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Diablo 3 Developer Explains Health and Potion Changes

Posted by Soulskill on from the where-would-I-put-this? dept.

One of the new features in the upcoming Diablo 3 release is a change from the traditional potion-guzzling, inventory-clogging system of previous games to a new scheme in which monsters drop health orbs on the ground that refill your health when you touch them. Lead Designer Jay Wilson says the change makes for more varied gameplay and a more consistent way to scale difficulty. He told the Multiplayer blog: "When the player has similar downsides, it means we can make a lot more interesting monsters. We don't have to kill you to challenge you. We can make a monster that affects your mobility, we can make a monster that has different kinds of attacks that are dangerous to you and that you actually have to avoid. And so it makes the combat a lot more interesting."

5 of 177 comments (clear)

  1. Finally! by fructose · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Thank goodness! No more 10 minute sessions of inventory management just to juggle your potions around.

    1. Re:Finally! by MikeBabcock · · Score: 4, Insightful

      As funny as that was, it annoys me when games allow you to carry phenomenal amounts of weight without considering the awesome difficulty of having 14 different massive hammers over your shoulder at once.

      --
      - Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
  2. Re:What about bosses? by ivan256 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Who's to say an "orb" doesn't fall out if you hit the boss hard enough? It doesn't necessarily have to die....

  3. Orb monster drops? WTF no! by Tavor · · Score: 4, Insightful

    We don't have to kill you to challenge you. We can make a monster that affects your mobility, we can make a monster that has different kinds of attacks that are dangerous to you and that you actually have to avoid. And so it makes the combat a lot more interesting."

    As opposed to what... ice-based attacks that freeze/slow? Poison that drains health? And what, avoiding those *&^*&^ Pit Lords and Abyss Knights at the River of Flame? Yeah, I don't see anything new here, ffs. As someone who likes fending off PVP'ers in the middle of fighting demons, I'd prefer being in control of my health, rather than being dependent on monster drops.
    Just having a system where potions in your inventory were dropped to your 'belt' hot-bar automatically would be an improvement far beyond the orb system.

    --
    Windows has detected an undetectable error.
  4. Re:Metroidiablo by ildon · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I think you're missing an important gameplay point. You actually have to KILL mobs to obtain health orbs while in combat. A lot of times in Diablo/Diablo 2 on the harder difficulties (and especially hardcore in D2) often times when faces with extremely dangerous packs of enemies or difficult bosses, you'd have to town portal REPEATEDLY to restock on potions, before a single monster had fallen. Admittedly, this was pretty bad game design. It pulled you out of the action and felt "cheesy".

    The obvious answer is to tune difficult groups of monsters and bosses with this in mind (or provide alternate sources of healing through things like abilities, life leech items, or secondary mechanics to drop health orbs BEFORE an enemy or set of enemies dies), but it's still a considerably bigger change than simply "unlinking healing items from inventory".

    Overall, I do think it's a positive change, I just think you're oversimplifying it.