Blizzard Talks Diablo 3 Inferno Monsters
Blizzard talks about the decisions made with Diablo 3's Inferno difficulty setting.
Diablo 3 arrives next month, and you know Blizzard will do everything it can to ignite potential customers with flames of anticipation by releasing little nuggets of never-before-told details until its release. Today we have Blizzard’s "Bashiok" who talks about the monsters Diablo 3 players will encounter in the Inferno mode.
Based on this post, the Inferno monster levels used to be linear so that players could go wherever they wanted and farm for items. It would be no more or less difficult than any other area in Inferno. But after play testing, the team decided to make the monsters progressively more difficult.
"It just felt wrong," he admitted. "It didn't feel right to be progressing through the game and have it stay pretty much the same difficulty the whole time. It felt like a letdown to get to the final boss of the game and it be no more difficult than the first."
He goes on to explain that there's a wide variety of players and that the team wanted to make sure everyone had something that suited their gameplay style. And while Blizzard expects that with enough time and dedication players will reach level 60, the jump in difficulty to Inferno needed to be different amounts for different people.
According to Bashiok, there are the "hardcore-casual" people, and then there are the "crazy" people. Raise your hand if you're part of the latter group.
"For the crazy people, they need a HUGE ramp in difficulty," he said. "For a more 'casual but still hardcore' audience, you want an obvious but milder increase in difficulty. So for the crazy people who play non-stop, they’ll hit Act I and get a challenge, but 1 month later they’ll still have something to work on (Acts II, III and IV). For the 'hardcore-casual' they will reach level 60 later and not get brick walled when they reach Inferno. They can experience some 'small victories' working on Act I with the dream of maybe someday reaching the later acts."
Just so we're clear, Diablo 3 will get hellishly, "brutally" hard in Inferno mode the closer players get to the end. "We know people really want goals to work towards and challenges to overcome," he said. "We made Act III and Act IV really, really brutally hard, for the most elite players only. It felt wrong to make ALL of Inferno that brutally hard."
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Sounds like a challenge that may require a few extra sets of weight lifting with the index finger before the game arrives on May 15. Does anyone even sell finger dumbbells?
Kevin Parrish has over a decade of experience as a writer, editor, and product tester. His work focused on computer hardware, networking equipment, smartphones, tablets, gaming consoles, and other internet-connected devices. His work has appeared in Tom's Hardware, Tom's Guide, Maximum PC, Digital Trends, Android Authority, How-To Geek, Lifewire, and others.
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aznguy0028 I'm actually very happy to hear this. Looking forward to the monsters kicking my ass left and right! :DReply -
outlw6669 Reply9357017 said:Does anyone even sell finger dumbbells?
Why yes they do :o
http://www.finger-weights.com/ -
Pherule This somewhat defeats the whole point of the "entire area being farmable". Guess it'll be back to doing runs in only the final act once players are strong enough. I'm disappointed, because I thought Blizzard wanted to avoid that.Reply -
crackseed PheruleThis somewhat defeats the whole point of the "entire area being farmable". Guess it'll be back to doing runs in only the final act once players are strong enough. I'm disappointed, because I thought Blizzard wanted to avoid that.Reply
I understand what you're saying but if you think aobut how they're doing it, it's actually still MUCH better then D2's scheme. In D2 we basically sat in small chunks of area clearing to 2-3 big name bosses which DID get brutally boring. It was either that or risk your cow level creation capability by hoping no one would kill the king after everyone farmed the level for loot/XP.
With D3, you have the entire game on Inferno that you can farm. Granted, A1 will yield slightly less better loot then A2+, but given that you DO need to farm to tackle the later portions, you can easily blow through all of A1 per session instead of having to just take a WP to Worldstone Keep and be like 'Oo - Baal" - now, it'll be all about combating those far more nasty packs of random-modded boss monsters, which, IMO - was the true fun of Diablo's combat.
It's a win-win overall, though it may still need some tweaks once we get our hands on it :) -
gaborbarla I remember that it was a challange to kill Diablo at the end of Diablo 2. Then I saw my friend that was farming for weapons years later, and he could kill the hardest level Diablo in 12 seconds including the time it took to hop all the way to the end of the passage where diablo resides in. If he found a weapon he wanted he kept it, otherwise reload and try again, thousands of times. :DReply