Diablo IV Interview with Kripparrian - MMO Aspects, End-Game, D3 Comparison

Diablo IV Geposted 31.03.2023 um 11:33 von Wowhead

Disclaimer: This one-on-one spoken interview was lightly edited and condensed for the purpose of clarity.Wowhead: You've had a long history with the Diablo franchise, starting back in the original Diablo with that unfortunately ill-fated character that was hacked just before level 50 all the way to your incredible Diablo III world-first hardcore Inferno Diablo kill. You've been immersed in the franchises’ lore and gameplay for so long and have experienced so many different iterations of ARPG designs - in the current era of ARPG difficulty and complexity, do you believe Diablo IV is striking the correct balance between catering to casual and hardcore players?Kripparrian: It’s pretty difficult to say what the casual ARPG experience is supposed to be like. I’m actually not sure if any game has really defined it. I think from a Hardcore perspective, the build depth potential is definitely there - though it definitely needs finer balancing for playstyle-oriented decisions to be made. The screws aren’t quite tightened on balancing, skills being equal in power and in terms of clear speed. There will definitely be a build that vastly outperforms every class, and it really requires quite a lot of balance for there even to be multiple options. In the very best case we will have like two builds per class, but until there’s like some iterations and some really fine balancing done, I think people will kind of in a way be forced to play what is effective over what they want to play.

The idea that people will be able to play Hardcore and have playstyle decisions, 4-5 build options per class, that’s a bit distant into the future. For the casual crew, I think the early experience is a little bit weird. I imagine that they have a pretty good curve for the level scaling that constantly happens in the game, but in the first few levels it seems really wonky. You certainly feel your character getting weaker as it levels up in the first dozen levels - at least in the Beta. The casual experience starts at very early levels, and the Beta wasn’t too great with that, which could have an effect on the casual gamers’ motivation to reach the end-game. But, similar to World of Warcraft, this part of the experience won’t be as important once we reach higher levels. To answer your question, I don’t really know what a finely tuned casual ARPG experience really is. Maybe Blizzard tries to define it with Diablo 4.
WH: Speaking of World of Warcraft, It's clear that Diablo IV and many new ARPGs have quite a bit of MMO influence to them, from the multiplayer aspect to things such as world bosses. How do you feel about that encroaching influence - do you think it's good or bad for the growth of the ARPG genre as a whole?Kripp: I had some experience with Lost Ark in that regard, which is a very MMO-like ARPG experience. To me, this game experience was quite an unwelcoming surprise just because I was expecting an ARPG but it was more of a 70/30 experience. It’s like you’re hyping up to eat some delicious Chinese food, but then all your favorite Chinese restaurants are closed and you need to eat something else which might be close, but not quite the same.

Coming from Diablo I to III going into Diablo IV, some players may have an unwelcoming experience. On the other side, if we go way back, I think a lot of Diablo III’s core player base is actually World of Warcraft players. When they announced the 1-year subscription, at one point you got Diablo III for free. I imagine that those players made up a considerable portion of the player base back then. For me personally, Path of Exile has moved me in a direction of a mostly single-player experience paired with some kind of odd multiplayer interaction. We don’t know how much of that will become reality in Diablo IV, though.
WH: Dungeons are one of the other highly discussed systems coming out of the Diablo IV Beta, and it's clear that this was one of the mechanics you were most passionate about - given the MMO influence you just talked about in Diablo IV, do you think dungeons might be saved by implementing something like the wildly popular Mythic + system, or do you think that this would MMO-ify the ARPG genre too much?Kripp: I kinda have to take your question and move it into more of my experience. I haven’t really done the Mythic+ dungeons in World of Warcraft all that much. I do know that MMO dungeons are kind of like a 30-minute ordeal type of thing a lot of the time, and you have to rely on group members. I think D4 isn’t quite there. I think the dungeons are easily soloable. I don’t even know if doing them in a group offers any advantage, maybe it offers even disadvantages. We know there’s going to be some kind of Nightmare sigils which update dungeons to become very similar to Diablo III’s Greater Rifts, so I think it’s still more of an ARPG experience in terms of the overall design.

My main criticism regarding dungeons is that some objectives are very poorly designed. The one I have the most issues with is the “Den of Evil” kind of kill-all-monsters objective. Having an advanced character and having to deal with 300 monsters in a dungeon, chasing every single monster down, is an awful experience. As a side result, the Sorcerer becomes an even stronger class because they can move around much quicker in dungeons that need backtracking or extensive monster clearing. If the Sorcerer didn’t exist in D4, I would have had a whole lot less fun in the Beta test, and interacting with the dungeon mechanics would be an even bigger reason for that.

