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Diablo 3 Dev Talks Multiplayer Options, Long Dev Cycle

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

AusGamers spoke with Blizzard's Jay Wilson recently about Diablo 3's multiplayer experience. Among other things, Wilson said the developers were making an effort to encourage cooperative gameplay. For example, each player within a particular game will see different loot drops from monsters, which prevents competition over who can click an item the fastest, and encourages trading. He also mentions that a team is already working on methods to prevent cheating, and he discusses why Blizzard games tend to be announced so long before they're completed. "One of the reasons why we actually prefer a really long window before we release a game is because we want a lot of feedback; we want to hear what people like and don't like about it; we want to give them several opportunities to play it before release."

8 of 59 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Here's some fuckin feedback by bigstrat2003 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If the only thing Blizzard does is to remove incentive for assholes to play the game, it will be a resounding success for the vast majority of players, and for Blizzard. Griefers ruin the game for everyone except themselves.

    Sorry you want to grief players to have fun. Go ahead and leave, because we won't miss you one fucking bit.

    --
    "16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
  2. Re:Here's some fuckin feedback by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    That's weird, I'm pretty sure that where you typed "boring" you meant "fun."

  3. No they aren't by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    All games get boring eventually, griefers or no.

    However, games that give plenty of room to griefers are only more interesting to griefers. Griefability does not make the games at all more interesting to the rest of us.

    Griefers always insist that their selfish and rude behavior is actually of benefit to those whom they make suffer, and it simply isn't true.

    Yes, anti-griefing rules makes the game more boring....to griefers. I say good. I hope they make it as boring as possible to griefers, because the fewer of them the better.

    Go grief each other somewhere else. And good riddance.

  4. Re:The biggest problem with D3 by CronoCloud · · Score: 4, Insightful

    There shouldn't be colors involved with every sword and axe swing.

    I disagree. If I'm wielding a sword with fire attributes I want to see the sword flaming when I'm carrying it. When you play a tabletop game, and your character has a badass magic weapon, don't you imagine the weapon glowing/sparking/flaming?

    Realism and atmosphere is what immersed the gamer into D1,

    It was? I thought it was the fun of nonstop hacking and the ability to fire tons of arrows without having to carry any and the ability to cast walls of fire on all who oppose you. That doesn't sound realistic to me.

  5. Re:The biggest problem with D3 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    If I'm wielding a sword with fire attributes I want to see the sword flaming when I'm carrying it.

    Yeah, me too. But look at the first part of the gameplay video--the weapons are two regular hatchets, and nearly every swing is a bright red streak, and every stomp creates a blue and yellow effect. There's nothing magical about a barbarian's stomp on enemies, so adding colorful effects kills contrast from actual magic and hurts realism.

    nonstop hacking and the ability to fire tons of arrows without having to carry any and the ability to cast walls of fire on all who oppose you. That doesn't sound realistic to me.

    There are degrees of realism. Not counting the number of arrows you shoot, or casting a magical fire wall, are obviously part of the fantasy game. That doesn't nullify the advantage of realism in other aspects. Lord of the Rings was an awesome movie, in spite of its fictional components, but it was awesome because it was all made to appear realistic.

  6. Griefer by AlpineR · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Wow, at first I thought you were complaining that Diablo 2 is filled with jerks who just click and cheat and make your games unfun. Then I realized that you're that jerk and don't want your own fun spoiled!

    I'm not very impressed by your ability to click a mouse or to download hacks that somebody else wrote. But I've learned that different folks get their jollies in different ways. It'd be nice if Battle.net could set aside a server just for all the jerks and hackers. Call it "Thunderdome". Or "Hell". They can go click, exploit, scam, and spam to their hearts delight. The rest of us will go play something fun and friendly.

    1. Re:Griefer by garylian · · Score: 2, Insightful

      There is only one problem with your suggestion.

      Griefers don't want to have fair competition, and don't really want to fight other griefers. It's why UO died such an ugly death. They were hemmoraging subscribers at a pretty awful rate before they made the whole "light/dark shards". That just happened to get rid of the rest of the players. (And while the UO fanbois always recall how absolutely GREAT the game was prior to that change, I noticed that after the change, the PvP side of things was a barren wasteland with no players.)

      Their whole game enjoyment comes from making others miserable. That's why they call it GRIEFing. It's all about them and how much they can annoy another player. These people are simply anti-social. They don't care about making friends, or enjoying the game with others. They want to see how much frustration they can cause, and what it takes to make other players log out and/or quit.

      So, trying to get these knuckleheads to a server where they can exploit and grief each other to hell and back won't work, because they won't want to play there either. They'll be trying to get away with stuff on the regular servers, just so their e-penis will grow bigger and they can strut around talking about how awesome they are. And when they do get banned, they will go insane on the Blizzard forums for that game.

  7. Re:What kind of cooperative gameplay? by doctrbl · · Score: 2, Insightful

    How can you encourage cooperative gameplay if the players who want to cooperate live together?

    Any time I've ever lived with people who game, all of us had their own PCs. Network them together and off you go.

    PS: Some friends bought Kane & Lynch for the PC and were shocked to discover that cooperative multiplayer was not available by using 2 PCs; you had to both huddle over 1 PC with a split screen, one player using an XBox gamepad. For this reason I won't trust any title with the "Games for Windows" MicroSoft tag...