Diablo III: Reaper of Souls
EU & US Release date: 25 Mar, 2014
We sit down with lead producer Alex Mayberry to have a chat about the new Diablo III expansion - Reaper of Souls
08 April 2014 | By Import
Revealed last year, Reaper of Souls is the full length Diablo 3 expansion fans have been waiting for. Between setting the record for fastest-selling PC game back in 2012, and having fancy console ports in development, it's clear to see that the game was a hit. But what does this new expansion have to offer? And are fans going to be happy with it? Well we sat down with lead producer Alex Mayberry to have a chat about Reaper of Souls, and all things Diablo.
Strategy Informer: So Diablo 3 was a big success, what were the thoughts you had going into producing more content?
Alex Mayberry: We're very ambitious at Blizzard, and with Diablo 3 we were happy with its success but we don't want to stop there. We know that players want more content, they want more things to do. There were more things we wanted to do with the game, so an expansion made a lot of sense for us.
Strategy Informer: Expansions have been overshadowed recently by DLC, what would you say separates Reaper of Souls from a conventional piece of DLC?
Alex Mayberry: Well there's a lot more content. We made some major architectural changes to the game. The new loot system is significantly different from the previous system. And on top of that we've created a mode called 'Adventure Mode'. So in Adventure Mode you're not tied to the story. In fact you're given random goals throughout the world, if you complete these goals you'll eventually get a key for a portal, and it will build you random dungeons. Multi-floored, up to 10 floors. It takes from areas all over the game to make these dungeons. It randomizes not just the areas but the lighting and weather, and all the monsters. You'll encounter combinations of monsters you've never even seen before. In the story mode every monster has a home. In this mode we break all those rules and conventions, so you'll see monsters together that you've never seen before. And you play through a rift and there's a boss at the end, and the bosses are all random, and of course you'll get the chance of getting legendary items by doing this.
These are infinitely repeatable. To do that we had to change the difficulty system of the game, and refactor that from scratch. We now make it so monsters are all dynamic in difficulty meaning anywhere you go in the world the monsters will be at the appropriate challenge level. We've added a new class to the game, the Crusader. We also added an entirely new act. So the act is probably 1 ½- 2 x the size of act 2 in the original shipping game. We've added the Mystic, who does enchanting for you. Lets say there's a great item drop, and it's almost perfect but one of the stats is not for your character class. You can take the item to the Mystic, and for a price she'll re-roll that stat for you, and you'll get a list of other possibilities. You can keep doing this over and over again.
So there's a lot of new content in Reaper of Souls, we made tons of new legendary items. In the shipping version of the game you could get a legendary item, it drops, you get the pillar of light, you're excited but you pick it up and it's for a Witch Doctor and you're a Barbarian. Now the game looks at the class you're playing and it builds an item tailored to the class you are. So when that legendary item does drop, not only is it likely it's going to be for your class, but it will have properties on it that are tailored to your skills. It gives you the option to look at the item and then determine 'I don't usually use this skill, but because this item has a property that augments that skill I'm gonna try that out'. And the legendary items are built in such a way where they have a lot of synergy, so as you collect more of them, it'll change the way you play the game.
So we really want legendary items to become game changing like items. So there's a lot of content here. Blizzard expansions tend to be much bigger than the expansions other companies put out. If you compared them to other games they're often the size of the game themselves. So it's not standard DLC at this point. It's a typical Blizzard expansion.
Strategy Informer: How do you think all this extra content changes the experience of the original Diablo 3?
Alex Mayberry: I think it changes it a lot. Especially with Adventure Mode. At the heart of Diablo 3 is a game engine that relies on random number generation. Randomness in the monsters, randomness in the items, randomness in the environment. However we stuck very closely to the paradigm of Diablo 1 and 2 where you play through the game and unlock a difficulty, then you play through again and you unlock a difficulty.
What we found with Diablo 3 is that started to feel very constrictive. Once you get to the highest difficulty, you felt like you've seen everything. Even though random things happen from time to time, the feeling was you've seen everything there was to see. Also you were forced into a path through the whole way, and because you've done it before you know the path. Now with Adventure Mode all that goes away and you get these things called bounty, and you have a map screen that shows all the different waypoints. So from any place in the world, pull out a map, click on a waypoint and teleport to it. All the monsters will be there, it will all be at the right challenge level, and then you will randomly receive bounty's, and bounty's are a quest that is not tied to the story. As you complete the bounty's you get keys to the rifts and can go into these random dungeons. All of these things contribute to making the world feel more open, and making it feel that as a player you have choices to go do things. You can play what you wanna play, when you wanna play it.
