Diablo Watch

Mike Morhaime has been interviewed by Gamespot at the AGDC ‘07 (Austin Game Developers Conference). He covers a lot of ground during the interview but there’s one part of specific interest to Diablo fans - when he talks about Blizzard’s future development plans:

GS: Does the overwhelming success of it mean that a hypothetical Starcraft MMOG would be pushed further out because you have this thriving community that you don’t want to cannibalize?

MM: Not necessarily. It’s actually more a question of us not wanting to cannibalize the resources that are going into supporting the game. We can’t just take the World of Warcraft team and have them work on another game. But what we can do is staff up the World of Warcraft team and gradually peel off some of our developers to start working on something new. But it will take time. And we’re at the stage right now where we’re starting to think about what we want to do next.

GS: When do you think you’ll want to talk about what you’re doing next?

MM: Probably not for a long time.

Now, I’m not sure what that means! Is he talking 2008? Is he talking ever?

When talking about the upcoming WOW movie, Mike is asked whether he feels that the Diablo world can support a Diablo movie. “Absolutely,” says he. So maybe we’ll see a movie before we see a game.

E3 has been tamer this year. That doesn’t mean there’s nothing happening there.

Gamasutra has an interview with Frank Pearce, founding member and senior vice president of product development for Blizzard.

Here a bit from the interview:

“Our global headcount is 2,700,” said Pearce, “And most of that is customer service for World of Warcraft! In terms of development staff it’s probably around 350. World of Warcraft is about 135 people, 40 for Starcraft II, 40 for team 3, our cinematics team is about 85 guys. Then there’s sound and Q/A and that sort of thing.”

When pressed for details regarding the new project, Pearce was cagey. “Team 3 is working on something really awesome. I can’t give you any hints, but it’s totally awesome.”

All attempts to extract additional information were understandably met with looks of shock and horror from Blizzard’s director of global public relations, who also attended the meeting.

With Blizzcon just a few weeks away, I wonder if Blizzard are warming up to a formal announcement of this mysterious third project.

I’ve been thinking lately about the new content that Blizzard added to Diablo 2 with the Pandemonium Event (i.e. the Diablo 2 Ubers).

I’ve heard many arguments that it’s not REALLY new content as Blizzard have just taken a few bosses and made their uber versions. For example, they’ve used Andariel’s model to create Lilith who shares very similar spells and effects.

Diablo has become uber Diablo, gaining a a few extra hitpoints. Same goes for the other bosses (Mephisto and Baal) as well as the lieutenants (Duriel and Izual).

That is one way to look at it. However, lets turn to the year(s) preceding World of Warcraft’s launch. Blizzard created a special “custom” campaign (The Founding of Durotar) for Warcraft III that used the game engine BUT simulated WoW in terms of gameplay. The quest structure, the items (epic, legendary, etc), even the levelling.

Come to think of it, I might have enjoyed the campaign MORE than I have enjoyed WoW. You could control three heroes plus summoned creatures and henchmen, the quests made sense (i.e. not repetitive), and the items were pretty powerful.

That’s not my point though. My point is that what Blizzard has done with patch 1.11 is test the realms for the style of gameplay that their next-gen MMO (lets call it Diablo III: Heaven and Hell) will feature.

This looks a long shot now but come back in a year and we’ll see. I definitely think Blizzard’s next-gen MMO should feature top SOLO content in addition to raid content.

I do expect to kill Diablo even as a casual SOLO player. Surviving the fight might be a 10% chance and loot might be just a few greens but I’d like to see Diablo go down. Amen.