As part of Diablo IV’s press coverage leading up to the early June launch, Blizzard Entertainment has invited Wccftech to participate in an hour-long roundtable Q&A session with a bunch of fellow journalists as we filed questions to Lead Class Designer Adam Jackson and Lead Game Producer Melissa Corning, discussing everything related to key systems such as progression, player customization (cosmetic and non-cosmetic), respec, crafting, and much more.
It was a massive chat, which we condensed and edited in the transcription. It should definitely answer many of the most burning questions Diablo IV fans have about the aforementioned topics.
I’ll start with the big one. After the beta, one of the main topics within the community was the respec cost. As this factors into player customization, I was wondering if you are continuing to look at the feedback from the community and whether you are planning any changes at launch or beyond for that.
Adam Jackson: Our vision for respec, so to speak, is that we have to balance this idea that we want players to commit to a fantasy and a character and have actual weight and meaning to their choices. But we also want them to feel free to customize their character and explore and try different builds and fantasies and ways to play. Where we’ve landed on that is that earlier on in the game it’s very cheap, basically to the point that it’s essentially free, to respec your character and change around your build and experiment and do what you want, particularly through the campaign.
And then when you get to the really late game, we do want you to kind of start to optimize and focus on a build and focus on a real fantasy so that you can have that identity of, I am a werewolf druid, or I am a blood casting magic necro. Right. That’s kind of where we got with the respec costs. As far as the idea of making everything free forever, I don’t think that we’re going to be going down that direction anytime soon. But this is a live service game, and we are continuing to listen to feedback from the community, and honestly, our goal over time is to make the best game possible, so we’re going to do whatever we feel is best for the players.
My question has to do with cosmetics. In Blizzard games, they can range anywhere from canonically fitting to comically goofy. Will Diablo IV force cosmetics that stick to the dark tone of the game’s world? Or can we expect all different kinds in this?
Melissa Corning: Every single piece of equipment in the game right now is specifically designed to fit within the vision and the feel, the gothic horror style of the game.
A wide range of play styles is available through the five classes, but can fans of previous Diablo classes like the Demon Hunter find analogous builds with the new system?
Adam Jackson: That’s actually a really interesting question and a hard one to give an exact yes or no answer to. One of the things that we have to balance whenever we make a new Diablo game is this idea that we want to balance the familiar with the new. We want people to have something that they can identify with from previous games or playstyles or whatever. And then, we also have to create new things because we have to make our game new and exciting and have other fantasies to chase. As far as chasing fantasies or playstyles of classes that existed before but aren’t in our game directly, it is a fine line because we do want to balance that old with the new.
I think you can find some aspects of that in certain ways that our classes play. Like, for example, the Rogue has a lot of similarities to what the Demon Hunter did in Diablo III. There’s a lot of arrow-based archer fantasy and combat, and they move around really quickly across the battlefield. We don’t purposefully try to hit everything one to one, though, because then it’s hard to make new things if all that you’re doing is referencing old things. But also if we make something too one to one, then that means that we can’t bring that class in the future if we wanted to for Diablo IV, right? We don’t want to exclude the possibilities of what we could bring in the future by referencing things too much in classes that aren’t in Diablo IV before that maybe existed in previous titles.
The community would obviously love a lot of player-made mods with the emphasis that you have on customization for Diablo IV. Are you considering allowing mods in the future? And if not, why not?
Adam Jackson: It’s an interesting question. Honestly, my group doesn’t handle that very much at all, so I don’t really know.
Melissa Corning: Yeah, I don’t think we have any plans to support mods at this current time. I think there would probably be a lot of technical hurdles if we wanted to look into that, depending on player feedback.
After the beta, it was the first time people had seen the Druid, and some people had negative feedback regarding their appearance. But then you saw people like Arcane who saw themselves in that character. How does that feedback make you guys feel?
Melissa Corning: I think we expected a lot of different opinions about all of our classes, but yeah, our goal is definitely for every single class to feel unique, not just through their skills and animations but definitely through a diverse visual appearance as well.
Adam Jackson: I’d say one thing also on the gameplay side that matters is that it’s important for different classes to have different silhouettes so that you can tell what you are playing. If two people come up against each other, like in PvP or out in the world, that you can actually tell, like, Hey, there’s a Barbarian over here; this is a Sorceress over here. It’s something important that we consider when it comes to even gear and how all those things look on different classes.
