BlizzCon 2016 Diablo III Dev Talk Panel Transcript

This is a full transcript of the BlizzCon 2016 Diablo III Dev Talk Panel Transcript. The panel was held by the following panelists:

Kevin Martens (lead game designer)

Wyatt Cheng (senior game designer)

Adam Puhl (senior game designer)

Joe Shely (senior game designer)

Travis Day (senior game designer)

Narrator: Welcome to Diablo III Dev Talk and Q&A.

Kevin: Alright, welcome everybody to the Dev Talk Q&A. We have a bunch of new stuff for you today. We did not announce everything yesterday. There’s quite a list, and before we get into that, I do want to introduce the panelists.

I’ve got a big group of senior designers with me today. My name is Kevin Martens, I’m the lead designer. All these guys are working on these features and many others that you see today, so I have Wyatt Chang, Mr. Joe Shelley, Travis Day, and Adam Puhl. Thank you for that warm welcome.

Thank you all for being here. This is a really exciting voice conference not just because of the necromancer, but also because of the 20th Anniversary. So yesterday, of course, you’re probably familiar with some of these announcements, but we did talk about the Darkening of Tristram event where we’ve largely recreated Diablo one in the Diablo III engine, and that comes on PTR next week for everyone to play.

The Armory which is a full 5-Equipment-scale everything loadout for each of your characters — where with one button press you can change your Gems, your Legendary Gems, your Skills, your Passives, your Kanai Cube powers, and of course, all of your equipment no matter where that equipment is.

That’s probably like a small feature that at least for me has a huge impact that saves me a lot of time. And the rise of the necromancer pack, which is not just the necromancer, with all the VO for male and female, and all the movies all the way from acts I through V. It also comes with two character slots, stash tabs, a necromancer pet, and a slew of other cosmetics. So we will be unveiling over the next little while next year.

Seasons

Kevin: So today we have a bunch of things, and first up this one was important to me. We’ve want to do this for quite a while and the team pulled together, and we’re bringing Seasons to consoles: XBox One and PS4 players, welcome aboard!

So when this comes out next year, I want to do a brief summary of the feature, and go through what it looks like on console; and I understand that many of you are familiar with Seasons from the PC build. So I’ve put some of the new cosmetic items that you can unlock in later Seasons in here. A sort of a sneak peek, so you have something to look forward to, and so we move on to the new features that are for all of our systems.

So let’s get started. When you join a Season, this is a reset of your character, and your account for everybody at one time on Seasons. Just like it is on PC, as a community, everyone starts from scratch and starts creating Seasonal characters at the same time; and so multiplayer is often a big part of this.

When you’ve created your seasonal hero, you choose which class you want, and you choose whether you’re going to play Normal or Hardcore. I definitely recommend playing Hardcore. Yeah, about half of the Seasons that I have played on PC, I play Hardcore because even if I’m playing an identical build to what I normally do, I get all cagey and scared, and I start defensive abilities in my movements, and it feels totally different even with identical characters. So this is a great place to try out Hardcore without risking one of your characters.

Once you’ve created your character, you start participating in the Season Journey, and this is a grand tour of Diablo III, you accomplish different goals, and you do it at higher and higher levels.

This is the example of finishing a Nephalem Rift on Expert Difficulty; and it gets more difficult, and the reason you do this is we have a bunch of guaranteed rewards. So there are two categories:

We’ve got Cosmetic Rewards like pets, Portrait Frames, and Wings. PC players, these are the Seraphin Wings from an upcoming Season. So this will be the first time you’ll see those, and I won’t say which Season they’re coming in; but you’ll find out soon.

And of course, you get full six piece armor sets for all of the classes, and these rotate. So from season to season even if you chose to play the same character class, you could get different sets every season and so you’ve got them all.

Alright, so the way the rewards work is as you start finishing chapters you start getting pieces of these cosmetic rewards in your full 6-piece set. When that happens, it looks like this.

And when you go onto your console UI, you have these cosmetic pickers where you can start unlocking these portrait frames and using them. On console portrait frames have not been very in your face, and so we’re bringing them to the forefront; and they’re going to be on the screen all the time, and appear more often because you can upgrade your portrait frames. Here’s an example of choosing a portrait frame and activating it.

Next: Leaderboards

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