Jay Wilson Interview: D3 Character Build Variety

Diii.net's exclusive interview with D3 Game Director Jay Wilson continues with some more character and skill coverage. In this installment Jay talks about how Blizzard designs the skills and characters to allow for a wide variety of viable builds and play styles, and how that process is one part design and several larger parts luck/surrendering to the fiendish ingenuity of the players.

[Medievaldragon]

I like all the features mentioned to further customize your character. And the fact you can spend points across any of the skill trees to access the next tier.

[Leord]

This might turn out to be more useful than they realize!

It allows people to put skills pretty flat, and with a few dependency lines, it's still pretty darn balanced.

[Cogo]

It's also harder to balance though. W'll see how they get out of this one...

[Xulfxulf]

I found interesting Jay's comments about surrendering the game to the players and not trying to make patch changes or tweaks to maintain how the designer wants it to be. Obviously that's not yet a problem with D3, but someday... it will be ours. The precious?

[Leord]

Well, there needs to be a basic balance. I think what he means is just that they won;t be twiddling with it like on WoW..

[Xulfxulf]

They can "twiddle on with it" and in fact they'll probably be required to do so, but there's a proper psychological state required. I've read about that in books and postmortems by Raph and other MMO designers. That games are often ruined by designers who can't let go of their vision and who keep trying to enforce it on the players. I'd guess Jay's read those same books/postmortems.

[Maticus]

I really enjoyed the melee sorceress, I hope they bring back the wizard version.

[moondragon]

Very intresting options you as a player seems to have. I like the Tier thing as well.

[Cogo]

People complaining about the auto-stat assignment are weird. There will be plenty of variety as it is. At least what they have shown so far!

[Malfurion]

Jay Wilson cracks me up

[DJDarkstar]

It is really good to see a lot of flexibility in the hands of players in the way of Character Customization. As one of those people who never stick to "The best spec" etc and love to play and test things for myself, this is awesome :D

[Recka]

This seems to be great, gonna be fun to play every class and try out alot of the different skill combo's or "Specs" if you will

[Wuushu]

JUST RELEASE. DO. IT. NOW. :)