DGC Ep 157: Diablo III Bonus

Welcome to Dev Game Club, where this week we look in this bonus episode at Diablo III to discuss the game's impact and systems, while also touching on a Kingdom Hearts update and getting into a ton of listener feedback. Dev Game Club looks at classic video games and plays through them over several episodes, providing commentary.

Issues covered: Kingdom Hearts 2 side/end game stuff, the inventive choices you have to make to do side stuff in JRPGs, figuring out constraints and min/maxing against them, generosity in game design and development, finding ways in development to layer on more stuff, adding more to a game, being good at making the game you make and losing that institutional knowledge, sticking together and iterating, thinking outside the box for a platform, business model and the endless game, not caring about the campaign, being able to drop into certain types of game, soaking in the endorphins, having quest randomness in the first game and in adventure mode in Diablo III, hero rooms in Republic Commando, having areas become memorable through repeated play, games as a service, encouraging and cross-pollinating classes, Diablo and WoW influencing one another, incorporating the auction house and gray market sales in Diablo II, going against player expectations, purchasable cosmetics as a revenue stream, being generous with your success, vicious and virtuous cycles in revenue models, anticipating Diablo IV, establishing your game's reputation, procedurality and generosity, shooter-looters and the expense of making new content, embracing rogue-likes as a way to leverage a small team, making a lot of content and having players chew through it, procedural board game generation and fitting together worlds, lore through-lines from the first game in campaign mode, bringing in new characters to bring in both new and old fans, having to establish a character as interesting in their own right, leveraging 3D for more variety and efficiency, every character having spell-like abilities, couch co-op is more about the couch, reflecting on the Brevik interview, gold taking up space in inventory, weird multiplayer friction with gold taking up space, high value resources and gold forcing you to spend money, disarm trap skill, mechanics in conflict with the game, low lethality of traps, bosses in Diablo, difficulty of making boss battles interesting, experimenting with traps as a boss battle design, limiting to one mouse button for the Mac, Blizzard having a lot to answer for with our nation's youth, the cost of connecting to the Internet in the late 90s, video games pushing technology, the changing expenses of telecommunications, digitizers, skill and technology gaps for 3D modeling, even making stuff in 2D on a computer was hard and slow, getting into the industry, growing the developer tent to include economists and psychologists, grit and streamlining, knowledge vs design grit, grit as a side effect of development style, adding grit to the development process, adding in only what you need.

Games, people, and influences mentioned or discussed: Kingdom Hearts 2, Lore Reasons/Waypoint, Square, Final Fantasy IX, Republic Commando, Crystal Dynamics, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Nintendo Wii, Tomb Raider Anniversary, Diablo (series), Nintendo Switch, Dominion, Borderlands 3, Blizzard, World of Warcraft, Guild Wars, Reed Knight, Dead Cells, Jason Schreier, Maddy Myers, Into the Breach, FTL, Andrew Kirmse, Meridian 59, Destiny, Star Wars, Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance, A Way Out, David Brevik, Anthony Gallegos, Marvel Heroes, RebelFM, LamestarGames, Journeyman2011, Raymond Cason, Good Old Games, Derek Achoy/speakyclean, Shenmue, DreamCast, Sean Richards, Super Mario Galaxy, Bungie, StarCraft, LucasArts, Zimmy Finger, Out of This World, Portal, Jon Knowles, Turn 10, Forza Horizon, Super Star Wars, SNES, Dark Forces, Mark Crowe, BakedPotato, Jesse Morgan, Aaron Evers, Mark Wahlberg, Invincible, Halo, Mike Vogt, Devil May Cry, Resident Evil, Monster Hunter (series), Capcom, Dark Souls, Bethesda Game Studios, Daron Stinnett, Starfighter, Unity, Unreal, Shigeru Miyamoto, Peter Baumgartner, Dark Crystal.

Next time:
Devil May Cry -- First 4 Missions!

Links:
The Making of Final Fantasy IX

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