Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

by Jason Schreier

  For a game that had been in development for so many years, a fresh perspective could be useful, especially when Blizzard began reexamining core parts of Diablo III, like the loot system. In the PC version of Diablo III, enemies would spawn fountains of loot when they died, offering that familiar dopamine rush for players as they picked up cool new weapons and accessories. But without a mouse and keyboard, sorting through all those glittering rings and amulets could be a chore. As the Diablo III console team playtested the game, Mosqueira found that this loot overload was impeding people’s progress, forcing them to stop every few seconds just to organize their inventories.

  That’s when they tweaked the formula. “We said, ‘OK, every time a gray or a white item’s going to drop, seventy percent of the time it’s going to just drop gold,’” said Mosqueira. The change might have seemed drastic to Diablo II devotees, but it wound up forming the foundation for what the team called Loot 2.0, a system that would improve Diablo III on both PC and consoles. “We started realizing that maybe we can be dropping less,” said Mosqueira, “and if you’re dropping less, well, we need to drop better.”

  With Loot 2.0, Mosqueira and his team hoped to address every criticism players had about gear in Diablo III. Fans complained that it took way too long to get the top-tier “legendary” items, so Loot 2.0 guaranteed that each major boss would drop legendary gear. Fans pointed out that, when they did finally get legendary items, the game would generate those items’ stats randomly, making it likely that a player would spot a shiny orange weapon and get excited, only to find that the weapon was useless for his class.* So Loot 2.0 introduced a weighting system, skewing the random number generator to increase the chances that when a player picked up a legendary item, it would be something they needed.

  As Blizzard’s developers met throughout 2013 to talk about what they wanted to do with Reaper of Souls, “randomness” became a driving conversation topic. After all, random numbers had always been the pulsing heart of Diablo. Since the first game in 1996, which sent players battling through procedurally generated dungeons under the decrepit city of Tristram, Diablo games had relied on a random number generator for just about everything. Dungeon layouts were random. Treasure chests were random. Most magical items were random, too; the game would piece them together from a large table of prefixes and suffixes, with each item’s attributes tied to its name. (A “Lucky” belt would boost the amount of gold you received from monsters. A sword “of the Leech” would offer health every time you attacked.)

  This randomness was what gave Diablo its mass appeal. Playing a Diablo game was sort of like campaigning in Dungeons & Dragons: every time you played, you’d have a different experience. There was something naturally addicting about finding a new item and hitting “identify,” knowing you could wind up with pretty much anything. Diablo appealed to that same instinct that makes us want to feed all our cash into slot machines and lottery tickets. It would have fit in nicely next to the craps tables at a sparkly Vegas casino.

  It took a long time before the designers realized that their obsession with random numbers was hurting Diablo III. “I started to worship at the throne of randomness,” said Kevin Martens, a lead designer. “And when I could make something more random, I would, missing the point that randomness is a tool to get replayability. . . . When people ask me, ‘What’s the major difference between Reaper of Souls and Diablo III?’ my shortest possible answer is: We shaved the rough edges off randomness. We made randomness work for the player instead of against them.”

  That was where Diablo III diverged from Las Vegas—Blizzard didn’t want the house to always win. Josh Mosqueira and his team realized that the way to keep players happy was to give them the edge. “When Diablo III shipped, whether you got a legendary [item] or not was just a whole bunch of die rolls,” said Mosqueira. “Sometimes you’d get lucky; sometimes you wouldn’t get lucky. . . . In Reaper, we just said, OK, we don’t want to cheat. We don’t want the player to feel that we’re making it easier for them or anything like that, but we just need to raise the floor, so it doesn’t take me 104 hours to find a legendary.”*

  They also needed to do something about the difficulty. Back when they’d developed the original version of Diablo III, Blizzard’s designers had believed that players wanted a game more challenging than any Diablo before it. “We had this video, ‘Diablo’s going to brutalize you,’” said Martens. “We had people on our team talking about how hard it was and how even though they’re experienced developers, they still get murdered. The truth is—now we’re on Hindsight Mountain looking back—that some people want it really hard and some people want a little bit easier. And everything in between.”

  It wasn’t just that Inferno mode was too tough. Players had lost their appetite for playing through the same campaign multiple times, with nothing changing but monsters’ strength. The structure that had felt rewarding in 2001 was, for several reasons, a slog in 2012. Video game design had made drastic leaps in the past decade. Dozens of Diablo clones had emerged over the years, and some of them had even improved Diablo II’s structure (though none were quite as successful). When Diablo III came out, people expected a less repetitive rhythm.

  Reaper of Souls was the opportunity to solve these problems. Blizzard’s short-term solution for Diablo III had been to make Inferno mode less challenging via postgame patches, but with Reaper, they could take things further. “It was probably late November of 2012 when I started to think maybe we should completely redo the difficulty system,” said Martens. That was a tough prospect, though. “The whole game is built for these four difficulties. Every monster has their numbers tuned for each of these four difficulties.”

  Kevin Martens zoomed out. What if, instead of treating difficulty levels as stages, the Blizzard team overhauled Diablo III’s structure entirely, making it so monsters would scale with the player’s power over the course of the game? And then what if they added a new modifier system, so that anyone who wanted more of a challenge could switch to Hard or Expert modes to boost enemies’ health and damage? If you wanted to make things a little easier, you could simply flip back to Normal. To solve Inferno mode’s chicken and egg problem, Blizzard would kill both the chickens and the eggs.