I should mention that upon exhaustively playing and farming with many characters in the Beta, I would say that some dungeons are actually pretty fun. You can just pick a dungeon that has a good layout or a lot of monsters, and some of them are quite consistently fun because there are only tiny deviations like lever placement. I don’t know how it works in the higher levels when it comes to Nightmare sigils, but if you get to pick your dungeon it would actually solve a lot of problems I initially talked about. If I can run dungeons I like to run and make them a whole lot more difficult, I think that would be a great solution. However, some dungeons are way easier than others, so balancing again plays a huge role; we have to see how things play out, but there are definitely some interesting design angles that the game could take.
WH: You’ve talked about the Sorcerer a bit in regard to gameplay and power standards. In your recent class ranking video, you ranked Sorcerer as the #1 class based on your findings in the Beta because it feels like the most polished class. Do you feel like Blizzard should bring Sorcerers down in terms of power level, or should other classes get buffed instead?Kripp: Power has a lot of different angles to it. I think the one thing that the Sorcerer excels at and will continue to excel at is mobility. Teleport is an incredibly strong movement skill, and its cooldown decreases significantly when you invest points into it. I believe you can get a skill up to Level 18, and getting it to 12 should be very doable early in the game. With that, we’re looking at a 5-second cooldown on Teleport. Combined with a couple of cooldown-reducing mechanics like Teleport’s first upgrade, you might have a very similar movement experience compared to Diablo II’s Sorceress, almost instantly teleporting around the map. While the class might get out-damaged by the Necromancer on paper, the minion class doesn’t have any way to move quickly other than walking - it’s a completely different approach to class power. You might do more damage, but it’s a lot less fun of an experience.

In terms of overall class balance, I think that classes will be a lot closer together compared to Beta. The Beta represents a massive difference in low-level character power. Getting a Druid to 25, for example, is pretty difficult. I think Druids are going to be pretty good in the end-game, actually! The Ultimate passive looks very strong, for example - but you won’t unlock that until the low 30s, so getting there will be quite the adventure unless you get the right legendary aspects to work with. But in the end, that is what I am really looking forward to when playing Diablo IV at launch: It’s like the Wild West, and you figure out what’s good. I actually do think that character complexity is quite high. My favorite part of Path of Exile is making and testing builds, that is what I really like about the game. Diablo IV is, regardless of how the game is going end up in terms of balance, I’m pretty sure I’m getting that particular experience out of it, so I’m very excited!

WH: That is interesting - you don’t think that Diablo IV is as easy as everyone thinks it is, or rather will be?
Kripp: I think the difficulty is going to actually take everybody by surprise. To me, Diablo IV’s systems seem to be extremely difficult to min-max, especially because the overall balance is not quite there. The differences between a normal and an optimized character are going to be absolutely massive.

WH: Switching back to your Diablo IV review video - you mentioned that the UI is one of Diablo IV’s weak points right now. if you had to isolate one specific UI element to be changed immediately, what do you think would have the most positive impact on players?
Kripp: There are some elements of the UI that I think are fantastic. The skill tree and its clarity, the small yet perfectly visible health bars - some things are done incredibly well. I went back and went through every single UI element and I got the feeling that one half is done extremely well while the other half is done extremely badly. I hope there is continuous work being done in this department.

For most players playing Diablo, the biggest thing is going to be the map. I don’t play with a transparent map overlay, and I think I’m in the minority on that, but the minimap doesn’t offer any ways to interact with it. You can’t zoom in or out, it’s just a flat visible thing, but if you want any more details you have to bring up the full map and block out your entire character along with everything on the screen such as health bars and mana. That is just not a good system - you cannot do that. In a game like this, with the ambitions, the complexity, and the character agency that it has, the map needs something. There’s a lot of annoying stuff, like the character stats page and the inventory page that I think are functionally okay - like I can get over an inventory that I don’t like the look of, or I can deal with having to click four extra times to look at my actual attributes.

The main reason why a lot of people have isolated the UI as being poor is that the UI is part of the overall visual experience, and there is just such an incredible difference between Diablo IV being such a beautiful and compelling visual game that the UI just really ruins it. It’s like a few pieces of litter on a pristine beach - they really stand out when the UI isn’t working.

WH: I think you hit the nail right on the head with that because I remember as my first character loaded into the beta being struck by just how incredible everything looked - having those wargs jump out of the darkness at you, seeing everything in the scenery around you and then a short while later finding that first item with a scrollable tooltip and stopping dead while staring at it in my inventory going “why on earth does this exist?”

Kripp: The item scroll can be bad enough that it can completely cover the legendary power on the item, so you are forced to interact with that system if you have advanced tooltips on, and you need to have advanced tooltips on as you’re playing through.

WH: I found several items that did that myself, and every time I did I couldn’t help but think to myself that something needs to change with this. I think you make an excellent point about the map as well - I’m one of those people that ever since Diablo II, my map overlay was always active and I have to admit I’m a little conflicted about that because as you mentioned, this game is gorgeous; the art direction in this game is absolutely stunning - and it feels like a mix between needing that overlay because it feels better and it’s how a lot of people play the game versus the potential for people only looking at the overlay instead of enjoying how beautiful the world is.

Kripp: Yes, that’s a difficult issue to answer and think about - I don’t really know what players expect and where the balance lies between form and function there.

WH: Okay, one last question - go ahead and put your tinfoil lore hat on for me because I’d love to know what you think here. Given what you know about the Diablo franchise, if you had to take a guess, who - or what - do you think the Bloodied Wolf is that we encountered?

Kripp: The Bloodied Wolf - it seemed friendly, but it didn’t really have that charm that I feel they would use if they were going to betray us again as they did with Leah in Diablo III. I feel like the wolf is a genuinely helpful character, maybe one of the angels. I expect they’ll introduce many new characters because I think they’re trying to redefine what Diablo is - if you go back to Diablo III, you’re a Nephilim, you’re basically a God, but now suddenly you’re back to being some guy challenging the Gods and the Heavens, so you’re going to need all the help you can get if the storyline is going to make any form of sense! I’m not really expecting them to kill off notable characters from previous games either, so it could very well be Tyrael or one of the angelic friends, or even something in between - I have faith that the wolf is a good doggo!

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