Gameplay Panel Blizzcon 2010

This is a transcript of the Gameplay Panel held at Blizzcon 2010 discussing the newly revealed Demon Hunter and changes made to the other four classes during the year.

The remit read "How does the Diablo III team go about creating a class fit to fight the legions of the Burning Hells? The designers and artists delve into the creative process." c

On the panel was:

Jay Wilson - Game Director
Kevin Martens - Lead Content Designer
Christian Lichtner - Art Director
Julian Love - Lead Technical Artist
Wyatt Cheng - Technical Game Designer
Leonard Boyarsky - Lead World Designer
Paul Warzecha - Lead Character Artist.

Jay Wilson - Game Director

Jay Wilson, Game Director

Today we introduced our fifth and final class for Diablo 3 and that is the Demon Hunter. We are going to talk a lot about the Demon Hunter today, how we came to this decision and what she's really all about. So, the first question could be "Why the Demon Hunter?". A couple of you, maybe one or two guessed that we might put a class that shoots bows and crossbows and throws things. It was a good guess, those one or two of you that actually got it. Really, the Demon Hunter fills out our archetype. We knew from the beginning that we wanted a blasty Wizard type and a big Barbarian and a pet class, we knew we wanted a class that used conventional ranged weaponry. So she was really one of the earlier classes that we chose but she was very different when we chose to make her.

We really felt this character fit the Diablo universe. We wanted a very dark character, an almost obsessed anti-hero. We really liked the idea of a Bounty Hunter. That was a lot of the drive for what we wanted. We wanted a character that felt like this is somebody who hunts down the enemy.

Demon Hunter's Bio

Whenever we decide to have a class we like to boil it down to the top three things. What's this class all about. So the first one is pretty obvious. We knew we wanted a conventional ranged class which is the class that operates at a range but uses weaponry to do that. We also liked the idea of the Bounty Hunter vibe so we wanted to get in this idea of gadgets and traps. A Bounty Hunter prepares for a fight so we wanted to really focus on that with this character.

We always look for a way to do more fantastical stuff with a character. The Diablo 3 classes are very showy at times. Here we have Shadow Magic. Shadow Magic is really kicking into the idea that she really likes to dabble in anything she can to make her more effective in hunting down the enemy so she's not adverse to using dark magic or "Hey, I found out if you take the spleen of this demon and carve out it down into a bow the arrows actually go 20% faster. She knows every trick. She knows more about Demons that anyone in the Diablo universe.

Christian Lichtner - Art Director

Woodland Ranger

Early concept

I'm going to go through a very brief history of the development of the Demon Hunter. I want to show you guys how things usually start out. We knew early on it was going to be a ranger. Class design and development takes a lot of time and effort from the development team and we take a lot of care in making sure that this is as much fun to play. Early on we started with concepts and what you can see here is a Woodland Ranger concept. That already looked pretty ranged obviously, you can see the arrows at the back.

That was a good starting point. We really liked stuff. We said to ourselves that it still read a little bit on the swifter side and also a little bit more deadly so we added a bit more of an edge to the character but that still wasn't where we wanted the character to be.

Adding melee

Whilst we already liked it a lot and thought there was some really good concepts going on with it already there was something missing. We didn't quite know what we needed to add to it. We started to added elements to give it a little bit of a twist. Most of the Diablo classes we do, we always give it a little bit of a twist, a little bit of a angle, a little extra something. In this case we started adding certain melee aspects, adding short daggers, short swords, even fist weapons and you can see some armour on the chest there.

As we iterated on this we added even more of that. We added cowls and a lot of different elements like that. As you can see our products take a lot of development and one of the things we started to realise as we went through all these concepts was that it really didn't start to read Ranged any more, it started reading more and more like an assassin, a little bit like a melee class and so at that point we said to ourselves that we need to take a break. We need to slow down, rethink what we are doing.

Demon Hunter Born

We decided to look at more concepts and sort of go back to the basics and rethink from the get go what we wanted to do with this class. There were a few questions we asked ourselves at point. One of them was that we had announced the monk class in the previous year and we really wanted to make a class now that was a little bit on the darker side. One that you didn't quite know where they stood in the world and what their outlook was. We also knew that we wanted to make the class mysterious so you didn't quite know their history. The other important thing to us was, as huge fans of Diablo 2, we wanted a class on our line out that was on the more medieval side, a little gothic and that paid tribute to the Diablo 2 classes. Of course, most importantly, we wanted to make sure it read ranged so we came up with the Demon Hunter which is what you are seeing today.

Demonic Hero?

Part Demon

So, how do you make a Demon Hunter? First off we started off with the craziest thing we could think of and thought what if it was a Demonic Demon Hunter? What if it was a demon hunting demons and as you can see here (left) a concept of a fully-blown demon. We really liked this concept, we thought it was a lot of fun. It only had two problems with it. One of them was, in the Diablo universe, our heroes really have to be human, they are pitted against hordes of hell and having a hero that was demonic would be a problem. Also there was a problem as far as designing gameplay around a changeling or a shape shifting class so we went back a thought about making him part demon. In this particular concept you see a very large Demon Hunter and he has a demonic arm. One of the issues we had at that point we were worried about the fact that if this guys walks into town trying to sell his wares or try to buy something maybe the townspeople wouldn't quite go along with it once hey see the demon arm. Also the size and bulkiness of him really felt very strong and we weren't sure if it felt ranged or fast, swift and agile as we were hoping for. The arm implies melee because it's so thick and strong.

Finally!

We changed all those things at that point. We went a slicker, more agile. We went with a design that only had armour up until the ribcage and below the ribcage it's very light and leathery. We also decided to go with dual crossbows because we thought that would be really cool. We were still holding onto the demon arm, we thought maybe we could pull it off but what we started to find was that when people were playing it they really wanted to hit things with the demon arm. They felt like it was something they really wanted to use so at some point we had to say goodbye to it. It also messed with the human part so last but not least we ended up with this design. It's very close to the previous one. As you can see it has a cowl. It's a little bit more on the dark side and a little mysterious. It still moves very fast and swift and we wanted to make sure it had a dark vibe and it really read very anti-heroish in that sense and also with that medieval vibe that we were talking about of course, most importantly, that it read ranged!