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Diablo 4 is almost here! Ahead of the launch, I spent several weeks playing the game and had the time to chat with a few developers. I spoke to Joe Piepiora (Associate Game Director) and Ash Sweetring Vickey (Dungeon Producer) during the review period. During the chat, I got to pick their brains on various topics.
From the reason players have to wait so long to get a mount to the topic of capped progression versus infinite progression, nothing was especially off-limits. Diablo 4 promises an incredible experience and a worthy successor to the grimy, violent action-RPG series.
Joe Piepiora and Ash Sweetring Vickey discuss Diablo 4
Q. The land of Sanctuary is massive, but players won't receive their mount quest until deep into the story. What led to putting that feature so late into the game?
Joe Piepiora: We think that the player is. The goal is to allow the players to sort of explore the world of Sanctuary as they play. And in situations where we've tried to put the mount on a little earlier, a little bit later, we found players getting very, very focused on reaching a specific point in the world - the moment we give them the mount so that they'd get on their horse and travel directly to a destination without spending time exploring.
So we want to give a portion of the game experience while going through the campaign, where they are on foot, they have more of an opportunity to engage with more parts of the world. Now, we do have lots of fast travel opportunities. As players reach Waypoints, they can teleport from place to place, so they can quickly teleport back to major cities when they need to do things.
This is about when they progress deeper into the world, unlocking more of these Waypoints as they explore. Now that said, the moment the player unlocks the mount the first time, which they'll do during the campaign, once they unlock it for the first time - every other character on their account and every future character they make will have immediate access to that mount perpetually.
So this moment in time is only during the first few days, maybe, or hours, based on how you choose to go about some things, of your experience with Diablo 4. At that point forward, any level 1 character you make, you'll have access to the mount right away.
Q. While having a Jeweler is an excellent idea and a great way to get gems upgraded, it's not fun to run back to your stash and run back to the Jeweler. Has there been any talk of putting a stash in that room or letting that NPC access your stash to minimize the redundancy the system offers?
Joe Piepiora: We will look at this feedback as we go through the experience. There is a balance between what is too much running back and forth to manage specific inventories. Like what is okay, what is acceptable. When you use the Jeweler right now, it will pull all the gems from your bank already.
So if you've got things in your stash, like a whole tab full of gems, you can use all those from the jeweler crafter when trying to upgrade gems. And you'd still need to go back to interact with things you already have in your stash.
But new things you make would end up in your inventory. Long story short, we are a live game, we will be looking to make adjustments as we go, and we will be looking for opportunities to improve that experience overall as time goes on.
Q. Will there be a cow level? Or is there already a cow level that nobody has found yet?
Ash Sweetring Vickey: There is no cow level.
Joe Piepiora: I don't know what that is. I have no frame of reference for what this question is asking. None at all.
Q. Diablo 3 had virtually limitless upward progression, but some said it became tedious or frustrating. Did that feedback lead to Diablo 4 having a more defined ending?
Joe Piepiora: Yeah, so, Diablo, different games have different ends. You know, in Diablo 4, we did want to focus on capped progression. So there is no sense of infinite power for the player to obtain through prolonged play. Now that's because we wish all the decisions players make while leveling their character up to have a lot of weight.
Such that the build you have crafted for yourself by the time you reach level 100 is one that you have optimized. For every item you get, you're looking for just the right affixes on that item. All the bonuses have the right affixes. It's rolled well.
You want to upgrade all your items. You really are looking to be the sum of your choices versus saying that because you invested 300 more hours in your character and did more work in the Paragon Board, you're much more potent.
You want to say that you did the work, reached level 100, and reached this point. Some of our highest pinnacle challenges in the game require not just being level 100.
You need to have an excellent build and understand your character very well. You need to have great items with significant roles to be successful in some of those situations. And you need to know the encounter as well.
So really, it's about making sure all those things matter greatly. That's more of the focus for Diablo 4. That sense of capped progression. Oh, one more thing. I'm speaking specifically about power progression from the player's side. You don't get higher and higher items by doing higher and higher level content after a while.
But if you're looking for more and more challenges, in the Nightmare dungeon system, creatures will continue to scale up to much higher beyond level 100. They go all the way up to level 150 at launch. So you could try to push yourself. That's extraordinary. Extremely challenging to try and do that kind of work.
But you can continue to try and claw your way forward through that kind of content. That goes beyond even the challenging level 100 pinnacle challenge we have in place. You can try to make the Nightmare Dungeon climb beyond that.
Q. The class selection for Diablo 4 is solid, with some fun, familiar gameplay styles. Were any new classes brainstormed that didn't cut?
Joe Piepiora: I often get asked versions of this question, and it's interesting, right? It sounds like, here's how I hear the question - and maybe I'm wrong. I often am. I'm professionally wrong very frequently. So I think I hear, "What is the cool stuff we didn't get in Diablo 4?"
That's kind of like the core of it, right? What cool stuff sounded neat that we won't get in Diablo 4? And the reality is you got all the most incredible things in Diablo 4. The property you didn't get is something we didn't think was good enough or didn't know was good.
And another way to think about this as well - there's a lot of room around that campfire, right? So we have five classes at launch - Barbarian, Sorceress, Druid, Rogue, and Necromancer. Great fantasies, great characters, I think everybody would agree. But there's room for more. As a live-service game, the launch is just the beginning.
You know, we have our seasons coming every quarter, we have significant content infusions, and then we have our paid expansions - which we're not discussing too much today.
We're about to launch the base game, right? But as time goes on, you can imagine we can potentially add more classes to the experience as we go on. You know, we plan to support Diablo 4 for years to come.
Q. In a setting with so many free skill points characters can start with (Altars of Lilith, Map Progression), was it particularly challenging to separate Hardcore characters from that?
Joe Piepiora: We talked about this quite a bit and ultimately landed on allowing many of these effects to carry over between normal and hardcore mode characters. We went back to "Where does it end?" When the players can mount up, for example, for completing the campaign, that's an account-bound unlock at that point forward for all of their characters. Does that mean I need to finish the campaign on a hardcore character to unlock the mount in the hardcore server?
We didn't feel like that was a significant benefit for the Hardcore player overall. And the same is true for these other collectible items and things you can go and gather for your account. We didn't want to say, "Because you chose to play Hardcore one season, everything you did there doesn't affect your normal character."
And the same thing is true for the normal mode. The idea is that you go around and collect all the Altars of Lilith on a character, and then the next time you roll a hardcore character, you have to go collect all those Altars again on every single hardcore character. It felt more like a time sink than a fun experience for those players.
And so, in the end, we opted to make sure many things were account level that would simultaneously apply to both the normal mode and hardcore characters.
Diablo 4 launches on June 6, 2023, with early access beginning on June 1, 2023. The gates of Hell open again, and it's up to players to set the world of Sanctuary right again.
