Episode 8

Tom Chilton: Well the aerial combat that we had in Wintergrasp we just ended up feeling wasn’t really polished enough for the final experience. We gave it a shot with the vehicle technology that we had but ultimately it was a little goofy that you could crash your airplane into the ground and nothing bad would really happen. Then also the kinda of sense of flying really wasn’t there enough.

If you look at a lot of games that have done flight simulation, there is a lot of care that goes into giving you that sensation of flying by having the world tilt and stuff like that so it feels a little less mechanical, feels a little bit more alive or more natural. So one of the things that we have kind of tasked ourselves with doing is figuring out how to polish that, how to improve on our vehicle physics, there’s still a lot of vehicle physics tech that we want to get in that didn’t make it into the first pass of Lich King.

So we have to make some tough decisions sometimes about what we are going to go forward with and what just isn’t working out well enough to meet our quality standards and that was one of them. So it’s still definitely on our list of things that we want to do, we have a lot of people here who are passionate about vehicle combat, passionate about making it more interesting, more fun, by increasing the number of things we can do with it – that would definitely include the possibility of doing aerial combat.

Jay Wilson: Thank you very much.

Jay Wilson: Well there are some aspects of shrines that we liked, experience shrines I think are probably the prime example everyone uses. They're fun because they drive the player forward. Monster shrines are sometimes fun because they bring out a rare that you didn’t know or weren’t expecting that could come from any direction and that’s cool. But for the most part, the pure mechanic of shrines, a random powerup that just appears in the world for no reason, we don’t really want to litteraly bring that back. What we are going to try to do is integrate a lot of the best things of shrines into our quest and event systems so that when you encounter a random quest or random event that has a story context within the game it either rewards you like a shrine would reward you or something that is actually built into the gameplay of the quest. So while technically no shrines are not coming back verbatim, we are trying to bring back kind of the best things of them in a different form.

Jay Wilson: Exactly, and really they are kind of there to change up the gameplay and add a little factor of randomness, but we felt that very few of the shrines actually did that – accomplish that goal...

Jay Wilson: Yeah, stamina shrine lets you run a long time. Skill shrine made you a little bit more powerful. We feel like we can take the best and put them within actual events that are a lot more fun and have a lot more gameplay to them.

Jay Wilson: It’s definitely diverse and it’s diverse on a lot of different fronts. When you think about Diablo 2, all the different ways you can build your character, we really expanded all the ways you can customize your character by adding in the rune system. Not only can you completely customize your skill set, much more so than you can in game like most MMOs like World of Warcraft, because of that, the items you want are based upon the skill set that you’ve chosen or the type of build that you are trying to create.

And items, one of the things we are trying to do is focus on this even greater element of defining your build. So really it's up to the player on what kind of stats they want on their character, but we're definitely not shooting for a, "oh here's the barbarian armor", there is a set and when you get the full set you're done. That's just not very Diablo and it's not really the kind of gameplay we're going for. If anything we’d like the item set to be a lot more diverse than it was in Diablo 2.

Jay Wilson: Exactly, always a new build to try out.

Dustin Browder: Hey everybody.

Dustin Browder: Well obviously each of the races behaves differently with how they use their air units. The Zerg, obviously the mutalisk is still a powerful part of the Zerg air force and still used for a lot of fast raiding, a lot of sudden attacks from different directions to keep the enemy off balance and of course in mass in the end game you can obviously use mutalisks for mass air assaults.

The other races behave a little bit differently. The Terrans with their banshee, is very very powerful anti-ground unit. It can even sometimes just power right through base defenses which really the wraith couldn’t have handled in the original game. So you see a lot of need for all the races to have some very powerful anti-air weapons to deal with these kinds of threats.

A similar threat on the Protoss side is the void ray. It is a very powerful bream that can really do a lot of damage to enemy buildings. So you’ll see there are some very heavy hitters in the air in Starcraft 2 that really require you to get out there and use some of these more dedicated anti-air units like the corrupter, like the phoenix, to really fend off these powerful sort of air threats. Obviously there are some similarities players will see with the original game, at the same time there are these really powerful hitters really do make a pretty big difference.

You'll also seem some new authority for some of the bigger units in the game. Certainly the carriers have a much longer range than they’ve ever had before. It makes them a very powerful threat from the air in the end game. We should probably see more carriers used in higher level games but obviously will see how that goes in the beta. And of course the battlecruiser has three different options in terms of how he wants to sort of improve his battlecruiser, whether he wants to buy a yamato weapon for his battlecruiser, or the player wants to a buy a shield for his cruiser, sort of different choices for the player for the battlecruiser which again adds to the authority of these big end game units which makes them a little more practicle in different matchups. Where previously you would only see battlecruisers in certain matchups in Starcraft, now in Starcraft 2 you’ll probably see them in more matchups sort of across the board.

Dustin Browder: I certainly hope so. We obviously haven’t gotten to that stage where we’re doing a lot of that work yet. A lot of the stuff people are seeing in-game right now, I know we’re showing a lot of material, I know people are looking at it saying, “If this looks really good, it must be close to final.” That’s certainly not how the art team feels about it right and they’ve been going over it and hitting individual units as we go forward, individual races, and the Zerg in terms of their buildings and even their units are still the furthest behind in that respect. There is still a lot more work to go into the Zerg , for instance the hatchery, the lair, the hive are all going to go under massive revisions here in the next couple of weeks as we really punch up the art to really represent these iconic, critical, central buildings to a Zerg base. So there is still a lot of work to go into it and certainly bleeding buildings would feel very Zergly, very appropriate for the race and is something we’d love to do.

