by dredscythe - 3 years ago     show comments

Here is where you’ll find a recap of the group interview that happened today with the community and Joe Shely (Lead Game Designer) and Careena Kingdom (Lead Animator).

NOTE: This will not be a 1 for 1 transcription, but a general summary of the questions and answers.

Lord Fluffy:
Hey, Lord Fluffy, Face of Diablo,, um, is there, I see in nother games, a large portion of development time is spent on a low percentage of high end players sort of trickled down hype tactic. Uh, whereas in the Diablo 4, we saw that the leaderboards are scrapped pretty early on, which was pretty much the only end game high end game activity to do in D three. Uh, what do you anticipate will be the direction of these high end players in Diablo 4?

Shely:
So, to set the record straight, we haven’t made any announcements about leaderboards. And in Diablo 4, yeah, we expect that a wide variety of players will be able to play and enjoy the game, including high end players. And, if you take a look at some of the recent changes we’ve made to the skill and itemization systems, where we think that depth and a variety of possibilities and the ability to explore and create your own, builds are key aspects that kind of appeal to that player base.

Cas:
I just wanted to ask, it seems like Diablo 4 has sort of been going back to its roots in a sense. And what is it about these games that you think wasn’t quite captured in Diablo 3?

Shely:
Well, the world of sanctuary is a place that, uh, we’ve only seen glimpses of up until this point. Uh, even every Diablo game has taken a bigger and bigger swath of Sanctuary and with the Diablo 4 and our focus on providing an open world with lots of things to do, including world PVP, Camps, and all the other things you can do, we’ve zoomed way out in terms of the amount of Sanctuary that players will be able to explore. Careena can talk more about that.

Kingdom:
Yeah. So yeah, one of the big benefits of the open world is that it gives the player agency to, lead their own experience that they have. There’s a huge variety. It’s not just one single path. You actually get to experience it as you see fit. And, I don’t know if you want me to go into specifics of like, beyond that, like traversals for example, or the camps that we can, the areas that you explore, the fields of hatred that you come across from the PvP areas. Do you want me to elaborate further?

Cas:
Sure

Kingdom:
Okay. So, one of the areas that you can come across as the fields of hatred, which is a set area that you walk past in the open world that anyone can enter and a big part of it is there’s this bubbling up, of evil from Lilith’s presence in the world is increasing Mephisto’s influence and through that, every creature that you find in those areas will drop something that we call shards of hatred, which is a currency that allows you to unlock new cosmetics, new armor sets there’s chests that you can, you can open up to gain unique rewards to that area specifically. You have the choice of going hostile, which means you have the ability to attack other players and other players can attack you. You aren’t by default, when you enter these areas, you’re are not hostile by default. So once you’ve gathered all these shards of hatred, there’s a purification process that you enter. You channel them basically, and you have to defend that area from monsters whilst you’re doing that, you actually can be targeted by other hostile characters that can sort of steal the loot that you’ve been keeping that you’ve been sort of trying hard to gather, and that’s where the PVP element comes into play. Joe, did you want to add?

Shely:
That’s absolutely right. I would add that, uh, you can be targeted by hostile players anytime you’re in a PVP area in addition to the two, when you’re at that key moment, when you’re purifying shards.

ThaPchild:
So are those shards the only thing that you’re going to try to extract from there? I was curious if loot is going to drop from these monsters that is also stealable by other players. I think that adds a pretty, hype level to the PVP environment?

Shely:
Monsters in the fields of hatred will drop loot. There’s no current plans to make that loot specifically stealable by other players. But the shards of hatred will drop if you are killed by someone else and their currency that are used to acquire things from the vendors in the PVP town. So for example, we have some very cool cosmetic armor looks that can only be obtained from the shards.

Echohack:
We’ve talked a lot about the open-world aspect of Diablo 4. So I want to understand a little bit more deeper when you run out of inventory space and the open world kind of like what happens next? Can you walk me through that loop look like, do you go back to town and salvage via town portal all the time? Do you have to run back via horse? Are there other options, like finding a Blacksmith out in the world, something like that. Um, can you kind of walk me through that?