Strategy Informer: When going into the expansions development, how do you come about thinking of these new features?
Alex Mayberry: We do a lot of brain storming within the company, we have a Strike Team that we put together as we get far enough along. It's made up of the game directors from all of our different franchises and key people within the company, and they do weekly playthroughs and they give us constant feedback. But probably, more importantly we read the forums. We read reddit. We read all the fan sites. We have a team of community people, they spend every day going through the internet, looking at what people are saying, and they link us to posts that people are making. So for us we really wanna know how do people play Diablo 3? What are their complaints, what are their suggestions, what more would they like to see? Then that really helps us steer the game in a direction we feel players will like.
Strategy Informer: Talking about fan interaction, when the original Diablo 3 came out, there was a bit of controversy from fans regarding the overall art style. Would you say that this has effected the expansion pack or its tone?
Alex Mayberry: Well the expansion centers around Malthael who is the fallen angel of wisdom, and he's the angel of death. So it's a darker tone because the theme is death. So as a result there's a bit more of a gothic look to this one, particularly since it takes place in Westmarch, which is a big city environment that is a first for Diablo. It's kind of a haunted apocalypse, and it's a place where Malthael is literally sucking the soul out of the city. So because of the theme of this one everything is darker. Having said that it's not a correlation to those early complaints. If you go back to the early days of Diablo when those games were made, color was limited. You had 256 colors to work with, today color is unlimited. So when it comes to how dark the game is, I can point to all kinds of places in the game that are dark in terms of content. I think maybe the word here is 'gothic' and with Reaper of Souls, it's a gothic experience because that's where it's set.
Strategy Informer: Diablo has also spawned novels, and comics. What do you think attracts fans to this universe outside the game?
Alex Mayberry: Oh, I think there's some great things about this universe. The idea that angels and demons are in this internal war with humanity caught in the middle, and humanity itself being part angel and part demon. And the fact that humans ultimately have the potential to be more powerful than either of those forces. It's a very compelling universe to play in. It's a universe that gives the opportunity to become a great hero. I've always felt that part of the magic of a Diablo game is how you start the game feeling kind of puny, meager and not very accomplished. By the end you're a force to be reckoned with. So that's the experience that we wanna convey.
Strategy Informer: This series has seen expansions before in Diablo 1 and 2. Have you taken any inspirations from those previous ones?
Alex Mayberry: We always look at Diablo 1 and 2. They're obviously the precursors to Diablo 3 so they're probably our first reference. But at the same time we don't just want to recreate what was done before, and we also wanna push the game in new directions so we have to play a balancing game between maintaining the legacy of Diablo 3 and at the same time broadening the universe and going in new directions. We try to keep a good eye on where we're going and where we've been. We also listen to the community. The community often reminds us of features of Diablo 1 and 2 that they like best. The lore, the community is amazingly caught up on the lore and story, so they're a great benefit to developing these expansions.
Strategy Informer: Diablo is a very PC-centered series. But Diablo 3 is coming to consoles, how would you say console development has affected future developments of Diablo?
Alex Mayberry: It doesn't really affect what we do on PC. The PC has always been the leading product. With that being said even before Diablo 3, even in the Diablo 1 and 2 days it's always been a game where you'd think “man this would look great on a console”. Even as a player I used to play anything that was even remotely Diablo like Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance or Champions of Norrath, because I wanted that console experience. So it's really great for us to be able to put Diablo on the console, especially because even though it's the same content, they're on different platforms. Our goal has always been that Diablo on the console should feel like a console game, not like a PC game that got put on the console. Once you pick up that controller and start moving that character around, you realize it's the same game, but it feels very different. So that's kind of where we have to keep things in mind. The console experience, while pulling from the same content, they can't be clones of each other. We just have to be mindful of when we're developing games on the PC, of how that's going to translate to console or what problems that's gonna cause or what challenges that's gonna create for the console group. But it doesn't really negatively affect development of the PC game in any way.
