(Author’s Note: News article published August 17, 2012)
Breviks says he would have done things differently in terms of items, skills
In an interview with Edge, Gazillion Entertainment president and former project lead for Diablo and Diablo II David Brevik talked about his opinions regarding Blizzard’s latest installment Diablo III.
Before leaving Blizzard Brevik and his team had worked on the early design of the popular action-RPG and when asked about what he thought of the final product he answered, “I wouldn’t have made the same game. They did some stuff that I thought was great, that advanced action-RPGs in a lot of ways. I think their story presentation was much better than we’d ever done it; I thought that the [ability to] teleport to other players, to group rapidly [was] really good.”
After focusing on the good points Brevik continued, “But I wouldn’t have made the same choices that they did for some of the item stuff. The way that they did the skill selection really kind of changed, making it more of a loadout that you would find in a shooter or something.
“I thought that being able to change your build on the fly was almost too flexible. So I felt like that took away from some of the replayability, and the lower level cap [did] also.”
Brevik then went on to talk about the game’s real money auction house and its affect, “It became more efficient to grind gold than it did to find items. The point of the game is to find items; if you make the point of the game to grind for gold instead, it really loses a lot of what the game is about.
“[Blizzard has] done the auction house stuff before. I think they did a fantastic job with it in WoW, so I’m not quite sure why there was so much stuff lost in translation in Diablo III.”