Shely:
Absolutely. So in Diablo 4, because the world is so big, there are many places that there are multiple capital cities, there are smaller towns, so there are many places that you’ll be adventuring through and you have the ability to bind your town portal to a particular location in the world, so that when you town portal, you returned to that specific location, maybe it has a layout that you’d like, or a vendor that you like. Um, and we expect that players will be moving their town portal around depending on the activities that they’re doing. Of course you can also use waypoints in Diablo 4. Having approached a Waypoint, you can then teleport to another waypoint. If you were out in the world and you ran out of inventory space and you wanted to make sure that you weren’t leaving any thing on the ground, or you would probably open a town portal, which would lead you back to a town that has a waypoint you at it probably has vendors. Uh, I mean, it varies based on where you’ve decided to go. You could sell your or you could salvage the materials that you got from the items. You return via your account portal to the place where you were farming. You could take a waypoint to another waypoint in the world and head off somewhere new. You could leave the town on foot and hop on your mount right off to adventure somewhere else.

Cas:
As we’ve talked more about the open world, if you could give us an estimate of the size of Diablo 4 compared to other worlds and world games or compared to Diablo 3?

Shely:
We think we talked about the scale of the world a little bit when we announced, Diablo 4 at BlizzCon last year. Its dramatically larger than the area of Diablo 3, I don’t know the exact exact scale difference, but it’s dramatically larger. A good way to think about it is that in Diablo 3 you know you would go into act two and you’re near the area around Caldeum. You can explore the city, you can explore some of the immediate surroundings. You can meet the lacuni who are cat people but in Diablo 4, Kehjistan, which is the area of the world that contains Caldeum, you’ll be exploring much wider area of Kehjistan, which includes deserts and all kinds of other terrain beyond that immediate area that you explored in Diablo 3. And that’s only one of the five regions in the game.

ThaPchild:
Will there be separate gear sets for PVE and PVP? And can you talk about how you’re going to balance PVP without throttling PVE content?

Shely:
There are a wide variety, so there, there are many different affixes, regular affixes, legendary affixes, unique items that could be useful for PVP. There are not currently any affixes that are exclusive to PVP, that only work against players or anything like that. We want to have a large pool of items that players can draw from and find things that are very useful in PVP, or things that are very useful at PVE. We plan to continue adding items like that. Certainly we’ll keep an eye on what’s happening in terms of PVP if something seems out of whack.

MrLlamaSC:
I’m Mrllama, face of Diablo. So, one thing that I really want to ask about, or what I really love about Diablo 2, is that there’s hits stun, there’s block animation, you’ve got your hit recovery speeds, all of these things that make you have to play a bit more tactical as opposed to jumping into the middle of a bunch of monsters, and then being able to just jump out whenever you want, if you feel like you’re taking enough damage. Are we looking at implementing these things in Diablo 4, to encourage that sort of play, or will it have that style still of, if you’re kind of standing in the middle of a bunch of stuff, you can always just kind of dart out if you need?

Shely:
So we’ve got, you know, we have things like the evade skill and you know animation is the fundamental aspect of all the things you’re talking about. We have our lead animator here, so I’ll let Careena answer that.

Kingdom:
So it’s something you brought up really interesting, which is the hit reactions. It’s a balance between you’re not going to be able to data instantly, you can’t spam and just escape immediately, in pursuit with the Rogue. The Rogue has that hybrid ability of both melee and ranged. She’s not able to back out attack and then come back in and attack instantly. There is a health balance. There she is vulnerable in certain ways. A big part of her is being able to strategize based on the battlefield, knowing what monsters are around you. She’s very much heavily about combination and choosing which imbues at work to your play style. With the evades, I don’t know if you’ve noticed in the videos that were released, her evade in particular is when you see her spin around, that was something that led really well to the fact that she has a very fast gameplay style. Unlike the Sorceress, when you see the Sorceress standing back, she’s going to be the real flourishing, loud moments that visually look very cool and feel cool, but because of the Rogue’s speed, it was very direct targeted duck in, duck out, um, ASAP, make it work with her agility and make it very fluid. It’s not enough to have things look cool cause you don’t want to be sitting there watching something play out. It’s very important to us that the player is always in control with hit reactions. Um, there’s two types right now, we’re playing around with something that we call flinches, which is a blended hit reaction, which is only on the upper body that doesn’t stop your ability to trigger a power, trigger, another skill, or be able to move away. We do have what we call get hits on a player, which actually will push them back and does take control away from you. You have to be aware of which like, just like the stun, the stun actually you have to wait for that to play out and that’s by design. Joe can talk about that more, but we are trying to make it feel a lot more visceral in gameplay in terms of motion. So you will be able to attack and if someone or monster it attacks you, you will see that physically in a way the player moves, but it won’t have as much impact as the other options, which is the more physical.

