Diablo III Kore

“We’ve been amazed by the incredible response to each of our previous BlizzCon events,” said Mike Morhaime, CEO and co-founder of Blizzard Entertainment. “We’re pleased to be bringing the convention back to Anaheim this year, and we look forward to this new opportunity to meet Blizzard gamers from around the world.”

 A collection of BlizzCon 2009 Diablo 3 Videos

Interviews and Q&A's:

 Blizzard posted the pictures from BlizzCon 2009 cosplay contest, including the winner of the Cosplay (the spider queen).

ANAHEIM, Cailfornia — What’s the fifth character class for Diablo III?

Blizzard Entertainment’s popular dark fantasy action role-playing series hasn’t had a sequel since 2000, but the franchise has sold 18.5 million copies worldwide. And that equals 18.5 million different fan complaints about the sequel. Diehard Diablo players didn’t want to see the color scheme of the series changed, much less the character classes they’ve come to play countless times over the years.

When Diablo III was revealed last year in Paris, fans were in an uproar because the Barbarian warrior is the only playable character from the previous games. With the simultaneous announcement of the Witch Doctor, fans knew that meant that the similar Necromancer class was gone.

Soon after, the spell-casting Wizard replaced the Sorceress. And the newly-announced Monk class is meant to replace the Assassin (with a bit of Warcraft’s Rogue thrown in).

That just leaves one mysterious class left. How will fans react to this one?

In the past, game director Jay Wilson has said that the class selection was contentious even among the Diablo team.

Wilson said at Blizzcon that his team doesn’t yet have a final concept for the fifth class, and that they recently changed their minds about it.

But he’s quick to add that doesn’t mean that they’ve changed the character completely.

“We changed gears,” he said.

“We changed our high-level idea of the class because it was actually one of the first classes that we picked, years and years ago.”

The fact that the class was chosen first, he said, was part of the reason why it needs to be re-tooled.

“We’ve had this class for four years, and it’s not as exciting to us as it used to be,” he said. “It had actually become a chain around our necks.”

The new class isn’t a “complete departure” from the first concept, Wilson said. “Most of the skills can transfer over, but (the changes) definitely freed up our art staff to be a lot more imaginative.”

Since the announcement of Diablo III last year, Blizzard has teased fans with a slow rollout of the game’s characters. The Barbarian was announced with the unveiling of the game, but it was supposed to be accompanied by the Wizard, not the controversial Witch Doctor.

That changed, said Wilson, at a company show-and-tell event where the new character went over very well with the rest of the company. “A lot of the senior people at the company actually came to us and asked us to show the Witch Doctor at the announcement instead of the Wizard,” Wilson said.

“If you look back at BlizzCon (2008), and if you played the Wizard and the Witch Doctor, you’d have noticed that the Wizard actually had a lot more skills … because the Wizard had been in development for a lot longer,” Wilson said.

As for the recently-announced Monk, Wilson says he isn’t perfect just yet. “He’s actually way too powerful right now. He doesn’t feel that way when you first start playing him, but once you learn to play him, he’s really, really powerful,” he said.

Previous Diablo games didn’t let you choose the gender of your character, but you can in the sequel. Wilson says Blizzard has a greater commitment to ethnic and cultural diversity this time around, while still “appealing to 20 to 25 percent of the audience — which is roughly how much I think a character class like this has to appeal to,” he added.

“More is fine, but hopefully you’re catching about that amount.”

Screenshots: Blizzard Entertainment

Written By: Tracey John @ Game|Life

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But, says the game’s director Jay Wilson, it’s still OK for some kids, including his 9-year-old daughter.

The popular RPG series, which has sold over 18.5 million copies worldwide, has players fighting their way through dark dungeons and brutal battles to kill the Lord of Terror and his various Hell-spawn. The upcoming third installment will include all the Diablo staples: a top-down isometric viewpoint, point-and-click gameplay and randomly generated items and maps, in addition to all the blood and gore.

