David Brevik
One of the things I became infamous for is that I would often come in, and, I don't know about often, but every now and then I would come in and say, "So, I had this idea in the shower this morning." It was like, "Oh, Dave's shower idea has hit the game hard, because it's some major change to the game."
Erich Schaefer
At some point early on we went with the skill tree idea. We didn't start with that. That was a brainstorm by Brevik again. He was like, "Hey, let's make skill trees that are similar to tech trees in [Civilization II]," which I believe we were playing at the time. So that sort of set the pace. Then we started to think, "OK, what would be on the trees for these various characters? Should they have shared abilities like they did in Diablo 1, or should they have their own skills entirely?" I think one of the cool things, before I get to the specific classes, again, I think we kind of came up with this. I'm sure there's examples, but at least for ourselves, of, the warrior classes use spells just like the mages. So, before that, warrior classes in RPGs would just come in and hack on guys. Maybe they had some ability or something, but they didn't have a raft of skills they would commonly use like we ended up doing in Diablo 2.
David Brevik
I have no idea where I thought of that idea. I mean, again, I thought of it in the shower. But I don't know where it came from. It came from, I didn't like the way that we were, how we were going up levels and getting these skills, and it didn't feel like there was enough creativity or choice or things like that. We wanted to give people this sense of, "How do I choose how to play my character?" We had all of these skills, and it was kind of a mess, and there was all of these potential builds, how do we organize it in such a way that allows the people to easily identify?
One of the great things about Diablo 1, but one of the problems with Diablo 1, is that, from my hardcore nerdy perspective, you could make so many different builds, because everybody could do everything. But from kind of a general audience view, they were overwhelmed with all the possibilities. So we wanted to narrow that down into classes, yet still give a lot of flexibility within that class to kind of customize yourself and make you different from everybody else. And that's really the concept behind it. It was, "I'm going to make my character very different, even though I'm a Paladin and you're a Paladin, my Paladin plays very different from your Paladin, because of the choices I've made." That was really where the idea came from, and this was just a way to organize that idea.
Max Schaefer
I remember even on a fundamental level, kind of one of our goals with the character classes is that they would be slightly different than the stereotypical RPG character classes, but recognizable enough that you would know what they do. You should be able to look at the character and kind of get a sense of the way they play and what they do. That was a principle that another one of our key guys, Matt Householder, termed "familiar novelty," where you're seeing something new that you haven't seen in a game, but you understand what it is right away.
David Brevik
One of the things that he did that was really good for design for us was the way that he sort of set up the spreadsheets, because we used Excel to do all the data. And the way that we set up the balance, and the way that we did skills, I think [Stieg Hedlund] really brought that with us. So, we were able to put in more content with the way that he designed the way that we were going to do the data stuff for the levels and the difficulty, and things like that. That was definitely a big factor as well, because he helped to contribute in many other ways with design on all sorts of stuff, from monsters to whatever, all sorts of things. A lot of the radical ideas, more radical design ideas came from either myself or Erich Schaefer, I would say, the most.
Erich Schaefer
The classes themselves developed during play. I think it was largely Dave and I saying, "Hey, what would be fun to do with this guy?" and just cooking up skills on the fly; but a lot of times, most classes had advocates in the office, and people were big Paladin fans, or big Necromancer fans. They would just throw out ideas to do. The classes developed as we went based on the artists, Kelly Johnson making some of these characters. Just the way he moved, and the way that they sort of looked, kind of developed, "Hey, this is what this guy would do. Obviously he would have a shield slam." So, I think, again, a cool part of our iterative process is just like, "What would be fun to do with this character now? How can we go even more gonzo when he levels up, and gets even cooler things to do?"
I can't remember any sharp disagreements [over classes]. I remember at the end, when there was a lot of concern over balance, and I remember, I'm not going to name names, but, people would say, "This skill is way too good." And we would argue about the balance of skills. And I think we ended up patching the game many times, but there were some really bad balance problems, due to just kind of weird arguments at the end, and since there were only two or three or four of us who really had in depth knowledge of how to play these characters towards the end game, we made some weird decisions just based on personalities. I don't remember, I think everybody was pretty much on board with the looks and the feels of the characters as we went along, though.
Max Schaefer
I remember, I think we did spend more time going back and forth, I think, on the look of the Sorceress. That was championed mostly by Mike Dashow. It ended up wonderful, but I do remember going back and forth on that. Paladin looked great from the get-go. The Barbarian too. Necromancer was such a weird class, nobody had any expectations or really strong feelings on what he should look like. And, what was the other one, the Amazon kind of did herself as well.
You start with concept sketches, and then first in-game models, and, there's always a little bit of, "Hey, that didn't look like it did in the sketch. Why is that?" "Well, our camera angle and the scale makes it such that… That type of clothing doesn't look right anymore… Or, the way they move or walk looks a little bit weird." And normally, you put it up on screen, and everyone agrees, "Hey, that doesn't look right." "OK, we'll go back and fix it." And that's just the standard way that things work. I know we worked on the Paladin's animations for a while, because his look didn't look quite right, but his walk was always spot on. I maybe even have an incorrect memory about this, but I remember we went back and forth about the Sorceress quite a bit before it was nailed down.
Erich Schaefer
Yeah, and I kind of remember a lot of joking that it looked like the Necromancer was wearing a skirt. We ended up leaving it, because enough of us liked it, but that was, not necessarily a contentious point. But it was pretty funny.
David Brevik
It's amazing how many new standard things came out of Diablo and Diablo II. It surprises me all the time. The rarity thing [for loot], for example, just kind of made sense. In some roguelikes, they would have your common item and your magic item, so they were different colors of text or whatever. If it was a magic item it was blue, if it was a normal item it was white, that kind of thing. And, so, we took a step further and went with the rarity levels. The rarer something is then it has a different color. That really has stuck with games, and then they took it to a whole new level with World of Warcraft, and it really became standardized roleplaying stuff ever since then.
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