Following the recent Diablo IV endgame overview video shared by Blizzard Entertainment, Wccftech received an invitation to an interview with Lead Game Producer Kayleigh Calder and Associate Game Director Joseph Piepiora focused specifically on that part of the action RPG.
The Q&A happened in a roundtable setting, but it was nearly an hour long and would have been impossible to transcribe as a whole, so I focused on the questions that I was able to ask the developers. As a reminder, Diablo IV is set for a June 6th on PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series S|X with cross-play and cross-progression. If you pre-order the game, you’ll get four days of early access, thus giving you the chance to start playing on June 2nd.
Can you talk about how the Paragon system in Diablo IV is different and perhaps improved over the one you had in Diablo III?
Kayleigh Calder: It is an entirely new system except for the name. The system that we’ve built for Diablo IV aims to allow you to go beyond with your character to continue that customization journey and to give you more choices in how to build out your character so that two Sorcerer could play and feel entirely differently, not just in terms of skills, enchants, and the legendaries you wear, but also for the choices you make within the Paragon board itself.
Joseph Piepiora: One of the goals of the Paragon system was to make sure that players could regularly earn little bits of power as they progress and that was effectively infinite in nature.
Players can max the Paragon board, but it’s an extremely long cycle to go through all of that, and certainly, nothing you’d accomplish in a single season. When we thought about things in the Paragon before, one of the tenets we actually had for ourselves was trying to cap progression as opposed to having unlimited progression within a season or just in general.
We want players to find combinations of the points they’ll be earning through Diablo IV that feel like they are maximised, they’re the best possible configuration, versus endlessly acquiring more and more points to continue to progress the power of your character. We want you to get to a certain point once you reach Level 100 where you’ve got 220 of these Paragon points you’re playing with, you have your skill points, you’ve already got your legendary items and your unique items and now it’s about configuring the board exactly the way that you want.
So to Kayleigh’s point, there’s lots of really interesting choices you get to make while you’re progressing through the board, making a lot of different choices along the way that we think are really fun. When you reach a gate node on the Paragon board, you get to make a board-level decision, and you can rotate that board the way you prefer.
Kayleigh Calder: And you got the Glyphs as well, which you can add to the board, changing the nodes around the Glyph, powering up that Glyph. There’s a whole bunch of choices and investment that’s going into the Paragon board from the player.
Joseph Piepiora: I guess one last point on this is that when we’re thinking about customization for Diablo IV in general, we want to ensure that there’s a lot of depth and many, many interesting choices in the game overall, but we didn’t want to overload players when they began the experience, where they felt like there were a lot of these choices they had to make, but they didn’t have all the context and understanding necessary to feel that they were making good decisions, because it’s a really easy way to get players to face decision paralysis.
So, the skill tree is very focused on making skill-level decisions and making sure that you understand the context of how you’re making a build. If you’re trying to make a fire Sorcerer or a ranged poison Rogue, you kind of understand because you see all the pieces there laid out in front of you of how that all kind of fits together.
You’re still making those decisions, but you understand the connections and the synergies. The Paragon board basically comes in at a point where we expect you to generally understand how your class is put together, and now you get to build upon those ideas.
Earlier, you clarified where Diablo IV stands right now in terms of dungeon crawler versus MMO in that it was designed to be the former rather than the latter. But I’m wondering if this can maybe slightly change over time. As more and more players get to the endgame, is it possible that you could add more MMO-like activities and features to the game? For example, I’m thinking of some of the stuff that Diablo Immortal has been doing, like PvE raids or even some PvP features like the recently released territory control for clans, which I thought was pretty cool.
Joseph Piepiora: Yeah, Diablo Immortal has done a lot, the team has created a lot of really cool content and features to support that game, with what they want in their community and what their vision for it is.
We really want to make sure that Diablo IV remains firmly in the ARPG camp, like we’re not really making an MMO. We are making an online game that does have that connected community feel in some places. So when we think about features that we’d be looking to add to Diablo IV in the future, whether it’s in seasons or later updates, we’re thinking more along the lines that we are going to add features are gonna serve the game that we’ve made, that we think would be really good for the community. Now, again, the game is a live service and things will change over time. And what one person might say is strictly an MMO-only feature and what might look like an ARPG-only feature, I think it might get a little muddy over time, but we’re not looking to make that game, if that makes sense.
Fair enough. You’ve also said that Diablo IV won’t push players into any of the classic roles, such as tank, healer, or DPS (damage per second). However, some players do enjoy taking on a supporting role. Will it be possible to specialize your character as such and if so, to what extent?
Joseph Piepiora: That’s a great question. So, a couple of things. One, when I said that we don’t push players into roles, I meant that in Diablo everyone is sort of a damage dealer, but the way you deal that damage is very different, and sometimes the speed at which you do that damage is a little bit different, and then the tankiness you get to absorb is a little bit different as well.
Now, there are a couple of things that can be done. There’s some mechanics baked into the game at the baseline that will help other classes. An example of this are the conditions, like when you’re snaring a target or you’re stunning a target.
That does mean that that creature is snared and stunned for other characters, too, which then enables them to do different things. As an example, there’s an ability to put the vulnerable status on enemies, and so the baselines receive an additional 20% of damage from all damage sources to them during that time while they’re vulnerable and they have that purple health bar during that time.
And there’s lots of other things players can do to take more advantage of vulnerable enemies, so you can do that. When you put an enemy in a vulnerable state, they’re vulnerable for everybody. Barbarians have abilities, such as their shout abilities, that can affect a lot of their allies nearby when they use them. Which means that you can kind of create a very support focus shout based Barbarian. It won’t be the only thing they can do, but they could be rolling a lot of different shouts out to buff their friends as they’re running around.
As we’re looking like further down the line for all of these classes, we are going to be looking at this space and thinking about things more as we go and reacting to the way the players are playing. There are some legendary powers that do things for people that are nearby. We have some things baked into some of the class trees and in the Paragon boards that do small things for other players. But initially, it’s about trying to make sure that players can create opportunities for other players to do a little bit more damage and buff allies to use some specific targeted abilities. We want to likely go deeper into some of these ideas over time.
Kayleigh Calder: If I could add to that with an example, I played both Diablo IV beta weekends with my other half and we ran a Barbarian/Sorcerer combo. I built my Sorcerer to lay down a lot of frost skills and ice skills, which apply the frozen and freezing status which slows them down, allowing us to group them up. So there are ways for players to build out their characters so that they can be less of a just pure, high-damage dealer and do benefit the player in other ways.
Okay. Thank you for your time.
