There are two interesting posts from Bashiok today: one is a blooper in the gameplay video and the second is a very cool detail in the gameplay video that couldn’t be perceived as intended and most people missed. While critters usually die in one shot when doing AOE damage, the critters in Diablo III keep doing their thing as if they were tickled super-bunnies.

There is something the developers worked so hard to show in the gameplay video, and couldn’t get it right. Then the announcement of Diablo 3 was upon them, and it had to go out unpolished.  The Siegebreaker breaks through the wall and grabs the merc to kill him, adding an element of surprise using the physix engine as a tool to mimic such brutal action with the debris falling all over the place while his victim disappears into its clutches.

Blizzard Quote:

BLOOPER: SUPER-BUNNIES

Ladranas: The firebomb attack will annihilate anything, except the rabbit that it directly hit.  Haha, not trying to troll around, but if you look at the gameplay vid the WD targets a rabbit with the firebomb spell and it continues to sit there and eat grass haha.  I always knew critters were the most powerful part of any game! Will we be seeing an “Elixir of Critter Strength I ” ? =)

Bashiok: Heh, I think someone brought this up a long time ago and I replied to it then too. There was a bug in that build that caused critters to sometimes not be effected by direct damage. If you bombed them off to one side though they’d go flying. To put your mind at ease, bunnies will axplode!

ANTI-HYPER, BOO!

Frozen-wolf: Previously when beta tests were announced and sign-ups were launched, sign-ups that occur from the same household were disqualified. I was wondering if people who live in the same house, who apply for different battle.net accounts and both opt-in for betas will be disqualified?

Datth: Unfortunately we do not have information on beta signups or events. If you signed up for one, please check the details/fine print carefully to see what is eligible.

ME SMASH, PUNY HUMAN

2337: I’m sorry for a possibly useless thread, but even though I’ve watched the WWI Gameplay video MANY MANY times I’ve never noticed this before.  At the scene where Cain tells the merc to “Get away from the wall!” the walls breaks, fall down and the merc is dead (buried). This is what I thought until a few minutes ago when I watched the scene by stepping framewise through it to see how the wall buries him. I suddenly noticed a giant hand that grabbed the merc and pulled him off! It’s the siegebreaker who grabs the merc through the wall and smashes it by doing so .

Bashiok:  It is indeed the siegebreaker’s giant hand that grabs him. It was an extremely difficult and trying shot to create and capture. The way the interior and exterior sections were set up and shot it made it necessary to capture them uncut.

The hand shot just wasn’t working that well, so we’d tweak it, hope that the physics would move the debris properly. Shoot, it didn’t work right. Tweak it again, reshoot the entire interior run, something else might go wrong, etc. Over and over. In the end we had to settle with what would appear to most as a wall collapse simply because we didn’t have time before the announcement to keep tweaking it and reshooting everything to make it more clear that it was a hand busting through the wall and grabbing him. Especially when the one we went with had some very perfect moments in it (zombie corpse landing on railing).

I’m glad that someone caught it though, a lot of work went into those animations, and unfortunately we just ran out of time to showcase them.