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Skill Point System
- Skill point system - goals is increased sense of power progression, power, and customization
- Skill points - pretty straight foward - either pick new skills or rank up existing skills.
- Skill points granted on level up and on discovery of skill point tomes.
- Bottom of the tree is most powerful - from simple to more complicated play styles.
- Uses example of a cold branch on the wizard tree - i.e. skill that says instead of freezing, you get a bonus to damage.
Open World
- Dungeons are not open world - max party size 4, still 'private'
- Campaign areas start as private, only to you and your party. Once you've completed the campaign objective for that area, the world becomes shared.
- What does open world mean? Seeing players outside your party, public events, huge shared bosses
- Collectibles, open world pvp, other players, crafting materials - all in the Open World.
- How many players? Achieving a certain feeling - it should feel like a bleak and dangerous place so on occasion you'll see one or two other players but mostly be alone. Exceptions will be something like world boss event where more players will be seen in a certain area. Towns are the same.
Grouping/Solo Play
- Example of playing D4 with other players: You can jump into parties - party leader's state in the campaign area is shared with the party. Not stuck in your own story mode.
- Clans will exist - with clan banners.
- In game voice chat for parties and clans.
- 2 player couch co-op on consoles supported.
- What about more solo players? Nothing has to be done in a player, all the best content can be done solo or in a group - nothing stopping you from doing everything on your own.
- The level to which you engage with others is totally up to you. It's just as viable to play alone.
New Dungeon Mechanics
- Lots of dungeons in D4 - we want them dark, dangerous, and scary.
- Dungeons are randomly generated.
- Wants a tension between risk and reward in D4 dungeon crawling.
- Randomly generated buildings OR exteriors.
- Seamless exploration - this means no more loading screens to go from one floor to another! We can blend randomly generated tile sets together - dungeons can be sprawling interconnected areas.
- As you're crawling your way through dungeons, there will be random events and dungeon objectives.
- Random events: no longer restricted to a certain place in the world - i.e. Altar of Bishibosh in Whispering Woods or Alter.
- Dungeon objectives - creates a sense of identity for a specific dungeon to set them apart from one another. Objectives are completed by doing specific things in the dungeon like killing a specific mob. Doing more objectives changes the dungeon i.e. once you complete an objective, the final boss could be alerted and send more mobs at you, etc.
- End game dungeons: We know doing one thing over and over again is not great. Look for Varied Content, Strategic Depth, and Player Agency.
- Adding a new item called a Dungeon Key - for a specific dungeon, upgrades a specific dungeon to an End Game Dungeon - improves quality of drops.
Dungeon keys can roll a specific affix for that dungeon.
- Example - Lightning Pulse - adds a lightning pulse which chases you through the dungeon until you complete a particular objective - can't be killed until that particular objective is done.
- Plan is to haven hundreds of dungeons in the game. Upgrades to dungeons, changes in difficulty and affixes, will require different builds, skills, etc.
Monsters and Bosses
- Fallen lunatics are back!
- Skeletons - in D4, new item called Skeletal Ballista
- Elites: new category of affixes
- Enhancing Affixes - so for a mob that shoots arrows, they can gain Multishot. But if it's on a Fallen Shaman, instead of resurrecting one brute, he resurrects three.
- Boss: Tomb Lord - resurrector, blinds you with storm of bone, etc.
- New to D4 - Evade ability available to all classes. A dash and a strike back - good to get out of things.
- Unstoppable - Break out of crowd control and become immune.
- Boss: Ashava - first world boss. VERY LARGE!
- New Stagger system - your CC will work in a different way against bosses - it stacks up, building up a stagger bar, when that bar fills, a unique behaviour happens per boss. For Ashana for example, it breaks off her arm blades, making the next boss attack safer.
Legendaries and Itemization
- More item affixes the higher the quality
- Addition of Mythic quality items
- New affixes - damage to far away enemies, + one rank to a talent (adds to maximum rank)
- We want legendaries to be equal or great to set items.
- Example: Teleport items -Damage reduction when you teleport, gain crit when you teleport, infinite but random teleport, nova when you teleport.
But lots of legendaries will work for lots of skills, not necessarily that specific.
- Mythic items: equip limit one but 4 legendary powers on them.
- Runes and Runewords coming to D4 - 2 types, condition runes and effect runes.
- Combine one of each to form a runeword. i.e. "When you freeze an enemy, activate the next rune" "When the run is activated, reduce damage" becomes, damage reduction when you freeze an enemy.
Q&A
Q: Monetization/business model? How do I buy D4?
A: Very early days here, what I can confirm is we will sell a base game and expansions and I can confirm we will not sell power.
Q: Customization of my build - through legendaries or other options?
A: It's one of our main goals of D4. Skill point system i.e. Barb shout rank 1 does not have unstoppable but higher ranks do. Talent system will alter as well - 2 people with same kills could have different talent builds. Legendaries also will help customize.
Q: Offline mode? Solo?
A: You can solo everything, but no there will be no offline mode. Dungeons and campaigns remain private.
Q: Is there trading? How does it work?
A: We think it's the best that getting loot from monsters is the best way to get loot. We still do want to allow trading - but looking for feedback. 3 types of tradeable item - free trade items, limited trade items (tradeable one time), highest quality most powerful items are not tradeable. Still being worked on.
Q: PvP? How will it work? What does that do to balance?
A: Same talents/skills/items for PvP as PvE but the goal is to have enough choices and options that the best choices will be different for each play style. We want to locate issues as they arise and strategically balance things to make both formats good. We will have lots of tuning knobs to balance properly.
Q: How common will legendaries drop?
A: They will not rain from the sky in D4. Harder and harder content means better and better items. Because items will be so much better at higher difficulties, drop rate will not be altered, just better items.
Q: Combat pace of play?
A: Because of the timers in D3, it made people rush. End game dungeons currently with lots of different objectives, it means that pace of combat will be very different in every dungeon, particularly because of dungeon affixes. Lightning pulse, for example, means constant pressure to go fast. Finding all 4 idols for example will make the dungeon slower. Because of Evade skill, combat will feel more intentional. Have to be good at timing, plan is to make it a more intentional experience.
You'll want to take on tough challenges, but replayability is best when you have a varied experience. There will be hooks to play a varied difficulty content to encourage replayability.
Q: Random stats on each item?
A: Affixes will be randomized values within a range - so 2 items could have same affixes but different values. Planning on customizing affixes but no word on that yet.
Q: How will you support the game once it's live? Seasons, etc?
A: Yes, seasons will exist. Main goal for seasons to be to change up the player experience. Not many details yet. Example is: new legendary items introduced to seasons, or spotlight different legendary items from season to season. This is only one thing we can do for seasons. More info coming.
Q: Will we have Hardcore mode?
A: Of course we're going to have Hardcore mode.