Shely:
Yeah, absolutely. And in comparison to Diablo 2, which you mentioned when we think about hits stun that completely interrupts what the player’s doing. We’d like to focus that more into stunned type effects because those have the additional visual, they have lots of controls over the pacing of those, how often those are happening, and we also have additional visual language to communicate to the player why they’ve lost control.

MrLlamaSC:
The stun types and things will that just come from like specific monsters that can stun or will any monster have the ability if it hits you hard enough or whatever it is, or has a chance to go ahead and put you into that stunned state?

Shely:
We’ve experimented with various ideations and we experimented with a version where monsters could put you into a stunned state by doing a certain amount of damage or a certain amount of damage in a specific amount of time. We found that the feedback on it was not as positive as the clear cases where monsters are applying stuns directly.

SVR:
So, in Diablo 3, there is no such thing as for instance, block recovery, where there’s no minimum amount of time that you need to wait between two block instances. This has been a simplification from Diablo 2 to Diablo 3. Other RPGs do have some deeper mechanics to block recovery and blocking. What’s the stance in Diablo 4 in terms of blocking and blocking attacks?

Shely:
You can block attacks if you have a shield equipped. Barbarians can equip shields. There are there no internal cooldowns on blocking.

SVR:
So my next question is the design choice between game modes. Diablo is a very story-based game. It’s a lot about isolation and desolation of a player. It’s a private story, especially in campaign. Now solo self found is a game mode a lot of people enjoy playing. It’s something that is, you know, a choice game mode in different ARPGs. However, for Diablo 4 we’ve never been given a design reason why, and if solo self found will make or not make it into the Diablo 4. Has anything changed on this end and if so why?

Shely:
I don’t have anything to announce on solo self found at this time. I will say that when we have game modes that lots of players enjoy we look carefully at supporting those. So we want to have lots of different ways for players to play the game and that’s why features like Hardcore mode are making a return in Diablo 4.

SVR:
What do you personally think about solo self found mode?

Shely:
I think it can be a fun way play. I think as a game designer, I will often play games and make up my own rules for the things that I’m allowed to do in them. Those rules only work if I abide by my own contract that I’ve made with myself. love playing games in that way for sure. It’s something that we have to think a lot about in terms of splitting the player base out, in terms of ways to support it. In terms of what is the overall need for the player base to have something formal that provides that functionality.

Jmurda:
So, obviously everybody’s really excited about the Rogue. I think you guys hit that out of the park so far from what we’ve seen, but I wanted to know if the fifth class has been determined. I know you can’t tell me what it is, but if you know what it is yet, or is that still a decision to be made? And do you know if it’s something that’s going to be something we’ve seen before, or is it going to be a completely brand new experience, if anything has been decided, or if you can even tell me?

Kingdom:
We got nothing to say on it at this time.

Jmurda:
I had to ask.

Leviathan:
All right. So I do want to talk about the road cause I’m super stoked for this class. So I love what I see so far. One thing that it seems to be really keying in on is this new kinda like shadow aspect. It almost seems like it’s an element. So I wondered if there was like some element attached to that, or like if shadow attacks will do something additional, similar to how with cold, you guys were talking about, you know, the ability to chill and then eventually inflict the freeze? Sorry for the two-parter, how important are elements going to be to the game? Like will there be burning shocking and ways to scale those sorts of things?

