Rhykker interview with David Kim - Lead Systems Designer
General Info
Kim applied to work on D4 after his responsibilities were finished on SC2.
- Kim and team work on class design, item design, progression systems & pvp.
- Kim is most excited about adding more re-playability to seasons for example they want to ensure legendary items are equal or more powerful than set items so you can customize every slot. So in any given season maybe they make a small subset of items really stand out over others. Also intro new legendary items to explore and have unique combinations. Idea was to challenge the meta every season and cause meta shifts between seasons.
- There will be hardcore mode, operating exactly how you'd expect. When you die, you die forever. They might make HC into SC upon death but no decision yet.
- No offline play. They want to make campaign completely private unless you invite someone specifically. Once you beat that, the game becomes the shared open world.
- Party size is 4, but open world and other activities will require multiple parties.
- They want to ensure solo vs group play is as balanced as possible but it will never be truly balanced & devs want to bring it as close as possible while erroring on side of group play.
- When you die, you have to run back from last checkpoint and you will drop gold that needs to be picked up.
- Dev feedback will be done 4 times a year throughout development, may increase as development progresses.
- No plan to customize the UI, atm it's fixed.
- Clans are in early development. There are shared stashes, and possibly clan leaderboards. Goal is to develop more social play to allow players to make friends if they want.
- Weather systems just went into the game, currently its just visual but there might be gameplay interactions such as wet characters might take more lightning damage
- Game is being developed for PS4 and XB1 since those are the only platforms they know, since the devs don't know about ship date of D4, it may come out on future consoles.They want to ensure that even though game is open shared world, only in specific scenarios you will run into a lot of other players like world bosses, otherwise you should not be constantly running into other players. This remedies common MMO problem where players are just standing around waiting to kill x monsters for resources.
- Controller support for PC, no KBM for console.
- There are achievement systems.
- No development has been made on player or clan housing.
- Any place you can see in game can be reached due to open world nature of game.
- Gold sink will be done with The Gambler, he's similar to Kadala. They want to gold to be meaningful on a personal level. Example was given, if you can gamble with gold for the best items then gold becomes meaningful at all times.
- here is currently level scaling due to shared open world so you can play with your friends.
- They want to ensure every time you equip an item it's always making you stronger and never weaker or even against the enemies of that zone.
- Devs want to take elements from many games that work really well for D4. They currently have devs that are playing Last Epoch, PoE, Lost Ark, etc. D4 is not defined as an MMO, but there are many elements which are MMO-like.
- Business model (monetization)
Base game + expansion model similar to D2/D3
- Cosmetic mtx, but they will not sell power mtx
- Maybe stash and character slots for purchase but they want to give enough so you don't need to buy
[*]Difficulties
No hard plans on D2 or D3 style difficulty but KD's will act as 1 form of end game difficulty & in open world they want to ensure those have their own set of challenges
Itemization
Runewords
There are 2 types of runes conditions runes (CR) & effect runes (ER). You can take any CR and combine with ER to form a reward. The example in the demo, there is a combination where every time you hit the pot you trigger a crit. The example Kim gave was say you're a stun based build, then your CR triggers when you stun and the ER could be life leech.
- Only 2 chain runewords so far, but they are looking into runeword progression
- More rune words and combinations will be show off on the panel
[*]D3 team did not want to nerf items, so you essentially got massive multipliers on items and sets
[*]D4 team wants to do nerfs but strategically so it doesn't mess too much with established builds. Plus side of nerfs we can ensure crazy builds don’t happen, also ensure more builds are viable.
[*]Common > Magic > Rare > Legendary > Mythic
[*]Legendaries items are designed to support different build ideas but at the same time, they want to ensure the player is doing something against monsters. For example, you have a skill that pulls mobs together, combo that with a different attack skill that stuns then attach with another skill when hit, it reduces cooldown on all skills. This allows players to have option to play as more damage or more support based.
[*]Mythic items are strongest items in D4, only 1 can be equipped but each item has 4 legendary powers on it. Example was given that getting all 4 powers on 1 item is not high so having the cube would allow for strong items like this.
[*]They weren't too keen on charms from D2 as a system, inventory spacing was difficult. Upside was to collect cool bonuses but its not ideal to make system where you sacrifice convenience for power.
[*]Horadric cube will be back as they see it as a defining Diablo system
[*]You can expect to get more powerful versions of the same item throughout your progression even in the end game. This allows devs to keep an ideal drop rate. They have looked into keeping 1 drop rate for levelling progress another drop rate for the end game. However since the power of the items grow they can tweak to find the right # for the drops from testing.
[*]In D3, builds were mostly defined/created by the devs as they dictated how the builds were played based on sets. In D4, they want to create enough legendaries to the point where players can have various options. Example was given that through seasons, more legendaries would be introduced which are meta shifting based on player feedback. Comment was made, the most hardcore players tend to discuss online about specific builds which would be cool if it only had x item. This way the devs and community can work together on new items and ideas for future seasons.
[*]There are systems for increased magic & gold find, atm it is "confined in gems" but devs don't want these stats to compete with damage affixes so players don't have to play weak builds with MF vs strong builds with less loot drops. Currently, these gems are socketed into jewelry but they will not be in contention with making you stronger.