Circling back to the respec costs in terms of how that affects customization for each class, you said it’s closer to free upfront, but I’ve seen deeper into the Paragon system where refunding a point is 40K or something like that. I’m wondering if your vision is for people to create multiple characters within the same class and then go all the way out into the endgame Paragon system, or is it still cheap enough that if you really want to change builds, you can go all the way back and then all the way up again for totally different builds? In Diablo II, you were making a hard choice, but in Diablo III, it was free.
Adam Jackson: I would say our vision is somewhere in the middle. A lot of the ways that we think about our design problems is this idea that everything exists on a spectrum where you’ve got one end that’s completely one way of doing things, and the other end is completely the other way. A lot of times, our answer is somewhere in the middle, and then, depending on feedback, we may move up or down that slider of where it is. In this case, you could think of Diablo II, where it’s on the extreme left side, where it’s like, hey, you can’t respec at all. You could get it via quest and do it very rarely.
And then Diablo III is where you could do everything and change it around at any time, do whatever you want. Both of those sides, typically, with everything that we decide, have come with obvious pros and cons. If you can’t respec your character forever, then that means that you’re really committed to your fantasy, and you’re really rewarded for thinking about your build and planning that out. Every time you restart the game, you’re actually motivated to go through it again and try this new, completely different way of playing. There’s a lot of good rewards there, but it comes with the cons that you’re very scared to do your build until you planned it out and you can mess up. And then, if you mess up, you got to start over, right? And that’s not very friendly to newer players.
The other end with Diablo III, that style is really friendly to this idea that you can just experiment around and do what you want, and it’s very free form, but it comes with some downsides of the attachment that you have to your character and your build and your fantasy isn’t nearly as strong because I can switch on a dime on what I’m actually playing and doing. We’re trying to find the middle ground there. That’s why, as I said before, we’re trying to make it really easy early on because we know that’s the period of time when players can make mistakes and we don’t want them to be afraid to do that. Later on it gets to be a little bit more painful and expensive to do it.
As far as our vision of, do we want you to remake a character from the ground up every time that you want to change your build? No, not really. I would say our vision, we want it to be a real choice, so there should be some pain behind it or some commitment to the idea that if you really want to switch, you can, but you’re going to have to really invest in it. It’s a meaningful choice to do it as far as the exact costs and values. We are a live service game. I’m sure that those things will change over time; we’re just picking where we think the good starting point is. And like I mentioned on that slider, maybe we’re too far and it’s too expensive in the late game, we have to make it cheaper. Or maybe it’s the other way around, actually, and based on the gold acquisition rate, it’s not painful enough.
We’re going to find that out, I think, over time through player feedback. But the idea is that we want it to be a meaningful impactful choice to switch later on. But I don’t think we want you to give up and reroll your character if you put a wrong point somewhere. That’s definitely not our vision of what we want Diablo IV players to do.
Following up on what you said earlier about classes being visually distinct. The Druid class is pretty different from any other, and I know quite a few people who aren’t that fond of playing it just because of how the Druid character models are. Is there any internal debate about the opportunity to offer a skinnier version of the Druid at some point?
There’s no plan currently. As Adam also said, we made this decision from the beginning because our goal was to be visually distinguished. Also, we have hundreds of different pieces of gear in the game and all of it is handcrafted for every single class. And by actually having a specific look, we can guarantee that no matter how you customize your character, every single piece of gear is going to look absolutely fabulous on your character. That is also something we take into consideration of. Is this actually going to change? Are you going to be potentially able to make your gear not look great on your character?
With the degree of customization in Diablo IV, how are you designing classes so that you don’t have to choose the meta to be successful in gameplay?
Adam Jackson: We do have a balanced philosophy that you should be able to complete all the content in the game and hopefully be relatively equal to all the other classes and specs as far as their power level. We think of it in two tiers, to give you an idea. The first level is, every class should be able to complete all the content in the game and feel relatively equal in power to every other class. So if you make the decision, I want to be a Barbarian or a Druid, that shouldn’t be impacted by power level. The total package that they bring to the table should be relatively equal because otherwise, people are going to not pick one class and pick another, and that’s not something that we want.
The second part of that is all the main builds that we propose to you or fantasies that we sell, what’s part of that class should also be relatively equal in power as far as the total package of what they can bring to the table. You could think of this like, inside of the Sorceress you have some very clear fantasies of a fire caster, frost caster, and a lightning caster. All of those fantasies, while they’re going to play and feel very different and maybe have different pros and cons and situations where they’re more or less powerful compared to the others, all of them should be able to complete all the content in the game, and they should all be able to be relatively equal as far as the whole package that they bring.