Shely:
Yes. Let’s take, there were a couple of questions there. Let’s see, I’m going to go backward. Elements are important to the game. Shadow is an elemental type. There are individual elemental resists. You can increase your protection against cold or lightning or any of the other elements. You’ll be seeing a lot a elemental damage from monster variants, from monster attacks powers. The shadow imbue on the Rogue in particular modifies the Rogue’s base line attacks. There are some shadow things that the Rogue does, but we do want to be careful about the balance there between making the Rogue feel very real and visceral and Careena can talk more about that. But when you apply your shadow imbue it will make your attacks that it affects deal area of effect damage, where they would normally not.

Kingdom:
Did you want me to talk more of about the variants?

Shely:
Oh yeah, I thought you might want to talk about the way that the Rogue, the way that we’ve built the Rogue to show off how physical and dextrous she can be as she’s performing all these attacks. How there’s a balance between the magical aspects and the skill based aspects of the Rogue.

Kingdom:
With the weapon imbue. So yeah, you can imbue a weapon to the different affixes, like the frozen and poison and shadow. One of the cool things is that you can combine it with other players. So if your sorceress has frozen orb, you will actually get to the freeze point faster. So it does matter based on the fellow party members that are with you with the monster variants, there are differences in them that we bring both in the visual effects that you have as well as animation and abilities. So you might have a base monster that you’re used to playing against, and then you’ll come across an elemental version that actually will have different abilities. So you have to actually think differently about it, and it will visually look differently just at a texture level.

Lord Fluffy:
So can you update us on the current iteration of trade and where you expected to go going forward?

Shely:
When we were announcing the game, we also announced that there would be trading in Diablo 4. We think that trading is a key social activity. It help connects the community together in cool ways. We philosophically want to make sure that some of the best items in the game come from killing monsters. So we want to be careful about where that balance is things that you can trade, because certainly if we go too far in one direction, nothing that matters will be tradable and it won’t be a useful feature. And if we go too far in the other direction, you won’t feel like there’s any reason to do challenging content to get the best gear. We’re iterating on the exact implementation. Keep an eye out for more information in the future about where you know exactly what the details are of which items you can trade are and what any restrictions will be.

Wudijo:
I wanted to get back to the Rogue, which I believe is the coolest class if I donate so good job. I wanted to know how is that gonna be like pure melee or pure range build? Is that always going to be a combo? Or can you do one or the other? Or is it going to be doable but less efficient,? Or is there like some kind of like, you know, variation of builds that it can make?

Shely:
Absolutely. One of the cool things about the Rrogue I think is that when you say to someone, “Oh, it’s so cool Diablo 4 has a Rogue class,” what some people will hear is, “Oh, that’s awesome. I’m going to sneak up behind monsters. I’m going to stab them in the back. I’m going to quickly, uh, you know, dash in and out, and I’m going to avoid, you know, avoid monster attacks, right. I’m going to look for weaknesses in the monster.” And other people here, “Oh, that’s so cool. I’m going to stay at range. I’m going to put caltrops in front of me to keep monsters from reaching me. I’m going to constantly shooting arrows into monsters and stopping them, controlling them and keeping at a distance.” We want to pay both of those fantasies off equally. We don’t want melee Rogues to feel like second class citizens or range Rogues to feel like second class citizens. Both melee and ranged play styles should be viable and hybrid play styles should be viable. So, you know, if you look at some of the skills we’ve announced you could set up one of the cool versatile aspects of the Rogue. You could set up something like a cold imbue, trigger a barrage rain of arrows to chill and freeze your enemies. And then once they’re frozen, dash-In do some invigorating strikes, flurries, blade twisting all those kinds of melee damage attacks, take those monsters out. Or if you don’t dash back out, start all over again. So you can build whether it’s a melee or ranged class or a mix of the two is your decision as a player.

Wudijo:
Do you actually expect people to change their play style on the fly when they find like a really good sword or a really good bow? Do you think that people will change them or is that expected?

