Why is it so hard to make a Diablo game?

Posted by Kayla Phantom On Sunday, October 23rd 2011 in Games

All hardcore gamers are eagerly expecting the launch of Diablo III next year. Ever since the game has been first announced in June 2008, games that fell under the same genre had to be launched in the shadow of the well known franchise.

The most important thing for the games from the Diablo franchise, besides the graphics, character art and design level, is the loot drop system which had required years of beta testing.

"That balance is honestly the main reason why it takes so long to make a proper Diablo game," Kevin Martens, who is the lead content designer for Diablo III explained for Gamasutra. "The bulk of our work goes into tuning the game's loot drop system," he added. "There are so many parameters to alter, it can be dizzying. Even the slightest increase to gold drop can suddenly change everything in the game. Even a .01 percentage change in loot drop can drastically change the balance between player challenge and reward."

Failure is easy to achieve in this industry, therefore the objective of creating a game that sells millions from the moment it is launched can be very high-pressing: "[Keeping fans happy is] absolutely one thing we always have to keep in mind when we tweak anything in the game, because we have to normalize those slight changes to over a million players, or even 5 million players."

Talking about the experience of the players, Martens added: "Even defining what 'super rare' means in the game changes when you scale to five million players. So even if we make a mistake with a 'super rare' item and it only affects 400 players out of 5 million, that still is 400 players who have a bad experience. It's really a big deal."