[*]They want to explore idea of farming specific bosses for items, but they also like the idea of breaking boxes to get powerful items.
[*]They will allow items with some cross-class skills. For example, in D3 lots of legendaries could only be used on specific classes, however in D4, there are items which are bound to 1 class but hit effects can be triggered by any class. An example was shown with a Sorcerer ring which triggers Hydra on hit, but item was equipped on a Barb which spawned Hydras on hit attacks.
[*]Durability is a mechanic being developed. They want systems in game that take you back to town at specific intervals. Example given was, bonuses based on certain level of durability.
End Game
No official confirmation on raids. Devs want to ensure powerful items are not gated behind multiplayer content.
- Kim can imagine a scenario where there is a difficult version of the world bosses where you have to play with an arranged party.
- Keyed Dungeons (KD)
KDs have difficulty levels similar to GRs in D3
- Each level (or key?) have affixes which make the dungeon more difficult and different
- What's different than GRs is with KD you know exactly which dungeon you will be going into, therefore you'll know mob comps (maybe layouts?) so you can pre-plan and know meta strats based on which dungeon you enter. Example that was given, maybe a dungeon prefers mobility, so you change a skill to traverse the dungeon faster
[*]Leaderboards (LB)
Compete with "people you know" or clans
- Unsure of what type of LB systems and which events will have LBs attached
- Overall it's too early to talk about
Seasons
Spread all in between paid expansions
- Will have meta shifts from one season to the next. This might come in the form of buffs/nerfs to skills or new legendaries which introduce unique gameplay.
- New types of challenges in dungeons or different types of monster affixes.
- They want to ensure each season feels different and is a new experience every time you return for a new season with new things to explore
Skills
Skill tab skills are permanent but you can find Skill Tomes in the world which can be used to swap out your skills to new ones
- As you level, you gain 1 or more skill points to level each individual skill
- Talents can be reset as you see fit because devs didn't what you to spend gold to try new talents after you found new interesting legendary. They want to expand on the tree with future expansions but to what degree is unknown.
- All classes have asymmetrical designs. Sorceress starts one path then splits into 3 elements for total 6 final nodes but you have to choose an elemental path. Barbarian has two paths with 4 end nodes but you can only choose one. Druid has similar 2 paths as Barb however they're trying to where you can swap back and forth between paths.
- Players will know about proc scalars and hit effects on all skills so you can know exactly how much you have to hit before affixes proc.
- There will be skill synergies, esp on the legendary item side. Now that legendaries are more powerful than sets, you can essentially customize what you can do on every single item and skill slot.
- No diminishing return on crowd control abilities, so it's full duration on CC both to monsters or on your character. There are specific skills which make your character "unstoppable". This mechanic lets you break out of CC and be immune for the duration. Some skills can break you out of CC, other skills can make you unstoppable for a long time, so you can build characters specific to that.
PvP
Specific areas of the world where you can go hostile on anyone in the zones. These zones may have objectives that PvE players might need to do.
- Kim's team is exploring other PvP modes but has not found something they really love, more info to share in future. One example he gave was PvPvE modes because the heart of Diablo is killing hordes of monsters but in a pvp setting we want you to kill monsters and other players.
- E-sports angle is not planned for D4, but you never know what the players will do with game after release.
- Unsure if they will allow you to collect other players gear after win
Characters
All items have attack/defense and affixes.
- Max level 40, but may change in base game. Future expansion will lead to higher base levels.
- The campaign leveling progress will be significantly longer then D3 but how long is being actively discussed.
- No hard decisions have been made on player end game progression, but doesn't sound like there is paragon system. They want to ensure in the end game, players can make meaningful choices for specific builds, but can change those choices to suit different builds of their making (without penalty?)
- Attack = damage; Defense = dmg red. They want to simplify the math choices into these stats & keep playstyle choices and add to it. For example, if you have choice between 2 items, one deals +100 dmg other is +10% dmg these kinds of stats are bundled into "attack" to tell you which is better. There are other attack based affixes like "more damage against far away enemies" or "+# to talent nodes" or "+# to skill points" which are not taken into "attack" stat and are not a math decision.
- 5 classes on launch, more classes with expansions.
- Goal is to make every class feel completely different from each other, one simple way to do that is explore classes with dual resources similar to DH in D3. Look forward to new classes in future expansions.
- Have not put thought into any followers at the moment.
- Characters will be soaked in blood as they kill enemies and get hit. Thoughts about getting a cool item the more blood you have on your gear.
Crafting
Early days but 2 goals:
Gathering component is integrated into open world.
- If you go out of your way to gather materials then the crafted item will be worth your time & effort.
Trading
Not open ended trading, they want to ensure players cannot get best items by not playing the game.
- Trading system will dictate how stash tabs operate. To get around item binds currently stash tabs are shared between alts so you can trade freely
- There are 3 categories of items to trade:
Items or commodities that are common which can be traded any time
- Bind on Trade, you can use as long as you want, but after 1 trade, the item is bound to person receiving Item. This can be used on even best items in the game but not all
- Bind on Pickup