Shely:
We want to create opportunities where a player might think, yes, we want to create opportunities where the player might think, “Maybe I should try this Rogue. I’ve been playing melee, but maybe I should try this bow is really cool. Maybe I should try this out.”

Kingdom:
I personally tried the pure range and I die every time. I think it’s insane to have someone that’s so agile based and not go a little bit of both worlds. That’s the personally what works for me the best. My play style versus a boss or a monster or a PVE event open world or PVP completely changes up the way I play. It depends on what you’re wanting to do that day. You know, like when I’m saying, the Rogue gives you agency to explore it as you want. That’s how you mix up your kit and what works for you. You will come across a boss, your kit might not work as well and you’ll know if you die. You’ll replay it and you’ll swap out a couple abilities because this boss heavy fire, or this boss is heavy water. Your imbues and everything will change on the fly. But I mean, that’s one of the things I love about her. She’s all about combos.

Shely:
Absolutely. The key thing that enables that to work so fluidly is that at all times, the Rogue has both ranged and melee weapons equipped. So you could have on your skill bar at the same time without dropping out of combat without doing anything, both melee and range abilities, and mixed them together seamlessly.

Neinball:
I guess in the Q&A, they had mentioned that the Rogue class quests were kind of a central identity for just the Rogue and we weren’t going to get similar features for the other classes. Are those class quests going to be just for like introducing their various sub factions or are there going to be continual elements added throughout the entire story of Diablo 4 to give them additional context?

Shely:
Well, we plan to add content to Diablo 4 after release. Of course, we want to make more, tell more stories and make more stuff for the game, but the class quests for the Rogue are the means by which you unlock each of your three specializations from those different sub factions. I would say that each class has their own unique thing. So while the Sorceress doesn’t have class quests, the Sorceress has has the enchantment system. Which is think that’s completely unique to her. Every class in Diablo 4 will have their own thing that makes them special. And one of the things that we think is really exciting about that if you’re playing Rogue and your playing with a Sorceress and you’re seeing their unique class mechanics, you might think to yourself, well, I should make a Sorceress.

Leviathan:
I wanted to talk about like the flow of combat. So when it comes specifically to imbues, is this something that we’re doing prior to entering and engagement, or is it like in the middle of value you’re choosing, I’ll do a poison imbue now or do a cold imbue. Also, branching from that is will we be allowed to change skills while we’re engaged with an enemy or are we locked into what we bring in?

Shely:
Your pretty flexible in changing skills. We don’t do a whole lot of hard locking of things by whether you’re in combat with an enemy. We don’t want to encourage players opening their skill bar in the middle of fighting monsters, because we don’t think trying to manipulate the UI really quickly is fun. But we’re not trying to create a whole lot of restrictions. In certain end game content, there may be some restrictions on things that you can bring in just to avoid exploits or undesirable farming behavior, where you farm something for an hour so that you can be really strong briefly. This is just to protect that. In terms of the imbue system specifically, imbues are active skills when used enchant your weapon temporarily for a few attacks with that element. So you can place a cold imbue on your skill bar, use the cold imbue, and then the other skills that you have will be cold infused and deal that additional cold effect. You could also place poisoned imbue on your skill bar. You could place them both on your skill bar at the same time. If you trigger a poison imbue while you have a cold imbue active, it will replace it, but both imbues can be active or all three imbues can be active on a monster at the same time. So you could do a cold imbue, fire, a barrage trigger, a poison imbue, do a rain of arrows and now you’ve got a monster that’s taking damage over time and child.So you can place a cold imbue on your skill bar, use the cold imbue, and then the other skills that you have will be cold infused and deal that additional cold effect. You could also place poisoned imbue on your skill bar. You could place them both on your skill bar at the same time. If you trigger a poison imbue while you have a cold imbue active, it will replace it, but both imbues can be active or all three imbues can be active on a monster at the same time. So you could do a cold imbue, fire, a barrage trigger, a poison imbue, do a rain of arrows and now you’ve got a monster that’s taking damage over time and child.

