User blog:TheBlueRogue/Diablo III at GDC 2013

http://images.wikia.com/bluerogues/images/c/cc/GDC2013Header.jpg Game Developer’s Conference (GDC) is the world’s largest and longest-running gaming professionals industry event. The conference contains 400 lectures, panels, tutorials and round-table discussions on a comprehensive selection of game development topics taught by leading industry experts. GDC 2013 begins March 25th and lasts March 29th.

This year, Diablo 3 will featured in various panels. The summaries of these can be found below. We would like to ask, is there any elements or details of these sessions that you would be interested in getting more information about? How about any questions that you would like answered? Let us know in the comments: we will be attending these sessions, and can help gather the answers you seek!

Shout at the Devil: The Making of Diablo III
When building any game, but especially when it's a sequel to the beloved Diablo series, it's critical that you have a series of core design goals, or pillars, that you can use as a guide to making decisions and defining what you want the final vision of the game to accomplish. In this postmortem, we'll explore the pillars that guided Diablo III's development and how well we felt we accomplished each of them. We'll focus specifically on the ones we feel we struggled with and the game design lessons we learned during those struggles. Examples of specific challenges of living up to these values will be provided, prioritizing them against one another, and evaluating how well they were accomplished after Diablo III was released. The speaker will be Jay Wilson, Game Director at Blizzard Entertainment, Inc

Through the Grinder: Refining Diablo III's Game Systems
As with all Blizzard games, Diablo III went through many iterations before the final product was released. Wyatt Cheng will describe different game systems that were attempted, explored, and then ultimately removed. We'll go into detail about the pros and cons of each system, what worked and didn't work, and how the team used each failure to bring them closer to success. 1. Health Recovery: From Regenerative Damage Shields to potion dilution, where potions become less effective as you drink them, many different health recovery mechanisms were tried. What were the major issues with each of these systems and how did it lead to health globes in the end? 2. Controls. At Blizzard, control is king. Although simple on the surface, a number of iterations were required to polish the Diablo III interface, in order to provide the player with tight and responsive controls. 3. Skill System: The skill system underwent multiple revisions. Early systems involved different variations of point spending, an evolution from Diablo II. Later systems had runes, with multiple rune ranks that dropped as items, which could be used to modify skills.