Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

By Garrett Fuller, Industry Relations

At BlizzCon 2008, the Ten Ton Hammer team kicked off the show by attending the first panel which featured the much anticipated Diablo III. Lead Designer Jay Wilson and Technical Game Designer Wyatt Cheng got up to talk about their new class, the Wizard. For Diablo players, this new iconic character can be seen as a modern day take on the Sorceress from Diablo II. However, with an arsenal of crazy arcane power and a disintegrate ray that just does not stop melting monsters, the Wizard quickly showed why she is a welcome addition to the new Diablo III classes.

Melted faces anyone?

Jay started off by discussing the Wizard as the nuker class. She is the blaster, the light show cannon of wizardry that drops foes in smoldering heaps. When building the class’s powers they took out all elemental magic and simply made the wizard a master of time and space with some serious arcane fire power. They wanted a caster who could manipulate the power of the universe. No good, evil, life, fire, or cold, the wizard works in pure magical extremes which play into the class’s personality.

The D3 team continues to push the envelop with character design and is creating these heroes with deep personalities to match. Character back stories are important to immersing players into the game. The wizard is described as the student who was too smart for her teachers. Who delved into powerful magics because she became bored by the normal powers. They wanted her to have an ambitious, powerful, willful feeling as she runs through the Diablo world laying waste to enemies.

The first skill we saw from the Wizard was the Magic Missile. This is a classic game design spell right from the early days of Dungeons & Dragons. However, with the Diablo III graphics and physics behind the game, the spell adds a lot more to the on screen effect in the world. Glowing purple orbs of energy blast forth at foes as they come from all corners of the screen. The next skill theyshowed was Electrocute. This spell is similar to Chain Lightning and can be enhanced by items and skill runes. It was definitely reminiscent of the old Sorceress in Diablo II. One of the more interesting spells the Wizard has is Stop Time. Stop Time freezes things in place as a giant arcane orb covers the ground around the wizard. Stopping your enemies in their tracks and picking your targets can be a critical tactic against loads of monsters. The last skill we got a chance to see was the shocking blast of power known as Disintegrate. This beam of power grows stronger the longer you hold down your mouse. Needless to say the Wizard has quite an arsenal. These are just a few of the spells shown at BlizzCon.

The Wizard's Disintegrate skill will vaporize anything in her path!

After getting a full view of the Wizard, Jay and Wyatt began talking about the overall design of the classes and how players will be able to build their skills. The team showed several of the skill tree systems they had been working on. They wanted something new and more interactive for players with Diablo III. They looked at skills in Diablo 1 and 2 as well as World of Warcraft’s talent calculator as possible guides on how to build a strong skill tree in Diablo III. After many versions were passed around the team, including an insanely complex Horadric Cube skill system, the team finally settled on trying to create a build tree that could support six to seven active skills for a player. The team continues to work out ideas, but rest assured the developers certainly have your best interests at heart.

One of the great ways the Diablo team is enhancing skills is by adding a Rune System to the game that works with character’s skills rather than weapons and items. In Diablo 1 skills dropped from books that players found. In Diablo 2 players built up skills on their tree. What the Runes do is allow players to customize their skills using drops. So classes build up their skill set and then they can turn around and tweak out the best effects by adding different runes to each skill slot. Imagine the possibilities. The effects of these Runes were shown to us along with some of the Wizard’s nastier area of effect spells. The Teleport spell was shown with an enhanced Rune of Striking which allowed the wizard to pop around and blast enemies. Some of the other Runes shown were the Multi-Strike Rune, and the deadly life stealing Lethality Rune.

The team finished up the presentation by talking about the visceral game play that Diablo III hopes to give players. Each class is carefully examined on how it interacts with the monsters thrown at it. Class skills impact the environment, the monsters, and even how monsters die. The engine that runs the game is amazing. Skills shown were the Witch Doctor’s Firebat Swarm and Plague of Toads, also the Wizard’s Tornado spell which is just a swirling light show of arcane doom. The more we see Diablo III the more excited we are about the potential this game will bring to the game market overall. Look for Cody Bye’s hands-on game play articles as well as our video interview with the Diablo team coming up over the next few days.