ThaPchild:
Yeah. We see a large focus of games like World of Warcraft, for example, their end game is alt character driven and some people only want to focus on their main character. Will Diablo 4 end game be able to sustain people who want to focus on a singular character?

Shely:
Yes, we are. We have this concept of eternal and seasonal realms, and we care about our eternal realm players, our players, who want to continue focusing on a single character for a long period of time. We plan to support those players so that they don’t feel left out in the cold or there’s nothing for them.

MrLlamaSC:
The question I have is, can you talk a little bit more about crafting and currency and gold sinks or currency sinks in the game? Just kind of a little bit more about like the economy in that way.

Shely:
The economy of a game is something that, uh, has to be carefully balanced. And so it continues to be in development. You know, where as we do play tests, we just did a play test recently and gold, there was too much gold. It didn’t feel valuable. We want gold to feel valuable Diablo 4 . We want you to care about how you’re spending your gold. So there are things in the game that costs a lot of gold. There are things that can escalate the gold cost over a short period of time. A healthy gold economy is one where the gold is going out as well as coming in. I don’t want to go into a bunch of specifics about in development features that that directly use gold, but yes, there is crafting thing. There are expensive things. There are situations where you’re going to either pay or things that use up gold. You’re not going to be continuously accumulating millions and millions of gold.

Dredscythe:
Looking at the Rogue and how the mobility is supposed to be the key aspect of the class. I’m looking at the B roll footage and how, you get from point A to B to C really quickly doing your damage, getting in, getting out. In the demo for DIablo 4 in 2019, the character kind of had like a little stick moment, at the end of your dodge and your character was kind of stuck there like a consequence of using it. How do you plan to make sure when the rapid movements happen the Rogue is still very fluid, and doesn’t incur unintentional stutter stepping when you’re doing your attacks and more so, dodging?

Kingdom:
At the playtest that we had at the last BlizzCon. I know what you’re talking about that little slow down at the very end of the evade. The easy answer is we got rid of that. Now it all flows very quickly, It was a mix of not wanting to play spam it nonstop. And that was the cost. There’s also other like service side things that went on, but, being able to evade now does not hick up your running at all. So you will immediately like your speed does not stop. It’s go straight on one together. And the Rogue was a big part of that because her combat. Her evades is very much part of her combat. Typically when she’s in the melee range. Joe, did you want to talk more about the evade?

Shely:
You covered it. We got a lot of feedback on that. Thank you for that feedback. That was wonderful. We have addressed it because of your feedback.

SVR:
Yeah. My question is based around a small incremental gain that you get each time you’re playing, we had at last BlizzCon we were told in the media Q&A that there will be a system where each time you’re playing, you put an X hours, your character will be stronger when you log off, even if you didn’t necessarily find an item upgrade. Now we know we have a similar system in Diablo 3 where it’s kind of a bit outrageous because nowadays in Diablo 3, you can’t really guarantee the item upgrade, but you can guarantee the incremental upgrade that you get by grinding Paragon. Last BlizzCon we got the confirmation that for each play session in Diablo 4 you will be stronger. Is there anything that changed on this end? Will there still be this incremental gain system? And if so, is it more clear nowadays how it looks like?

Shely:
That’s something that’s under development right now. In fact, I’m going to go back Monday and we’re going to review more iteration on that. We think philosophically that relying purely on the randomness, especially as you get better and better gear to feel validated for putting time into the game is not, it’s fine, but it could be better. We think that it adds value to have time invested in the game, give some benefit. That said, we want to be very careful that we recognize that at times in the past, such as you are referring to that it can feel like grinding is more rewarding than skill play or comprising the right items that it can come to dominate that. We also recognize that having a system like this, that is uncapped further encourages unhealthy play styles. Those are two key philosophy points that we’re taking into our iteration on this, this feature.

Leviathan:
Mine is around camps and I think we heard a little bit about it yesterday. My understanding was that you basically come across, you know, something that’s been hostily taken over because there’s this power vacuum now with the monsters and such. So is like a one-time thing that we do? We find a camp, we take it over, it becomes like a waypoint outpost kind of thing, or is this power struggle thing continuing to go on? So like you’ll have to go back and recapture it after some time?

