Almighty Video Game Designer

Chapter 186: Diablo’s Settings

Diablo’s design could be split into three main categories.

Story and quest lines: Building the foundations for the story as well as laying out every single quest line, allowing players to experience the story of the game seamlessly.

Map and level design: Create the scenes according to the story. Each chapter was placed in a different setting with different models and textures.

Moreover, one of Diablo’s biggest pros were its dynamically generated maps. Every scene the player experiences are randomly generated. Elements such as dungeon entrances and altars are randomly generated every time, which makes exploration one of the important pleasures of the Diablo series.

Combat system and monsters: This focused on the abilities the players have in combat as well as the characteristics each monster had, making the combat system feel more rich.

After these three points are done, everything else could be polished slowly over time.

Other than that, Chen Mo also wanted to make some changes to Diablo 3 in terms of art style and play style.

Chen Mo put an emphasis on cult, dark, scary, ominous, and bloody art style as he wanted the players to feel depressed and anxious when they play the game.

He also wanted to give the players a similar fear from the gameplay.

First, cut down on player attributes and increase boss damage. This will decrease the rates at which players beat levels, as they feel more in danger against large groups of enemies and bosses.

The worst part of Diablo 3 was the growth of the player at the later stages of the game. It gets to a point when it didn’t matter if the player was dodging attacks from the boss as they didn’t do much damage anymore.

The real trouble comes from elite mobs, but they weren’t beaten by out maneuvering or out skilling them, but it was based on equipment (resistance), making the game less tense that it should.

Therefore, Chen Mo strongly considered nerfing the growth of the attributes to allow the players to feel tense from the game.

Second, build on Diablo 2’s field of view design. The player’s field of view could be smaller, making it possible for the players to be under attack by enemies out of sight. This was especially important in dark caves or dungeons.

Third, designs could be borrowed from Diablo 2.

Take the character screen for example. In Diablo 2, the screen was placed in a dark town, the characters are blanketed in darkness and will only reveal themselves after the player had made their picks.

Diablo 3 on the other hand had character selection under moonlight, dramatically impacting on the atmosphere of the game.

Chen Mo wanted to make changes to all these functions and scenes that didn’t fit Diablo 2.

Fourth, the flow of narrative and player emotions should match Diablo 2.

Diablo 2 was a master at managing and manipulating player emotions. In the first chapter for example, the player would go through safety, danger, nervous, anxiousness, restricted, release, and relax in a cycle.

The first chapter went something like this:

Town (safe), Den of Devil (Danger), Kill all enemies, field of view increased (safe)

Cold Plains (safe), Blood Ravens (Nervous), Sisters’ Burial Grounds (Extreme Danger)

Stony Field (Safe), Underground Passageway (Danger), Dark Wood (Nervous), Jail (Anxious).

Inner Cloister (Temporary Breathing Room), Catacombs (Extreme restraint), Kill Andariel (Release, relax).

The players’ emotions rise and fall as they progress through the game as they are allowed to relax and times but are incredibly tense at others as they become increasingly immersed in the game.

However, Diablo 3 didn’t address this point so well. Evidently they didn’t care too much about the emotions of the players during level design.

Chen Mo planned to make slight changes to the progress of the scenes in Diablo 3 to remedy this, allowing scenes to better control the players’ emotions.

Moreover, Chen Mo planned to balance the game in the style of Blizzard, nerfing builds that players have a tendency towards. This allows the game to feel ordered among all the chaos, instead of making changes directly to the foundations of the game to meet his expectations.

After settling on a general design concept of Diablo, Chen Mo visited the Game Committee to run this through Qiao Hua to ensure the game wouldn’t have too much trouble during the review process before work resumed.

—

It was the eight day of the Chinese calendar, and the new employees officially started work.

Their new office was more or less in a finished condition. Computers, drawing tablets and other office supplies had arrived, and things like coffee machines, fridges, microwaves, and snacks were also provided.

Su Jinyu arrived back at work a day before the others to work on the new arrivals.

Chen Mo returned to the experience store at 11am.

“Manager, the new employees are here, would you like to welcome them?” said Su Jinyu.

Chen Mo nodded, “Alright.”

The new office was in a shop lot near the experience store. It was originally a cafe, but after a few light renovations it suited to be an office.

Everybody stood up upon seeing Chen Mo.

“Let’s meet in the meeting room, I’ll give a quick overview of what I expect,” said Chen Mo.

A meeting area was split out from the main office in order to form a meeting area for twenty people. After grabbing their seats, Chen Mo sat in the middle with his assistants by his side.

Chen Mo was quite happy with these new hires.

Most of them had plenty of working experience. As Chen Mo had the final say, the employees were more than capable.

Chen Mo looked around and said in a serious tone, “I’m pretty straightforward so I’ll skip the customs. I’ll skip the talk about pay as it has already been discussed when you guys were hired, but in summary, it’s higher than the industry average.

“I only have one wish, for you guys to complete the tasks I ask. I’m not sure what your previous companies were, but here, I go through every single detail of the game. I don’t hope to receive an ambiguous answer.

“No matter the circumstance, even if you don’t understand the intent behind my decisions, I hope that you will continue executing as ordered. You’ll understand the meaning behind them when the game is released.

“Similarly, as long as you guys do your jobs, I can guarantee that I’ll pay you what the companies cannot. You won’t have to worry about money as this isn’t one of those companies that skimps on that.”

The new hires seemed to be looking forward to this.

The vast majority of the new hires were older than Chen Mo, but not a single one dared question him as his experiences in the past two years trumped many of them.

Moreover, when considering the profitability of his games and his name, none of them dared to underestimate their boss who happened to be quite young.