Diablo III: Reaper of Souls - Interview @ AusGamers

AusGamers interviews Lead Designer Kevin Martens, and Lead Writer Brian Kindregan to talk about Diablo III: Reaper of Souls.

AusGamers: Can we broach how you’ve approached a lot of the negative feedback that stemmed from Diablo III, in terms of what has been implemented. With vocal fans that essentially wanted Diablo two-point-five as opposed to three, can you talk about how you might have sated some of those guys at all?

Kevin: Sure. I think there’s lots of valid criticisms of Diablo, and there’s criticisms that didn’t come out until a lot of people have played for a lot of time in many cases. Early on, we just had errors in the difficulty, it was just wrong. At a certain point in Hell difficulty, it did get too hard, and the gear didn’t keep up, and we did patch that pretty rapidly. We do believe that we did make Legendaries wrong, and we do keep making them better and better and other build-changing as well. So I think we’re finally nailing what the fantasy of the Legendary items is, and it’s still a little different than Diablo II, but is much more in that direction than it used to be.

So not all of the changes that we made in Diablo III are better than Diablo II, and a good example of that, that people complained about, would be the ability for people to customise their stats, to spend in different ways. We wanted to solve a problem that we think was endemic throughout Diablo II, and that was that people would get locked into a built that wasn’t quite what they thought it was going to be; they had to spend a point before they knew what that meant, and then they couldn’t re-spec it -- for a long time, there was no re-speccing available, and eventually they solved that problem.

Often, people would learn -- usually at the end of Act II, where they tried to kill Durial -- they’d learn that they had made a huge mistake, and this build was not going to work out, and they’d have to start over. Some people love that actually, and I have to say that we’re not supporting that, and we’re not going to in the future