Those are our North Stars and guiding lights when it comes to how we balance and tune them and the different builds that we create inside of them. Will we get it completely perfect every time? No, probably not. But every time that we’re making changes and we listen what we’re driving towards and by designing all of our content in such a way that we know all the main builds and fantasies that we’re giving to, you are going to be able to be functional into the late game. That is the bar that we set. That way you can be assured that, hey, I want to play this way. It may not be the way that the most popular streamers or whatever online are telling me to play, but it’s good enough to work and I’ve made my own expression and built it. That’s the bar we’re trying to hit.
I know for a lot of new Diablo IV players and casual players, the skill tree and Paragon boards look like they can be incredibly involved and overwhelming. Are there suggested paths for the different suggestions for players that don’t want to have to go and research the guides?
Adam Jackson: This is something I’m actually really passionate about, and I do think we can definitely even post-launch improve in this way. As far as the launch version of the game, we actually went through a lot of iteration on the skill tree in particular to try and combat this exact issue that you’re talking about of like, we don’t want to overwhelm players. We don’t want the number of choices they have at the beginning to be too large. That’s why when you look at the entire skill tree at once, it can be a decent amount of things to grok. But you got to remember that we actually space out almost all of our customization content as far as character and build creation over a long period of time while you’re playing.
So you won’t see or need to care about everything at once. As an example, when you log into the game, you start with a colorless basic attack that isn’t attached to any fantasy. Then you make your first choice of your basic skill and we’re basically telling you to pick what you actually think is cool and what you want to do. As a sorcerer, I’ll go back to that example of fire, ice, or lightning. You pick that first skill and you’re like, okay, well that’s cool. I like fire. We’re not asking you to choose all the combinatorics of that decision, of the detailed ways you want to play with fire or the different skills. We’re saying, hey, pick one of these three cool things and then a little later on we ask you to pick a core skill, which is your main spender that deals all your damage. And then later on we ask you to pick a defensive skill and later on an ultimate.
We give you these things very slowly and peacefully over time. We’ve purposefully designed the tree in such a way that there are connections that are going to be pretty obvious to you that are going to work. It’s going to be a little hard to mess up as long as you stick to those fantasies that we present to you as an example. With fire, there’s a fantasy of burning where you want to light enemies on fire, make them burn over time, and then they eventually die.
You’re going to see, I pick a fire skill, and this makes enemies burn. Somewhere else, you see a passive that says you do more damage to burn enemies and then another thing that says there’s other ways to apply burning to enemies and it’s really good when you do. Slowly, over time, we give you those ways to play. As far as the Paragon board, that is one of the more complicated endgame systems, but it’s not introduced to you until after the campaign. You don’t even get to see it or interact with it until way later on in the game when hopefully you have a much better understanding of the way that our mechanics and systems work and have some nuance to how you want to do your build and your character. We really tried hard not to overwhelm people when they initially log in. However, there is still that depth and complexity there for the people that really like these games and want to spend some hours spreadsheeting or thinking about their character and what they want to chase.
Melissa Corning: One of the other things we have that I personally really love is that on the skill tree, you can actually search. So Adam was talking about burning. If I’m like, okay, this is a cool effect. You can type in burn and it will highlight all of the skills that actually take advantage of that effect. Or maybe you want to type in fire or lightning, or you find some other effect that you’re like, I don’t want to mouse over every single skill and see if it’s actually relevant to me. Just tell me what I should pick to work with this effect, which I know for me has been very useful.
One of the most interesting people got to play around with in the beta is the new character customization system. It was cool to see the swirls you can make out of blood and the different textures. I know there’s some cosmetic-only items, like the stuff that hangs on your mount and the back bling. Are there also further customization options that are based on the character creator? Like different face paints, makeup, scars, or tattoos? Is that a separate class of cosmetic item, or is it what you get at the start of that?
Melissa Corning: Tell me if I don’t answer your question, but there are certain customization options when you make your character that are actually unique per class. There is, for example, one hairstyle that is actually unique to each class. If you’re talking about once you actually get in the game, is there a drop that is ever going to like a piece of gear that is I can’t wear this because I’m not Necromancer besides weapons, correct me if I’m wrong Adam but I don’t think that’s something in the game.
I meant more like on the Battle Pass. Would there be another hairstyle or a new tattoo you can unlock for your character that will show up not necessarily like loot or something that would drop in the world per se, but a cosmetic that’s earned or in a Battle Pass or something that is that level that is attached to your character.
Melissa Corning: I think it’s possible. We could definitely do it in the future, but there’s nothing that we can announce or talk about right now.
How closely tied is the relationship between the gear system and player builds? Will players need to acquire a specific set if they want to enjoy a particular playstyle, or is gear more focused on enhancing builds that are achieved through skills and Paragon?