Dustin Browder: Alright thanks guys.

Julian: Yeah, something pretty close to my own heart there, was we really recognized that monsters really live to die in Diablo. You really don’t have a lot of time to express their personality, and you don’t have a lot of time to try to make your experience with monsters meaningful. Most of what you’re doing is killing them. So one of the things I was really interested in doing was making as many different ways for monsters to die as possible. So that was kind of the goal, and think we’re up to something like 35 ways for any given monster to “bite it” at this point. But the basic theory is to really extend on the idea that Diablo II started with, which was that you would hit monsters and you would see the damage you did to them reflected on them. And we said, well let’s take that further, monsters could burn to death when you hit them with a firey sword, and then we added the idea of crits and monsters could explode across the screen, and it just kind of went from there. But that’s essentially the idea.

Julian: Yeah in fact that’s a common input that I’ll receive is “Hey this guy’s a firey this or whatever, but can we make that fire look green?” And that’s where the sort of designer in me has to kind of come out and say, wait a minute if we make fire green all of a sudden it’s a bit of a miscommunication in terms of the gameplay. And so there is a bit of constraint there that, at one point I’m trying to make things look as epic as they can, but at the same time they have to be really clear to the player so that they’re not confused that you know, green fire might mean poison. Then there’s the other part of it which is it’s really easy in my department to make a big mess. We can just clobber the screen with so many effects that you just can’t see the game anymore. So those are really the two constraints we really work with most.

Mike: Yeah, most people seem to really like it. I mean the feedback has been pretty good, personally I love it, because it lets you do both, it lets you have the large icons but it eliminates the frustration that people voiced about having different sized items within your inventory.

Mike: Oh yeah, very much so.

Mike: I am unabashedly a fan of WoW, I’ll probably catch flak “oh you’re making it look like WoW oh no!” but I love them, I love the WoW icons. And y’know what we’re trying to do is see, ok what works about the WoW icons? They’re illustrative; is there a way to try to maybe bridge the gap. You know what worked about the more symbolic DII icons, and what works with the WoW icons, and trying to find a way to put the two together. And that’s really what I’m trying to do is to try to make them more symbolic, so they’re not necessarily little murals, but they are painterly. So they are colorful because you’re going to have a lot more of them than you would in DII. So you have the hot bar at the bottom, and you want that to look colorful enough that it’s interesting, but not to the point where it’s an eyesore. And quite honestly I’ve made many iterations on the icons, and there’s still many to come. It ends up being a balancing act, you know I test them out what they look like next to each other, and if they’re too colorful – tone it down.

Mike: You know one of the best experiences I’ve had at Blizzard is the iterative process, which some artists don’t like, but I personally love it. Because it lets me test stuff out. For a while I was trying out, ok let’s do color theory… ok so all the berserker skills will be this tone, and all the battle master will be this tone. And you know on paper it looked good, sounded good, ok it’s a nice theory but what we found is when you put them on the hot bar, if you went down a certain tree now everything’s the same color at the bottom and it’s hard to tell them apart. You know, ok I get a gold star for being clever, but then I lose points because it’s not playable. So you know you go back once again, scrap it, and reevaluate it. But I love that process.

Mike: Yeah well it’s always an, again, an iterative process right, and one of the problems we had with one of the systems we had tried out was – it worked – but from a peripheral vision you couldn’t see what was going on. We wanted to be very clear and very bold about what was being done, so traditionally what happens is design will come to me and we’ll talk about what are the goals we need to accomplish. And then I’ll do some mockups and then I take it over to Julian and hope he can make those mockups look far better than my mockups.

Julian: And I think where we’re at right now with it is the recognition that spending your fury is what we really want you to be doing, we want you to see it as a commodity to spend in order to gain access to more power, and that wasn’t really being communicated so clearly with the other one. So we’re trying to accomplish that goal of making it more, yeah, you know when to spend, you know what you’re spending but you don’t necessarily have to look directly at it. So effects plays a little bit of a role there, but I think we’re trying to not put effects in there just for effects’ sake, but only do it when we think that it’s going to help you really read and understand what’s going on.

Mike: Yeah, before one of the problems was you would see the build up more than what you had to spend. Like you would build your fury up, and then you know “bonged”, and you’d have an amount you could spend. But everything was sharing the same visual space and you couldn’t necessarily discern one from the other. And again from an art standpoint, sure it worked, it was ok, but it wasn’t conveying the gameplay. And gameplay is king, you’ve got to make sure that it comes across in every way.

Mike: Let's see… if I had to use a cruel comment, one that I made myself as I was making it, oh "It's the fury traffic light". Because it's three spheres stacked vertically, and no we’re not making them three different colors, but you know as I was doing it I was like oh great, it pretty much well assures us that we are not doing different colors because it will well indeed look like a traffic light. But that’s the gist of it, because when you're playing hopefully your vision is in the center of the screen, and this is going to be to your right and down below. So you need to see a very bright graphic that kind of flashes to let you know, that even if you flick your eyes down there you’ll see I've got two or three of whatever that is to spend. Really that was the goal. Hopefully Julian and his team will ramp it up, so that, because we want it to catch your eye while you’re doing it, but not be a distraction.