Strategy Informer: What can we expect from Diablo in the future?
Alex Mayberry: At the end of a game there's always some features that didn't quite make it or weren't quite ready. So we're already planning out our first content patch for after Reaper of Souls ships. Nothing I can announce at this point. I will tell people to watch Josh Mosqueira's twitter (https://twitter.com/joshmosq), he likes to foreshadow things. Beyond that though we're developing our plans for over the coming year. What else we're gonna do after that first content patch. One of the things we're gonna do is wait a little bit because we want to get Reaper of Souls out, then we want to actually let the community sit with it for a while and we want to gage their reaction and find out what people like about it, what don't they like, what new things would they like to see, or see changed. That means we can plan out the long term future of Diablo 3, we can make sure we are staying in touch with the community and evolving the game in a direction players want.
Strategy Informer: So the community has actually changed the process of games development overall?
Alex Mayberry: Oh, community is hugely important. I read the forums a lot and it's funny how many times I read a post and it'll say something like: 'I know no one from Blizzard will ever read this but...' and there are times when I just wanna say 'we do read what you say!'. We can't respond to every single person, because there are millions of players and only a few of us. But I’ve been working on games for around 20 years now and it is so much nicer not to work in a bubble where you're guessing. You're guessing how fans are going to react and you're hoping that they're gonna like something. Also back in those early days you made your game, you put it in a box, and you never touched it again since technology wouldn't allow it. We live in a much more agile and versatile environment where we can put something out - do experiments like the auction house and later decide it wasn't a good idea and fix it. We can do things like create a new loot system. We can make changes and so many of the changes that we make, the idea generates from the community. We hear what players say, we hear what they want to do, we hear what they'd like to see. So we make that part of our development. Staying in touch with players is key to keeping them happy.
Strategy Informer: And finally, what's your personal favorite feature from Reaper of Souls?
Alex Mayberry: Adventure mode, absolutely. It's because it opens things up again. I like story just as much as anyone else but over and over and over again - I don't. Adventure mode feels like my choices are back in my hands. It's also tailored so that I can play 30 minutes or 20 minutes, and feel like I accomplished something. Maybe I picked up a legendary, maybe I picked up some rift keys, there's something to do. Even if I don't have a lot of time I can jump on and play, then jump back off again. So I really, really like the Adventure mode and I think it's gonna be one of the biggest features in the game.
Strategy Informer: So Diablo 3 was a big success, what were the thoughts you had going into producing more content?
Alex Mayberry: We're very ambitious at Blizzard, and with Diablo 3 we were happy with its success but we don't want to stop there. We know that players want more content, they want more things to do. There were more things we wanted to do with the game, so an expansion made a lot of sense for us.
 |
Strategy Informer: Expansions have been overshadowed recently by DLC, what would you say separates Reaper of Souls from a conventional piece of DLC?
Alex Mayberry: Well there's a lot more content. We made some major architectural changes to the game. The new loot system is significantly different from the previous system. And on top of that we've created a mode called 'Adventure Mode'. So in Adventure Mode you're not tied to the story. In fact you're given random goals throughout the world, if you complete these goals you'll eventually get a key for a portal, and it will build you random dungeons. Multi-floored, up to 10 floors. It takes from areas all over the game to make these dungeons. It randomizes not just the areas but the lighting and weather, and all the monsters. You'll encounter combinations of monsters you've never even seen before. In the story mode every monster has a home. In this mode we break all those rules and conventions, so you'll see monsters together that you've never seen before. And you play through a rift and there's a boss at the end, and the bosses are all random, and of course you'll get the chance of getting legendary items by doing this.
These are infinitely repeatable. To do that we had to change the difficulty system of the game, and refactor that from scratch. We now make it so monsters are all dynamic in difficulty meaning anywhere you go in the world the monsters will be at the appropriate challenge level. We've added a new class to the game, the Crusader. We also added an entirely new act. So the act is probably 1 ½- 2 x the size of act 2 in the original shipping game. We've added the Mystic, who does enchanting for you. Lets say there's a great item drop, and it's almost perfect but one of the stats is not for your character class. You can take the item to the Mystic, and for a price she'll re-roll that stat for you, and you'll get a list of other possibilities. You can keep doing this over and over again.
