Difference between revisions of "Combat"

Revision as of 08:52, 26 December 2008

Combat is the main activity engaged in while playing games in the Diablo series; they're not known as click-fests for nothing. Diablo isn't an RPG with a lot of social activities, or professions, or NPC dialogue. It's about killing vast hordes of evil monsters. Every class in Diablo III is a DPS class; all are capable of prolifically slaying the enemies, whether by spells, skills, brute force, or a clever combination of all three.

Aspects of combat are addressed throughout this wiki. Weapons and skills are detailed, monsters are described, strategies are promoted, and more. This page covers the basics of combat, and how the game is designed to facilitate it, with numerous quotes from the D3 Team.

In Depth Combat

One criticism of earlier games in the series is that they are fairly one-dimensional, in terms of combat. One or two skills can be used over and over again, in almost every situation, and there's little thought required. This was especially the case in Diablo II, where players were nearly god-like in their powers and could easily escape almost any dangerous situation by running or teleporting away. The D3 Team wants to make combat much more tactical in D3; it will still be a fast-paced, click-intensive Action RPG, but there should be a bit more strategy required than "click til dead."

Jay Wilson talked about the shallowness of combat in D2, and his plans to deepen it in D3 with 1up.com in December 2008.

The combat model doesn't have a lot of depth in the previous games. It was very much a "one-skill spam" kind of game, which I think works great for the Normal [difficulty] playthrough. I think most of the audience is just fine with that, and through most of the Normal difficulty, it's going to be like that. But as you go into Nightmare and Hell difficulties, I think that the more serious player will appreciate a game that's a little deeper on the combat-mechanic side.

1up.com: What makes Diablo 3's combat deeper than its predecessors?

Jay Wilson: Combat is as deep as the options the designers give themselves. Whenever you add a new capability to a monster -- potentially something that feels unbeatable -- it's more of an opportunity to expand the depth of your characters so they can respond to those threats. A good example would be if you look at Diablo 2: There were a couple of problems with just the power of the characters and the way they were made powerful. A player could run faster than any monster, so you could escape just about any threat. You had endless health and resource -- by resource, I mean mana -- because of potions. And you had the Town Portal, which could instantly get you out of any problem. Those were incredibly powerful mechanics to escape danger and were not class-specific. So every kind of class really had no need for anything like an escape skill or reactionary ability. They simply needed to attack, and if they ever got in over their heads, they simply ran away or drank potions. And it's the same response across the board.

So one of the things we focused on is that response -- 1) setting up scenarios where the players can't easily get out of danger without the use of class-specific skills, and 2) giving them really simple controls to use a broader range of skills without making the game that much more complex to play. I really distinguish the difference between complexity and depth; to me, complexity is adding more buttons, while depth is making a single button more powerful and versatile. So that's always been our goal -- reducing the amount of controls while making each button mean more. So that's one of the reasons we added the Hotbar; it's one of the reasons why we avoided the potion-health system. And when people play the game, they may not notice this next point that much, but we leveled out the movement speed somewhat so that the player moves at a more reasonable rate compared to the monsters.