Blizzard posted a blog briefly covering some of the features and systems that are planned for D4.
Based on the BlizzCon panel, David Kim (former StarCraft II lead designer who also was the chief balancer) is a lead system designer for D4. For SC2 players, his approach to balancing was polarizing; which is not much different with how some D3 designers were polarizing to its players. With that said, an RTS is completely different territory compared to RPG’s, especially action combat ones so it is going to be a different challenge for him to balance the PvE and PvP aspects (which the D3 team, eventually decided not to tackle).
The press kit for D4 (a lot of the media is still titled with the internal project name; Fenris) has the following leads on the team:
- Allen Adham – Executive Producer
- Luis Barriga – Game Director
- Daniel Briggs – Lead VFX
- Artist
Nick Chilano – Lead Animator - Kris Giampa – Sound Supervisor
- Zaven Haroutunian – Lead Dungeon Designer
- Timothy Ismay – Senior Producer
- David Kim – Lead Systems Designer
- Richie Marella – Lead Artist
- Jesse McCree – Lead Designer
- Matt McDaid – Lead Exterior Artist
- John Mueller – Art Director
- Sean Murphy – Lead Lighting Artist
- Jason Roberts – Lead Quest Designer
- Chris Ryder – Lead Interactives Artist
- Joe Shely – Lead Encounter Design
- Tiffany Wat – Senior Producer
- Gavian Whishaw – Production Director
Quick takeaways: Talents are essentially passives that modifies skills/damage (sort of like how the skill rune system works in D3). It really is slight of hand (separating them into two different places in the UI and utilizing points to unlock talents and a path in that tree).
While the game world is open and shared, dungeons remain private instances except for co-op parties. For the campaign, an area remains private until the player completes the objective (this is probably a seamless transition to a private instance similar to what happens in a lot of MMO’s like Ascent: Infinite Realm, Blade & Soul, or Riders of Icarus as examples.
They took a segmented approach when it came to the shared world aspect where part of it is determined by the type of content: private spaces which sort of operate like private instances in D3 which can be opened to other players (4 player co-op), shared world where you may see other players when there are things like smaller scale world events, and shared towns + large events which is self-explanatory; hub areas will have a lot more players while world boss events are meant to also allow more player participation. From my point of view, it’s an interesting way to shard the game world.
D4 is still being designed as an MMO-ARPG though with careful consideration payed to allowing players the ability to choose how they want to play (solo, co-op,using any of the messaging systems they want to like chat only, voice only, both), that PvP is optional (you can avoid those areas). Still, they do risk the potential of alienating portions of this particular demographic who are averse to anything resembling a persistent world MMO. Myself, I used to be one of those MMO-averse people. Now, I play a bunch of them but the majority of the time, I play it solo (knowing full well there is some content I will never be able to tackle unless I party up).
Dungeons will be randomized in terms of both interior and exterior environments. Seamless exploration will do away with the load screen. Dungeons will also have random events which are also no longer tied to specific locations (as it is in D3) as well as dungeon objectives. End game dungeons will have varied content, strategic depth (meant to encourage player builds), and player agency (they don’t want an “on rails” experience where players are simply reacting to what the game is throwing out. They are accomplishing this via inspiration from Path of Exile maps with Dungeon Keys (so essentially dungeon modifiers). The keys are dropped from specific dungeons and turns that dungeon into an end game one with the affixes that rolled on it.
The game will finally gain a built-in evade/dodge for all classes as well as an crowd control breaking I-frame (something they are calling “Unstoppable”). As far as itemization goes, Kim mentioned they are simplifying it as a design objective (attack and defense plus random line properties with higher tiers having more lines).
Unlike past BlizzCon’s, all questions were pre-screened and asked by one of the producers on stage (obviously to avoid last years debacle where one participant asked a different question from what they told the Blizzard staffer before they took the mic) considering the “free Hong Kong” protests that surrounded the venue. It’s just best to watch the entire session since one of the biggest things is how the actual leads talk about these things or answer some of the questions. So far, this team is a world of difference communications wise from the D3 principals where the underlying tone tended to be “we’re trying to define everything/the rules to play by”.
