GP: There have been several big reveals this morning regarding Diablo III, including the PvP system. Is it teams only in the Battle Arena?

Jay: Right now yeah, we’re focused completely on team vs. team play. The PvP system isn’t e-sport focused, and not as focused on uber-balance, we want it to be a more casual mode and we also want to account for the fact that there are so many different builds. Some players are going to build their characters better than others and there are going to be certain builds that are weak against other builds. When you have a team it’s a kind of cover off any weaknesses.

GP: Do you have any ideas about team sizes yet?

Jay: Right now three vs. three is the size we’re focused on. It’s the biggest we can get without things getting too lost in what we call “particle soup,” which is basically lots of effects and things going off. As we continue to optimise and get everything to read more clearly, if we can up the number we will but right now three vs. three is the perfect amount.

 

GP: And how about PvP in the game-world itself?

Jay: No, we’re not putting any PvP into the core PvE game. That’s primarily because it really only existed in the previous games for exploiting and griefing and for us that wasn’t really the focus of the game and it really hurt cooperative play. It also put a lot of pressure on the PvE game to be something it really wasn’t.

GP: We saw scripted character deaths in the first footage of Diablo III from the worldwide invitational and we haven’t seen any since. Are they still in the game?

Jay: Yes! We do still intend to have them in the game; the reason you haven’t seen more is because they’re all focused on bosses which is something we haven’t really shown. So all the major bosses in the game should have those scripted sequences. It’s also the last thing we do with a boss, once we’ve finished everything else, we add those scripted kills because there’s no requirement for them until then.

GP: On death, how are you guys handling death penalties in the game?

 

Jay: Right now when a player dies the get a durability hit. We want there to be some kind of penalty but we don’t want to make it too harsh. We don’t have any corpse running or collecting of your gear as we did in Diablo II. We found that too often is was a frustration point that caused people to quit the game. So instead, the checkpoint system respawns you a little way back. So you’ll lose a little time and a little gold through the loss of durability of items.

GP: While we’re on bosses: How do you create non-generic boss fights that can be completed by 97 billion different builds?

Jay: For bosses, while we do want to make more interesting boss fights than there were in the previous games, they are still extensions of the core way monsters work. So what we focus on is types of skills. We have certain skills of which we can say, “this is a boss killer” or “this is not.”

 

So we can look at those particular skills from a boss perspective and make sure they’re balanced [across the classes] right. As long as each individual skill is doing its job right, then the builds tend to kind of work themselves out because you can only use one attack at a time. And while you can use a number of different control skills on bosses, they tend to apply one of several common effects, so each of those effects we can balance individually.

So those things combined together give us a base model which we can balance. Not just the bosses but also the monsters.