Diablo Watch

For all the Diablo fans out there, a new web-based MMORPG has been announced as being in development – Riftforge.

Unlike World of Warcraft and its kin, Riftforge will have a free-to-play mode. Even more importantly, you’ll be able to SOLO end-game content by borrowing characters from your friends, hiring mercenaries, or leveling your own party of three. In this and other aspects, it’s much closer to Diablo than to WoW.

Here’s a bit more info from the official press release:

November 24, 2009 — Riftforge Entertainment Ltd. today announced the development of Riftforge, an ambitious fantasy online role-playing game. It challenges massively multiplayer online game conventions with deep, tactical combat, adding a significant element of player skill. Hundreds of thousands of players will be able to cooperate and compete on an unprecedented scale, thanks to a new web technology platform.

“As hardcore gamers ourselves, we have been sidelined for a long time by greedy game companies that are going after the lowest common denominator,” said Krasimir Koichev, Riftforge’s Producer. “The unrivaled depth of the Riftforge’s tactical combat system rewards competitive gamers for their skills, not just the time spent button mashing.”

The game world’s central location is the Riftforge, a hub structure that seemingly exists out of space and time. When the first Rift opens, players will be able to explore the immense landmass of Manirak. It is home to dozens of warring tribes, feuding city-states, and two empires fighting for supremacy.

The player creates a House (e.g. House Stark), which can send multiple commanders and their troops to combat missions. Completing missions and campaigns results in a constant progression of new skills, better equipment, and elite units.

Commanders and their troops come from the three branches of the Riftforge military: the Guardians, the Rangers, and the Raiders. Each archetype comes with its own unique commanders and units, with customizable skills, specializations, and equipment.

Features:

• Three powerful RPG archetypes to choose from: Guardian, Ranger, and Raider.
• Rare, elite, and epic units for each of the six troop types
• Dynamic front lines across 81 areas in nine war zones
• Seven enemy factions fielding dozens of generals leading massive armies
• Deep and engaging tactical combat, within a familiar turn-based system
• A graphics engine that combines isometric pixel artwork with Flash animations
• Playable on almost any device with a browser (including smart phones like the iPhone)
• Social features that enable players to interact and trade, cooperate and compete
• Includes a free-to-play MMO mode to encourage players to try the game

If you’ve had the patience to listen the latest Blizzcast to the end, you would’ve been rewarded with three questions & answers from Jay Wilson, Diablo 3 lead designer/director. They deal with maps, deaths, and elixirs.

MAPS

Will we be able to use the old overlay map instead of the mini-map?
Right now we don’t have any plans to do a fullscreen overlay. We really felt that the overlay was more there because the mini-map was not very usable as a small map. We feel like when you put that map and you cover it over the whole display it actually adds a lot of clutter but we are planning to do like a fullscreen map that just covers the whole screen so that you can kind of see an entire area like if want to check out if there are any areas of this dungeon that I haven’t explored yet, you can really see more of that. But right now we’re really focused on trying to make the mini-map is very usable at the size that it’s at and so we’ve put a lot of work and the maps are actually custom made. The ones in D2 were kind of auto-generated where as ours we literally we custom make every piece of it. We have an artist go through and draw out so we can make sure that they’re really visible and very usable and so far we’re finding that it’s working really well.

DEATH

Will there be special player deaths in various situations? Like when the Siegebreaker bit the Barbarian in half during the gameplay demo.

Well what we want to do with that, especially for particular bosses is have when essentially when the player is very low on health and they’re about to die the boss essentially checks like when it attacks you, did I just do enough damage to kill you? And if so then instead of just doing his normal attack he’d actually play some kind of special I pick you up and eat you or I throw you up in the air and knock you around like a baseball or something like that. It’s a system that really our announcement video we tested it for the first time, mainly just to see – can we actually do this kind of animation interaction between the characters but the actual system itself is still not in there but we do plan to do that and that’s primarily where. We might do some other things, we’ve talked about physics based deaths we’ve talked about having the characters if they like die to a cold monster he might completely freeze solid into a statue and then shatter or things like that but we haven’t decided at this point if that’s exactly what we’re going to do.

ELIXIRS

During the gameplay video an “Elixir of Vitality I” dropped. Can you explain Elixirs and the benefits and roles they will play in Diablo 3?

Well right now elixirs are primarily to provide a short term benefit to the player. I can’t remember exactly how many off the top of my head, I think there’s maybe six different kinds of elixirs and they do things like give you health boosts or give you damage boosts, give you different stats, things like that. So whenever you find one you can essentially use it whenever you want to give you a short term buff. And then as you go through the game the ‘one’ indicates quality so the ‘one’ is kind of a low end, not very good item, it’s not bad – at low levels it actually makes a pretty big difference, at high levels it doesn’t matter that much but as you go through the game they become more and more powerful. So we have a variety of different kinds of items like that we have added in to give the player some interesting buffs. Some of them are something like that were it’s just a nice bonus to have, whereas some of them are actually game changing kind of things like you can fire them off in an emergency to be able to deal with a particularly tough encounter.