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Three former Blizzard and Blizzard North greats spoke at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo this weekend, discussing the Diablo series and their role in history. Matt Householder is producing, Matt Uelmen is designing the music. and sound, while Jay Wilson played a number of roles before becoming chief designer in Diablo 3.
The timeline was quite interesting in the mid-2000s when World of Warcraft began and Blizzard North had just been shut down (last day of the studio was August 1, 2005). Wilson joined Blizzard and Diablo 3 where Blizzard North was working was moved “in-house” under his supervision.
One of the issues Wilson addressed was the tradeable rune system that Diablo 3 had at one point before moving to an alternative system with elements of player choice. “It was a blizzard back then. And now it’s not so true And I think something better is obsessing over designing the perfect game,” Wilson said.
“I’m going to explain it like… if you look at Ferrari, they make the car unlivable in order to take the corner 0.1 second faster. Lamborghini wants the car to look cool and go fast. sometimes it’s better but we need that perfect design So if we find a bug We eliminated it.”
Wilson still clearly favors the older system. And this is where he finds flaws in his perfect thinking. He says Path of Exile is an example of “Works well with similar systems. [and] It’s troublesome, but it’s fun, who cares?”
Go go…
Talk then moved on to the more controversial elements of Diablo 3: “always online” terms and real-money auction houses.
“When I was at Blizzard, the reason for the real money auction house was safety,” Wilson says. “It wasn’t money. We didn’t think we could make that much money. [but] The biggest problems with Diablo 2 are plagiarism and duplicate hacks. and the seller of all the gold and all those things.”
As Wilson puts it succinctly: “There is almost no solution to that problem without regulating the marketplace. There are many good ways to do it. But that was our thought at the time. The marketplace is in the game: we control it, so hackers don’t.
“like [always]-Online,” says Wilson, “as soon as you’re offline. You must have the client server exit. and when you do that Hackers can now reach you. But I can’t say those things because you’re not poking fun at hackers. You say, “Oh, we did it for security reasons.” [puts hands on hips] “Oh really?””
The most interesting element of the auction house is When deciding to get rid of it, Blizzard started to panic internally about something that seemed quite a bit off. It’s on the box as a selling point.
“The short answer is about profits,” Wilson said. “It makes a little bit of money. Nothing compared to WoW, we never expected it to be… we thought it was a courtesy to make the game more secure.
“If you make more than 10 or 15 million [dollars] I’d be surprised. It looks like a lot of money, but WoW probably does it every 10 seconds. It’s not very popular.”
Then, the delay between decision and action: “The reason we don’t get rid of it immediately when we see it as a problem is because it’s legal. We didn’t think we could because there were ads on the box…” said Wilson.
“So we spent a very long time trying to resolve all legal issues. before we agree We think it’s worth a try. If we get sued, okay.”
It’s interesting to hear Wilson talk about Diablo 3 from this point of view, because at that moment his hands (and tongue) were understandably bound. It’s easy to forget that the heated controversy in this game and Blizzard’s decision to “always online” is now just as common as hardcore. But then some players were seen as a serious insult. The auction house also splits loyalty like never before: and one of them is players who view it as outright profit. Aside from what Blizzard itself is doing right now in terms of monetization, the $10-15 million lifetime profit seems odd.
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