interview - here's what they had to say. There's a cool claustrophobia to the 'do it alone' dungeon crawling in Diablo 4, so it can feel a little jarring to see other Lone Wanderers step on your turf. You play the 'Lone Wanderer' who strives to help humanity survive in a brutally oppressive, bleak world. There's a clan system, raid-like boss fights such as the aforementioned Ashava battle, and a player revive mechanic.Īt first glance, these systems are at odds with the traditional Diablo dungeon-crawling action RPG experience Blizzard is shooting for with the bulk of Diablo 4. Unfortunately, I failed miserably (yes, someone managed to solo Ashava in the Server Slam beta).Įncountering other players in the always-online Diablo 4 is but one of a number of MMO-lite elements in the game. I also joined a group to take on Ashava, a world boss encounter designed for 12 players. Outside settlements, most of my impromptu encounters with other players revolved around public events either in progress or just finished (annoying). It's the kind of thing you'd expect from an MMO - perhaps in a city set within Blizzard's own World of Warcraft. I saw players running around Kyovashad, the city in the Fractured Peaks region, popping into and out of portals, visiting vendors and milling about. If you played Diablo 4 during any of the various playtests Blizzard has held ahead of the game's early June launch, you'll probably have run into another player or two.

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