A very good interview with Rob Pardo (courtesy of WallStreetJournal) said:
How much has running WoW and observing that economy informed how Blizzard has approached this auction house?
The design of the auction house had a lot of influence, as far as how we do the user interface, how people interact with it. As far as how it interacts with real-world money, probably not much at all. The World of Warcraft economy is really different than how I see the Diablo III economy playing out, mainly because of how you get the items, and restrictions we put on the items themselves. In World of Warcraft the item system is much more deterministic and its also a much more crafting-based economy. The people with the best items in the game are generally the achieverstheyre the ones that kill the toughest bosses in the game. All their items at the really high level cant be traded. It really ensures that theres an almost achiever item economy in WoW.
Diablo is not like thatall the items are randomized, so you dont really know when and where the best items are going to drop. And also all the items are freely tradable at all times. So you end up with a much more merchant economy.
What do black market sales do to affect a games workings and its atmosphere, the shared values of its player base? What kinds of values or attitudes are you trying to circumvent?
Theres probably the WoW version of the answer and the Diablo version of the answer. In World of Warcraft there are a lot of negatives around black-market item sales and gold sales. The first one is how it affects people that are actually playing the game: If you see someone farming an area that actually prevents you from being able to go to that area. If you see that might be running bot programs, it really makes you feel worse about the game that people are cheating within it.
But in a Diablo context, even if some of that activity occurred, the game is completely instancedyoure always playing in your own version of it, or you and your friends are. Youre not really subjected to people that are in your way that are just trying to do black-market activities. Players do want to have the ability to do some of this stuff; theyre going to go and do it. Its a pretty terrible experience most of the time. Its not secure; there are lots of chances for fraud; you may not get the item you want; if we catch you we ban you. We asked ourselves, if we allow it, is this really going to be harmful for the game? When we looked at it critically, we felt that in a Diablo context, it would be beneficial that people can do this freely. Its something that players know is part of the rules of the game. As long as the players know the rules theyre signing on for, then theyre okay with it.
Youve talked about the auction house being unprecedented in gaming in terms of the way its implemented here, but it does seem comparable to social games like FarmVille or Tiny Tower that basically allow you to spend money when you lose patience with the waiting game, or in this case the meta-game of grinding for random drops. It allows players to accelerate their own pace. How much have those games informed this new system?
There have been microtransactions going for a while in games. What no ones done is the player-to-player aspect of it. Were taking it a step back and saying its up to the player base to decide. Its not up to us. Its a player-driven economy; if people find value and want to do this activity, then there have to be sellers and buyers. You dont really have that sense that, like in some of these games, players feel they have to buy some of the items, or they have to buy gold from the company to even be able to advance in the game. Thats not how were designing Diablo III at all. I think the important thing for us is to make sure the game plays really well if you never trade an item.
Do you expect the meta-game to evolve in unexpected ways?
I would say thats quite likely. Considering that we dont have anyone to look at thats done it like this, its going to be hard to predict exactly what will happen.
The player base is very vocal about any change perceived to threaten the integrity of the game. In your experience do the majority of these concerns die away after the games are released? Or in other cases do you learn that they did have a point?
You ignore the opinions of the fan base at your own peril. I think whats really important to us is that when there is an uproar or a concern that we listen to it and think seriously about it. The thing that often happens is that players have imperfect knowledge of the situation. They imagine the games going to be like this, and heres everything thats going to happen. So theres usually a lot of fear without a lot of knowledge going on. If were wrong, then were pretty unafraid to change things.
The audience has certain expectations for the series that have calcified over time. But how have you defined what qualities are essential to Diablo and which ones arent?
In Diablo II [for example] you could fill your whole inventory up with health potions and at any moment you could use them, and almost stay invulnerable in a fight. It also had this downside where youd always fill up your entire backpack with potions. It made it so most of the abilities in the game werent that meaningful. Certainly any healing abilities were worthless because you always had these cheap health potions. We made the decision in Diablo III to do a health globe system, which is very different than how potions worked.
What we did consider was important was always having a fast, action-paced gameplay so that you didnt have to stop and go out of combat like you might in a World of Warcraft game. We wanted to make sure youre always fighting, killing the next monster, and going at that breakneck pace. Thats what we considered the important part of what potions were doing in Diablo II.
Diablo carved out a template for action RPGs. Besides the auction house, what other gameplay aspects do you think will establish Diablo III as a distinct work, in terms of being released this or next year?
One of the things that I think is interesting about the Diablo franchise, as opposed to some of the other stuff out there, is that there really arent a lot of action RPGs. Theres Torchlight, Titan Quest. But as opposed to some of the other established genres, like first-person shooters, action RPGs are not a genre youve seen a ton. I think theres still plenty of room to play with the genre. What were trying to emphasize so much more in this one is bringing in the co-op playyou can start playing a game by yourself, and [your network of Battle.net] friends can see youre online and can jump right into your gameand trying to figure out how much story we can add but still keep the pace.
Why do you think there arent very many action RPGs compared to other genres?
I guess its always been a mystery to me. If you look at how popular Diablo and Diablo II were, there werent a whole lot of other people that went into the genre. If I were to speculate at all, where that genre probably went was more into a more immersive [rather than isometric] 3D. Diablo has more of that Rogue, NetHack approachits more of a hardcore RPG from an item-collection standpoint, but its really fast-paced, randomized, and you can play over and over again. You havent seen a lot of games that have done that.
Do you think the game will find a sizable new audience, being such a distinct and older style of game?
AbsolutelyDiablo was our most popular franchise, and our easiest thing to play, and in a lot of ways our most instantly gratifying game. It doesnt get any easier than playing Diablo. You log on and its just a mouse-click away from having fun and killing monsters and picking up stuff.