At the BlizzCon convention, held this past weekend in Anaheim, the Diablo III development team gave fans a sneak peek at some grisly new features: the new Monk character class, a martial arts master whose rapid-speed abilities make for frenzied, blood-splashing kills, and new enemies such as the Fallen Lunatic, a demon that stabs itself in its chest until it explodes to damage the player.

I met Wilson’s wife and daughter as they played his game on the convention floor.

“I know my daughter well enough to know that I didn’t think she’d have any problem handling it,” said Wilson. “That being said, I don’t let her see games that have any guns in them or first-person shooters that have violence. That, to me, is a little too personal. And so, that’s where I draw the line. I think it’s got to be a really personal choice that everyone makes.”

The full Q&A with Wilson about Diablo’s gratuitous gore, including information about parental controls and the possibility that it won’t be released in China, is below.

Jay Wilson: I heard you met my wife and daughter!

Wired.com: I did. I was looking for a “human interest” story when I saw a woman and her young daughter playing Diablo III. I asked the mother for an interview and it turned out to be your wife. How do you feel about letting your daughter play an M-rated game like Diablo?

Wilson: Well, I feel like for every parent you have to make a choice about what kind of content is appropriate for your child and at what age. At a certain age, I wouldn’t have let her play a game like Diablo because of the violence. And honestly, I paused before letting her play. It’s hard when I work on it though, and she wants to see what I do; I don’t really want to deprive her of that. I know my daughter well enough to know that I didn’t think she’d have any problem handling it. That being said, I don’t let her see games that have any guns in them or first-person shooters that have violence. That, to me, is a little too personal. And so, that’s where I draw the line. I think it’s got to be a really personal choice that everyone makes. To do my official company line, too, one of the things we intend to do is add parental controls so that every parent can make their own choice about what’s appropriate for their kids.

Wired.com: Does your daughter have an inclination towards Diablo-like stuff?

Wilson: (laughs) No, no, no. She is a rainbows-and-unicorns kind of girl, all across the board. She likes World of Warcraft, but she doesn’t play it that much. She loves Spore, plays Spore like crazy. Nothing mature. Diablo is the only mature game I’ve ever let her play. And, again, it was because it’s my game. If it was somebody else’s game, I probably wouldn’t let her see it. I would’ve decided it was too mature for her. But she really likes games where she can control characters from an isometric view. So I think that’s probably the biggest appeal for her, she likes being able to look down upon the world and see her character moving around.

Wired.com: If your daughter is a rainbows-and-unicorns kind of girl, maybe people will blame her for the new art style…

Wilson: Maybe, but they shouldn’t. (laughs)

            

 

Wired.com: At the convention, we saw the Fallen Lunatic, who explodes after stabbing itself in the chest multiple times. Can anything ever too be too gory for Diablo?

Wilson: Yes. We do get a couple of things that are questionable, but usually, it’s not so much gore-related … it’s that you can have gore that implies things that we as a Western society aren’t really comfortable with. Any kind of nudity, you can’t really have, especially when you couple it with violence. Those types of things don’t work well. You have to be really careful with things like torture. Those things are difficult. But to honest, in the development of the game, we tend not to think about it. We tend to build what we need to build and then wait for somebody to say, “That’s a step too far.” There are a few ways we edit ourselves, but usually not with gore, like sheer amounts of gore. It’s like, “You want to behead the guy? Go ahead, yes. You want to slice the guy apart? Go ahead.”

One example of one of the biggest ways we edited ourselves is … we have this cool system where we can hit a dude so hard that his skeleton flies out. It was awesome, really cool-looking. And we added several skills that did that; every time you hit somebody, their skeletons fly out. But I have to say, it got a little boring after a while! It became a little excessive. It took away the coolness of it. And so there, we felt like our overuse of it actually de-emphasized it, and we didn’t like that. We were like, “No, if we want to push the skeleton out of somebody, we want it to be a big deal.” I want to really like see it, and I want it to be a special event. And that’s probably the main way we’ve toned ourselves down, is to go back and say, let’s not go so overboard, that there’s nothing cool about the violence.