Adam Jackson: The answer is a little bit of both. First, to clear it up, there aren’t sets in Diablo IV. We don’t have the idea that you get a bunch of pieces of gear and then you unlock this really powerful thing if you get all the pieces. Generally, every legendary unique power gives you some effect and it’s like standalone really good. They can be synergistic with each other, but we don’t have that concept. But I think you’re asking more about like affixes and itemization. The answer is it’s a little bit of both. I would say some builds are more or less dependent on getting certain stats than other builds.
And this is done on purpose to give different builds texture and different feeling, I should say progression systems and how you’re going to interact with that. As an example, if I have a build that’s both focused on critically striking enemies, right, I’m obviously going to chase Crit Chance as a step on every single piece of gear that I can possibly get because I want to get that effect more often to get the benefits of whatever that build is giving me, right? Whereas other builds, like the Barbarian with Berserk which asks you to get into this berserking state, which is just a buff on the character. There’s various skills and ways to do that, but there’s not really an item that gives you berserking, it’s done through skills and legendary powers and effects.
As far as how your build comes alive, that’s also a little bit dependent on build to build or fantasy to fantasy. For pretty much every build in Diablo IV, there’s going to be certain legendary powers or certain unique effects that you are going to chase that are going to make your build way cooler and more powerful over time. But how much of that lies in very specific legendary powers and how much of that lies in different item affixes or effects that you’re chasing to try and build up those stats like that critical Strike Chance example? I think it’s going to depend on build to build. There’s also going to be ways to get it through Paragon or your class mechanic and all these other systems. The whole point of all this is that you have a lot of different pockets of ways to chase that fantasy down. We give you the endpoint of what you’re wanting to chase, but how you get there is up to you.
Why have you shied away from sets when they’ve been such a key part of Diablo in the past? I wonder if it doesn’t fit with all these other customization options you set up.
Adam Jackson: The reason why we shied away, at least for launch, is that as much as we can, we’re trying to chase a more open ended design in a way where the players can choose how they want to get to their destinations. A lot of times, the way I talk about this with my designers is our job as designers is to imagine that you’re on a road and you’re trying to go somewhere. We give you the destination, and then we give you a lot of different roads on how to get there.
With that tornado druid example, your destination is to want to fill up the screen with tornadoes. But as far as where do you get the itemization, where do you get the legendary powers, which ones you decide to equip? That’s up to you how to get there. There are a lot of winding different ways that you can eventually arrive at that endpoint. When it comes to sets, a lot of times you can think of it in that framework of, we give you an endpoint, but then there’s only one road to get there, which is acquire these two or three or six very specific items, and that’s the only way to get there.
Our North Star for Diablo IV, at least right now for our design, is that we don’t want to be that prescriptive as far as the fantasies we’re selling you. Right. Obviously, there will be in that tornado druid example, some legendary powers that you’re going to want to have as they are very synergistic. But for us to say, get all of these different pieces and then you get to play the fantasy, it isn’t the way that we want to do it. We want you to piecemeal, get things over time, have different connections that you make because you’re going to be over-leveling your gear sometimes and switching it out and changing things around. Your journey is a little bit more piecemeal and your end isn’t so prescriptive.
That is why we decided not to do sets, at least for now, in Diablo IV. We don’t want to tell players how to play so much. We want them to figure it out on their own, and we felt like our previous design of sets was too prescriptive in that way.
One of my favorite ways to play in Diablo III, at least during the leveling experience, was to let my loot drops lead my characters to some extent. So if I got a core legendary affixed, I would adjust my build on the fly to respond to the loot. That was a fun way of helping me explore the different possibilities of the character as well. Is that something that you’re going to allow in Diablo IV within the respec stuff you were talking about earlier, or is it more the case that you’re always going to be hunting for the loop that fits the build that you’ve imagined?
Adam Jackson: I think it’s a little bit of both. When you’re going through the campaign we very much expect and delight in the idea that the player finds a Legendary item that pushes them in a completely different build that they weren’t even considering. We very much want you to do that and we make it very easy and low friction when you go through the campaign, which is the first 50 levels of the game. That’s a very long time. After that, it’s not like you hit a wall and then all of a sudden it’s impossible and a really expensive resource. It gradually gets more and more expensive over time. By the time you hit level 100, we expect that to be a little bit more of a difficult choice.
