BlizzCast Episode 5
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Bashiok: We're talking a lot about acts right now could you give any insight into the act distribution as compared to like Diablo 2? How many acts there would be?
Jay Wilson: We were originally going to go away from an act structure but we found it fell so easily into that and so we're going to a similar structure as Diablo 2. It just seemed natural, it felt right. Right now we're focusing on about the same length, about the same number of acts. I don't want to solidify because of course; you never know what'll happen. But right now we're going for about the same.
Bashiok: Talking about Diablo 2, everybody that played Diablo 2, or plays it I think a lot of people are going back and playing it, since the announcement they sort of understand the economy of Diablo 2 as a barter item based kind of system, the gold that was dropped in Diablo 2 wasn't worth much. How do you see the economy in Diablo 3 developing? And are there going to be any goals to establish trade systems?
Jay Wilson: Well, Diablo, at its core is basically a trader's game. If you look at other types of progression based RPG games, World of Warcraft is a great example. In World of Warcraft the best items are you know, held by the raiders. In Diablo the best items are really held by the traders. You know those people that are really good at trading with other people. We have no intention of destroying that design or that group of players. That being said a bartering system is actually a very exclusionary trading system; it essentially favors a very small group of elite people and it's not just that those people have entry into it. It's that anyone who wants to gain entry to that system, anybody who wants to just trade items with people, they have this huge barrier to entry, they just can't get into because they don't the value of items, they don't know what's worth what, they don't know what they need. So an elite trader would probably say, '˜Oh well, I like that I have this exclusive knowledge,' but he's actually denying himself customers essentially because there's no common language. A currency really provides a common language: that's the point of a currency. So we do want to support some kind of currency, we don't want to do some of the stuff that Diablo 2 did where they kind of actively devalued gold. We really do want to make gold, or potentially another currency it may not have to be gold a valuable commodity that players can use to be able to trade items. That being said it doesn't really prohibit item trading like people can use items as a currency. We have no intention of adding a Bind on Pickup or Bind on Equip, if we did it would probably be for like quest items not for actual functional, like items which people use to hack down monsters and stuff. There's nothing that's stopping bartering in that system but it does give people at least some kind of language you know if you've got two items and ones like a little bit more valuable, you can pad it with currency as well.
Bashiok: Right
Jay Wilson: Really we're trying to allow more people to get into the trading game because the more people that are in it the more fun it will be.