Shely:
So far, we feel like the permanence of changing the world by taking over a camps is something that we want to respect As we continue to develop the game, that’s something that we could reevaluate. Careena can talk a lot more about the details of camps and how they work.

Kingdom:
I think it’s really important to know that it is a permanent change and you, as the hero of the story are making a change to the entire world. The whole idea behind it is that those camps are, you know, become infested or some evil has taken over cannibals or, you know, destroying the local towns and there’s no one there. Once you defeat them and you return that camp to a site that actually allows, you know, all the marketplaces get to reopen back up and you unlock new vendors, new places where you can sell your gear, and a waypoint that you can actually now permanently have access to. Sometimes we can ask questions on whether or not that changes it for everyone else in the world and what it is because of the way it works is it changes it for you when you will be paired up with other people who have also made that permanent change to the world in terms of the PVE, no one will come across and see a thing that they themselves haven’t accomplished. So we want every player to have that impact in their own sort of game space.

Shely:
That’s right. The only situation where you might see that is if you’ve explicitly invited someone to your party where you’re the party leader,. They will see your state.

Cas:
I don’t know if that kind of answered, but my question was, you mentioned that you’ll be paired with people with similar game states. Are you going to be sort of, if you’re not in a party, will you not be able to see players that have different world states or will they be separated? How will that work?

Shely:
Our engine technology distributes players through the world. There are some situations where you might be in a state that conflicts with another player state, and then you wouldn’t see them unless you’re in a party with them. For example, the camps case.

Jmurda:
As a Hardcore player, I’m a little interested in the PVP permanence. Is PVP death permanent like it would be if you were killed by a monster boss. If, so there seems like there’s a lot of risk and rewards has to be worth that risk. Can you talk about that?

Shely:
Yeah. Not at the moment the game is under-development. Please tell us, all of you Hardcore players who really are excited about this, please tell us what you want with regard to that and we’ll incorporate that into the conversation. You know, we get feedback from our team on things like this. We think as you alluded, that if you lose your character when you’re playing in the fields of hatred in Hardcore mode that they might be desolate wastelands, because everyone is afraid to enter. There are certain things, we want to treat Hardcore with respect and we want to make sure that the rules that the players expect to have from past games that we’re being consistent with those rules. We did add something called the scroll of escape, which is a very rare consumable item. It drops in Hardcore only. You’re not going to have 50 of these. You don’t even have two of these. You might have, you might have one, if you have one, you’re going to treasure it, but it can be used to escape any dangerous situation. Whether it be a boss fight or other situation. If you are disconnected, we are very, very fast about determining whether you’ve been disconnected, but because of the way the internet works there is a moment where you might be disconnected and we don’t know yet. In that case, if you’re playing Hardcore and you have a scroll of escape, we will use it. The scroll of escape is not a guaranteed free get out of jail card though, because you’re going to end up in a random location in the world could. Could end up in one of the fields of hatred, in fact. But you can use it, you could use it in the fields of hatred. You could use it in a boss fight.

Jmurda:
That was delicate. So thank you for answering.

Wudijo:
I have one question about if you have any idea how the different activity is going to pan out in the end game? So will the open world scale through like the max level of it? You can go anywhere to quest or grind or something? Or is going to be a certain levels in certain zones? What about instance content with Dungeons? Is that going to be like the true end game where you eventually mostly spend time, you know, grinding Dungeons instead of going out in the world because you have completed everything. So how is the distribution going to be?

Shely:
Yeah, we talked a little bit about end game last BlizzCon in our announce. We’ve been continuing to work on it, and I would keep an eye out for upcoming information about that. Information about where we’ve continued to develop in subsequent blog posts, quarter two, quarter three and quarter four. To answer the second part of your question, we don’t want you to get to the end game and stop going out into the open world. We want to have a balance between doing dungeon content, which is instance. It has its bite-sized pieces of content. You’ve got a clear beginning, middle and an end, and that has a really solid place at end game, but we also want you to be we want there to be things for you to do out in the world that are challenging and appropriate for end game difficulty.

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