You still can totally do it. If you find a piece of gear that is for a completely different build, you can go do that. But another thing to think about is that when it comes to putting together a level 100 build, typically it requires a lot of different places of investment. It’s not just one single drop that will enable that build. Maybe a unique drop can open the doors for a completely new way to play. But you’re generally going to think about your Paragon, how you spec all of that, your class mechanic, how you did that, the skill tree itself, the gear that you’ve been collecting so far, and the itemization that you have been prioritizing up to that point.
As the game gets more complex over time and you unlock these additional systems, it is a bigger investment even naturally without the respec cost to overhaul that and go to a new build. We are kind of walking that fine line. Like I said before, in the earlier and middle parts of Diablo IV, it should be very easy to and we want you to. Later on, we still want it to be possible and you totally can, but you’re just going to have to really be sure about that decision because we want you to identify with the thing that you’ve been building for these first 60, 70, 80 levels.
Melissa Corning: We also have the Codex of Power. In every single dungeon in the game, when you complete it, you unlock a kind of legendary effect. For me, who loves Frozen Orb, I’m just going through the Codex of Power and finding the Frozen Orb dungeons because I want to find a legendary for Frozen Orb. I can just go do this dungeon and immediately now have this effect. I can apply it to a piece of gear that helps the build I want versus the random items I will find.
Adam Jackson: That’s a good point. A big plus of that system is that it does make it easier if you do want to make that choice even later on, since you have some of the puzzle pieces to try and chase various builds that you want. So it is by design that we want you to be able to still have that playstyle that you’re chasing.
With the customization that you can do from getting things from the Codex of Power or with the gems and the glyphs, what happened with runes and rune words? Are they still returning for socketed items, or are they dropped because of all these new features that you guys are adding in Diablo IV?
Adam Jackson: Yeah, totally. How would I say this? We like rune words. They’re very cool. We don’t have anything to announce as far as if they’re going to be in the game in the immediate future. We do think they’re still a really cool idea, and that’s all I’m going to say right now.
I loved the pets in Diablo III, and I have hundreds of them in World of Warcraft. Can we expect pets in Diablo IV this time around?
Maybe. We have no plans for pets right now, but we’ve definitely heard the feedback that people really liked them in Diablo III, so who knows?
How did you iterate over Diablo III’s crafting system and how critical is it going to be regarding the players’ build?
Adam Jackson: Crafting is a very open ended question. I’m guessing you’re talking about the blacksmith and upgrading your gear?
Yeah, I guess, the general experience of going to the blacksmith.
Adam Jackson: We have had a few iterations of it. One of the big pivots we made is that you don’t craft gear at the blacksmith, which we did have for a long time in Diablo IV and played around with things like, you could make a chest piece and you could make a helm or whatever. We moved more towards item modification and item upgrading. The idea is that you find maybe, what’s close to your perfect item, and then you can make it even closer, or make it your perfect item, or you find an item, and then you find the one that you want to use for a long time, and then you make it more powerful by upgrading it.
We thought that was a little bit more interesting because we still want you to go out killing monsters and finding loot, as that’s what Diablo is about, right? That is the gameplay loop at the core of everything you’re chasing. We don’t want to subvert that by making the blacksmith able to create everything you want because then you’re not getting excited about the loot that drops from monsters, so we motivate you to do that. The crafting system in Diablo IV is meant to enhance that or mitigate the RNG a little bit. That way, you still feel like you have some agency, you can chase the stats that you want and you can make your gear more powerful to make it into the perfect version of your character, but it doesn’t do everything for you.
That’s the fine line that we walk in Diablo IV. We feel like we still have a lot of things that we could add even down the road to make this an even better experience for players. We’re definitely not done with it at launch, but that is our foundation for crafting in Diablo IV.
Diablo IV has this top-down perspective. You’re not getting as up close and personal with your character. What approach did you take to ensure that your customizations and facial uniqueness are all shown in gameplay and cutscenes?
Melissa Corning: Yeah, this is great because as you pointed out, when you’re actually going through the story, your character is now in some of the cinematics. So it’s not just that you’re on the side. You’re actually in the cinematics talking with the NPCs and the major story characters. You’re actually in the story, which is just so much more immersive than previous titles. But that’s not the only place. Even when you join a party, when you open the party screen, you see a screen of every single person in your party all standing together. You get this cool visual of how badass my entire party looks. Look at us standing beside each other, ready to crush demons.
It’s just a nice screenshot moment of every single time you make a party. We do that in other places too, like in the profile, where we zoom in very close. Actually, in town, we zoom in a little closer. There’s a zoom option on the emote wheel that you can get closer. There’s a lot of other little places in the game where we try to really let your character’s individual look shine.
Thank you for your time.