So there's a lot of new content in Reaper of Souls, we made tons of new legendary items. In the shipping version of the game you could get a legendary item, it drops, you get the pillar of light, you're excited but you pick it up and it's for a Witch Doctor and you're a Barbarian. Now the game looks at the class you're playing and it builds an item tailored to the class you are. So when that legendary item does drop, not only is it likely it's going to be for your class, but it will have properties on it that are tailored to your skills. It gives you the option to look at the item and then determine 'I don't usually use this skill, but because this item has a property that augments that skill I'm gonna try that out'. And the legendary items are built in such a way where they have a lot of synergy, so as you collect more of them, it'll change the way you play the game.
So we really want legendary items to become game changing like items. So there's a lot of content here. Blizzard expansions tend to be much bigger than the expansions other companies put out. If you compared them to other games they're often the size of the game themselves. So it's not standard DLC at this point. It's a typical Blizzard expansion.
Strategy Informer: How do you think all this extra content changes the experience of the original Diablo 3?
Alex Mayberry: I think it changes it a lot. Especially with Adventure Mode. At the heart of Diablo 3 is a game engine that relies on random number generation. Randomness in the monsters, randomness in the items, randomness in the environment. However we stuck very closely to the paradigm of Diablo 1 and 2 where you play through the game and unlock a difficulty, then you play through again and you unlock a difficulty.
What we found with Diablo 3 is that started to feel very constrictive. Once you get to the highest difficulty, you felt like you've seen everything. Even though random things happen from time to time, the feeling was you've seen everything there was to see. Also you were forced into a path through the whole way, and because you've done it before you know the path. Now with Adventure Mode all that goes away and you get these things called bounty, and you have a map screen that shows all the different waypoints. So from any place in the world, pull out a map, click on a waypoint and teleport to it. All the monsters will be there, it will all be at the right challenge level, and then you will randomly receive bounty's, and bounty's are a quest that is not tied to the story. As you complete the bounty's you get keys to the rifts and can go into these random dungeons. All of these things contribute to making the world feel more open, and making it feel that as a player you have choices to go do things. You can play what you wanna play, when you wanna play it.
Strategy Informer: When going into the expansions development, how do you come about thinking of these new features?
Alex Mayberry: We do a lot of brain storming within the company, we have a Strike Team that we put together as we get far enough along. It's made up of the game directors from all of our different franchises and key people within the company, and they do weekly playthroughs and they give us constant feedback. But probably, more importantly we read the forums. We read reddit. We read all the fan sites. We have a team of community people, they spend every day going through the internet, looking at what people are saying, and they link us to posts that people are making. So for us we really wanna know how do people play Diablo 3? What are their complaints, what are their suggestions, what more would they like to see? Then that really helps us steer the game in a direction we feel players will like.
 |
Strategy Informer: Talking about fan interaction, when the original Diablo 3 came out, there was a bit of controversy from fans regarding the overall art style. Would you say that this has effected the expansion pack or its tone?
Alex Mayberry: Well the expansion centers around Malthael who is the fallen angel of wisdom, and he's the angel of death. So it's a darker tone because the theme is death. So as a result there's a bit more of a gothic look to this one, particularly since it takes place in Westmarch, which is a big city environment that is a first for Diablo. It's kind of a haunted apocalypse, and it's a place where Malthael is literally sucking the soul out of the city. So because of the theme of this one everything is darker. Having said that it's not a correlation to those early complaints. If you go back to the early days of Diablo when those games were made, color was limited. You had 256 colors to work with, today color is unlimited. So when it comes to how dark the game is, I can point to all kinds of places in the game that are dark in terms of content. I think maybe the word here is 'gothic' and with Reaper of Souls, it's a gothic experience because that's where it's set.
Strategy Informer: Diablo has also spawned novels, and comics. What do you think attracts fans to this universe outside the game?
Alex Mayberry: Oh, I think there's some great things about this universe. The idea that angels and demons are in this internal war with humanity caught in the middle, and humanity itself being part angel and part demon. And the fact that humans ultimately have the potential to be more powerful than either of those forces. It's a very compelling universe to play in. It's a universe that gives the opportunity to become a great hero. I've always felt that part of the magic of a Diablo game is how you start the game feeling kind of puny, meager and not very accomplished. By the end you're a force to be reckoned with. So that's the experience that we wanna convey.