Wired.com: I think some people would disagree with that though considering the gore in Fallout 3. Some would say that the dismemberment there never gets old…

Wilson: I think in our case, it really got old. I wouldn’t speak to what other developers have done — and I love Fallout 3, I thought it was a great game — but it’s a choice every developer makes. And yeah, I’m sure some people say, “Nope, it never gets old. Always love it every time.” But our feeling was (for Diablo III), it got old. And it doesn’t mean we remove it. It just meant that we really wanted to emphasize it, and so we did that by controlling the frequency of it.

Wired.com: Do you think Diablo III, with all its blood and gore, can appeal to a wider audience this time around?

Wilson: If we appeal to a wider audience, I don’t think it should be because we shied away from mature subject matter. Diablo is our Mature-rated series, and it’s important for us that it be that. It’s our goal, and that’s where we want it to be. So we wouldn’t go for an audience by moving away from that. Now do I think we can appeal to more people? Diablo II appealed to a lot of people, and I can only hope that we can appeal to more. But I think the way to do that is actually through introducing players to the game in a more friendly way. Better tutorial systems, a more streamlined control interface, better game design — those are the ways I think to broaden your audience. Content-wise … I think games like Grand Theft Auto have already proven the tone of your content is not restrictive to your audience size.                       

    

Wired.com: Earlier, you mentioned parental controls. What are you guys planning for that?

Wilson: We intend to have people to be able to tone down the actual gore levels. In terms of whether we go beyond that, we’ll probably do something. But we haven’t really gotten into a specific design for it yet, so it’s hard to say.

Wired.com: Are you thinking it’s possible to turn off the blood completely? Or simply change the blood color?

Wilson: Yeah, we’re going to have to be able to turn off blood, change the color and things like that, because you can’t have red blood in some regions, regions that we would very much like to sell the game in. So we definitely build everything, that every bit of gore, in a deposited manner so that at a future date, we can go through and change it all or turn it off. In terms of what kind options we give, we actually give within a particular version. We’ve haven’t nailed it down, but if you turn down the gore, you can actually change it to not have red blood. That seems to be really the sticking point for a lot of people because a lot of times we use blood as feedback. And so if we take that out, that actually hurts the gameplay. But we can change the note of that feedback so that it’s something that people are more okay with.

Wired.com: Do you think they’ll be controversy over the parental controls, like we saw with the new art style?

Wilson: I’m sure someone will be controversial about it. I don’t think they should though, the idea that people put parental controls and allow for option of turning down the blood. It’s not like we’re doing it across the board. It’s not like we’re forcing it on everyone. We’re making it an option, and not the default option. Will some people complain about it? I’m sure they will. But ultimately, that’s the world we live in.

Wired.com: You’ll obviously have to edit content for regions like Germany and Australia, but what about China? Is that a more difficult case?

Wilson: Definitely for regions like Germany and Australia, we will have to change blood if we’re going to sell there. And that’s fine. Those are the standards for those regions, and we don’t really have a problem with catering to what they need and what they want. But China’s going to be hard for us. Because a lot of the restrictions there are really… we may not be able to do them. It may not be possible. With our relationship with NetEase, we recently got new information about what China really wants, and it’s a lengthy list. It’s really hard for us to cater to. We’ll try. There’s no reason we wouldn’t want to go there, but there is a certain point where we’d have to redo so much of the game that it’s not viable anymore.

Wired.com: So it’s possible you won’t be released in China due to their gaming violence restrictions?

Wilson: We could have a lot of trouble with China, yes, but it would be our goal to go there. We haven’t decided what regions we’re going into, obviously. It certainly would be our goal to go there, but we will struggle to go to China.

Top image courtesy Blizzard

Written By: Tracey John @ Game|Life