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."
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?