Strategy Informer: This series has seen expansions before in Diablo 1 and 2. Have you taken any inspirations from those previous ones?
Alex Mayberry: We always look at Diablo 1 and 2. They're obviously the precursors to Diablo 3 so they're probably our first reference. But at the same time we don't just want to recreate what was done before, and we also wanna push the game in new directions so we have to play a balancing game between maintaining the legacy of Diablo 3 and at the same time broadening the universe and going in new directions. We try to keep a good eye on where we're going and where we've been. We also listen to the community. The community often reminds us of features of Diablo 1 and 2 that they like best. The lore, the community is amazingly caught up on the lore and story, so they're a great benefit to developing these expansions.
Strategy Informer: Diablo is a very PC-centered series. But Diablo 3 is coming to consoles, how would you say console development has affected future developments of Diablo?
Alex Mayberry: It doesn't really affect what we do on PC. The PC has always been the leading product. With that being said even before Diablo 3, even in the Diablo 1 and 2 days it's always been a game where you'd think “man this would look great on a console”. Even as a player I used to play anything that was even remotely Diablo like Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance or Champions of Norrath, because I wanted that console experience. So it's really great for us to be able to put Diablo on the console, especially because even though it's the same content, they're on different platforms. Our goal has always been that Diablo on the console should feel like a console game, not like a PC game that got put on the console. Once you pick up that controller and start moving that character around, you realize it's the same game, but it feels very different. So that's kind of where we have to keep things in mind. The console experience, while pulling from the same content, they can't be clones of each other. We just have to be mindful of when we're developing games on the PC, of how that's going to translate to console or what problems that's gonna cause or what challenges that's gonna create for the console group. But it doesn't really negatively affect development of the PC game in any way.
Strategy Informer: What can we expect from Diablo in the future?
Alex Mayberry: At the end of a game there's always some features that didn't quite make it or weren't quite ready. So we're already planning out our first content patch for after Reaper of Souls ships. Nothing I can announce at this point. I will tell people to watch Josh Mosqueira's twitter (https://twitter.com/joshmosq), he likes to foreshadow things. Beyond that though we're developing our plans for over the coming year. What else we're gonna do after that first content patch. One of the things we're gonna do is wait a little bit because we want to get Reaper of Souls out, then we want to actually let the community sit with it for a while and we want to gage their reaction and find out what people like about it, what don't they like, what new things would they like to see, or see changed. That means we can plan out the long term future of Diablo 3, we can make sure we are staying in touch with the community and evolving the game in a direction players want.
 |
Strategy Informer: So the community has actually changed the process of games development overall?
Alex Mayberry: Oh, community is hugely important. I read the forums a lot and it's funny how many times I read a post and it'll say something like: 'I know no one from Blizzard will ever read this but...' and there are times when I just wanna say 'we do read what you say!'. We can't respond to every single person, because there are millions of players and only a few of us. But I’ve been working on games for around 20 years now and it is so much nicer not to work in a bubble where you're guessing. You're guessing how fans are going to react and you're hoping that they're gonna like something. Also back in those early days you made your game, you put it in a box, and you never touched it again since technology wouldn't allow it. We live in a much more agile and versatile environment where we can put something out - do experiments like the auction house and later decide it wasn't a good idea and fix it. We can do things like create a new loot system. We can make changes and so many of the changes that we make, the idea generates from the community. We hear what players say, we hear what they want to do, we hear what they'd like to see. So we make that part of our development. Staying in touch with players is key to keeping them happy.
Strategy Informer: And finally, what's your personal favorite feature from Reaper of Souls?
Alex Mayberry: Adventure mode, absolutely. It's because it opens things up again. I like story just as much as anyone else but over and over and over again - I don't. Adventure mode feels like my choices are back in my hands. It's also tailored so that I can play 30 minutes or 20 minutes, and feel like I accomplished something. Maybe I picked up a legendary, maybe I picked up some rift keys, there's something to do. Even if I don't have a lot of time I can jump on and play, then jump back off again. So I really, really like the Adventure mode and I think it's gonna be one of the biggest features in the game.
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