BlizzCon 2013 – Diablo III: Reaper of Souls Preview Panel Transcript

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Presenter: Welcome to the Diablo III: Reaper of Souls Preview Panel. Your panelists are: Josh Mosqueira (game director), Kevin Martens (lead designer), Stephen Wong (senior gameplay programmer), Jesse Maccree (senior level designer), Joe Shely (senior game designer), Julian Love (lead technical artist), Tim Linn (lead interior environment artist), and Zaven Haroutunian (level designer).

Mosqueira: Hey, how you guys doing?

[People scream with happiness]

Mosqueira: Are you guys ready to face Death? Awesome isn’t that cinematic just awesome, we’re really excited to be here, umm my name is Josh Mosqueira, I’m the game director, and it’s a great honor to be here with you guys today, we’re going to show you some of the cool new things we have in store for you guys for the ”Reapers of Souls” .

We got a great panel for you guys today, but before we get in to meat and potatoes of Reapers of Souls, I want to take a few moments to talk to you guys about what Reapers of Souls means to us.

What of our high level goals we had when we started the project; and for us it all starts with epic heroes, where you are the Barbarian or Demon Hunter or the Monk or the brand new Crusader, You’re a knight in a battlestar armor, you guys are playing heroes which are bigger than life and you are facing the forces of darkness.

In “Reaper Souls”, we’re celebrating the dark gothic hearts. It is at the root of Diablo, and we have a sleuth of new monsters for you guys to kill and loot; and Joe and Julian, up here, are gonna talk to you about how our monsters are designed to live to die, and we’re not only introducing new monsters we’re also introducing brand new villain to the world of Diablo in the form of Malthael — the angel of death, and Tim and Zaven are going to talk to you guys about Pandemonium — the final battleground where you guys are going to be confronting Malthael, and trying to stop death; but we’re not just stopping there, one of the most important goals for us is we wanna make sure that there was, an end game for everyone.

We wanted to make sure that you guys have as many different options for when it comes to how you play Diablo III, so now not only you have a great story mode, we’re gonna see the story of the Fall of Westmarch — defeating Malthael, and we’re also gonna be introducing a brand new way to play Diablo III.

We’re introducing Adventure Mode. And to do that I wanna ask Kevin Martens, our lead game designer, to come on stage and talk to you guys about Adventure mode.

( Audience Applauses)

Martens: Hello, BlizzCon, it’s nice to have you all back in beautiful southern California. So who has had the chance to play Adventure mode on the demo floor today? Okay, so those of you had the chance to play it I am glad you had, but still you’re gonna learn a lot about how and why we made it. What problem we are trying to solve.

So adventure mode started basically as some core elements of the the game that weren’t working well together, so ultimately Diablo is about getting awesome loot and killing monster to do that, and we have these two things in the game that weren’t working well together.

On one hand we had this big, big world of Sanctuary, and we had it split up into four Acts, basically, so each of the acts were self-contained, they had cool villains at the end of them; and then we had this campaign mode and that was good; but we also had you play through it four times in a row so it sort of gets level 60 or to where the end game was.

So on the other hand we also had this big complex randomization system. We had all this content and we had this game with this random tilesets, and monster distribution was random, and those two things didn’t work well together playing that campaign over and over again; and not taking advantage of that randomness was something that we wanted to make a lot better.

So we put this core stake on the ground which is: “Go anywhere, slay anything.”

So under this idea — this is sort of how the beginning of Adventure mode happens; how the genesis of this feature began. So imagine a world where you can start in the Festering Woods and you want to do one of the favorite side dungeons, and you have a good reason to that, have that wrist rewarded.

Then go to a boss in Act III — he is Ghom in the Keep; and then go to Heaven and then again have a good reason to go there, have this epic awesome zone want to go there and be able to do that freely in one session without having to go out of the game to get back into the game again, so that’s ultimately what Adventure Mode is.

This is a brand new game mode. So that requirement that you played through the game linearly? That’s gone! You can play where you want to, not only — thank you. (laughs)

( Audience applauses )

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