14 DAY TRIAL // Diablo 3 has been launched for almost a week now and Blizzard, in between trying to keep its servers as stable as possible, has talked about some of the game’s elements, including the open world and the restricted dungeons, but it also discussed the game’s different monsters.
Diablo 3 was launched last week and, in between errors with its mandatory online connection to Blizzard’s Battle.net servers, it managed to deliver a fun dungeon crawling experience.
In order to put into perspective some of the elements that were crafted by Blizzard, the studio’s Senior World Designer Leonard Boyarsky talked with RPS about the game’s open world and how the new title is trying to blend Diablo I’s closed nature with Diablo II’s open one.
“We tried to open up the world because we want it to feel like a place you’re inhabiting. But we did want to go back to…well, it’s very hard in an action game to get that horror feeling, but we wanted to try and invoke that and get back some of the Diablo I stuff. That’s one of the reasons we have you start in Tristram, besides the story itself. We thought it would be really cool to revisit that area and revisit the cathedral that you were in back then. We really wanted to touch on that and make it part of the experience.”
Monsters were also designed extensively in order to really reflect the difficulty on which the player is experiencing the game and to make him think about the strategy, while exploring the world and its dungeons.
“Sometimes you’ll have a series of monsters that aren’t too big of a threat and then you can go one of two ways. You can throw a ton of them at the player and then they realize that five may have been fine, but seven is a little hard, and fifteen? It’s time to back up,” he said.
“And then we have Champions and Rares, for instance, and these guys just come around and, especially on the higher difficulty levels, you see them coming around and you realize you better have no other monsters on the screen.”
From what you’ve played so far, were you impressed with Blizzard’s world or monster design? Share your thoughts below.