  To an outside observer this might have seemed like an obvious method—most other games use difficulty modes this way—but for a Diablo game it was revolutionary. “Initially it seemed like this impossible mountain to climb,” Martens said. “You knew you needed to change this major thing, [but] you never thought about the game in that terms, in automatic difficulty before. We’d never considered it in that manner.”

  They’d never considered it because of Diablo II. It had never occurred to the team that they should change the difficulty structure because that was just always how Diablo games had done things. Playing through the game on Normal, then again on Nightmare, and then a third time on Hell was part of what made Diablo Diablo, wasn’t it? Blizzard had taken flack during Diablo III’s early development just for the minor act of making health orbs drop from enemies, which some fans saw as breaking series tradition, so it had been tough to even think about a move as drastic as upending Diablo’s entire structure. But what if they did? And what if they found a better replacement for it?

  In the months after launch, several Diablo III players had complained about not being able to teleport back and forth between the game’s four acts, and Blizzard had been looking to find a way to address that feedback. “We worked with the engineers and they said, ‘Oh yeah, we can figure out a way to do that,” said Rob Foote. “And actually, I think it was an engineer who said, ‘But couldn’t we do something better?’”

  Again, they all went into brainstorming mode. What if, instead of solely letting players teleport between areas, Diablo III gave them a whole new mode that changed everything? And what if that mode became the focal point for Diablo III’s new endgame?

  They would call this new feature Adventure Mode. Once you’d finished Reaper of Soul
s, you could open up this new Adventure Mode and jump into any area of the game, from the deserts of Caldeum to the frozen peaks of Arreat. Each of the game’s five acts would give you a series of randomized bounties like “kill a boss” or “clear a dungeon,” and the more bounties you completed, the more loot you’d snag. Adventure Mode would also add special events and what the game called “Nephalem Rifts,” multitiered dungeons that shuffled areas and monsters from all throughout Diablo III like some sort of gothic mixtape. As Blizzard envisioned it, Adventure Mode would entertain players for hours and hours once they’d finished the game. It sure beat smashing pottery.

  In August 2013, at the Gamescom trade show in Germany, Blizzard prepared to announce Reaper of Souls to a packed room full of reporters and fans. This expansion would center on the demonic archangel Malthael. It would come with a new class, the crusader. And it would introduce all sorts of features, starting with Loot 2.0, in a free patch that Blizzard hoped would signal that the developers of Diablo III were listening to the complaints.

  “Right before we were going to do the announcement, the energy in the room was tense,” said Josh Mosqueira. “I could feel that everybody was [thinking], ‘Mmm, this better be good.’ You could feel that they almost were expecting to be disappointed.” Then Blizzard put on the announcement video: a four-minute opening cinematic for Reaper of Souls, introducing the world to Malthael. Holding a nasty scythe in each hand, the archangel sliced his way through a group of Horadrim mages and attacked his former brother, the angel Tyrael. “The Nephalem will stop you,” Tyrael said. Responded Malthael: “No one can stop death.”

  Gamescom’s audience erupted in applause. “It’s almost like this wave of excitement,” said Mosqueira. “You could feel it. I said, ‘OK, I think people are willing to give us another chance. Let’s not fuck it up.’”

  Originally, Blizzard had planned to put out Reaper of Souls later in 2013, but the Diablo III team realized they needed more time, delaying it to the first quarter of 2014. This was a surprise to just about nobody. Blizzard had a reputation for taking its sweet time with games—Diablo III had taken ten years, after all—and you’d be hard-pressed to find a Blizzard game that hadn’t missed at least one deadline.

  One quote, delivered by the director of StarCraft II, Dustin Browder, has always stuck out as a telling description of how Blizzard makes video games. In June 2012, over a year after Blizzard had hoped to ship StarCraft II’s first expansion, Heart of the Swarm, Browder spoke to me about the game’s progress. “We are ninety-nine percent done,” he said, “but that last one percent’s a bitch.” Heart of the Swarm wouldn’t come out until March 2013. That last one percent took nearly a year.

  “The thing that makes scheduling challenging is iteration,” said Rob Foote. “You have to allow for iteration if you want to make a great product.” Iteration time was the last one percent. Blizzard’s producers tried to leave blank slates at the end of their schedules so that their development teams could push, tug, and polish every aspect of their game until they felt like they had something perfect. “And it’s challenging too,” said Foote, “because people say, ‘What’s in that, it’s a lot of time, what are they actually doing?’ They’re iterating. We don’t know what they’re going to do, but they’re going to be doing something.”

  Even with the extra time for Reaper of Souls, Josh Mosqueira and his crew had to cut some features. In conjunction with Adventure Mode, the Diablo III team had devised a system called Devil’s Hand that would place fifty-two high-powered enemies throughout the game’s world. Players would be able to kill them all for collectible items in hopes of eventually getting all fifty-two. The Diablo III team didn’t have enough time to get Devil’s Hand’s collection system in shape, though, so Mosqueira decided to cut it. “We figured, we have extra time, but we can’t get both of these right,” he said. “And the really important one is Adventure Mode, because that really changes the way people play the game. So we had to put Devil’s Hand off to the side.”*

  As the months went by, everyone at Blizzard felt ecstatic about the progress they were making. Since Error 37, they’d changed Diablo III’s formula, overhauled the loot system, and thought they could win back millions of players with Reaper of Souls. But Mosqueira still felt like the game had a critical flaw that they had yet to address, something that seemed at odds with how they wanted people to play the game: the auction house.

  When Blizzard first announced Diablo III’s real-money auction house, cynics saw it as a cash grab. After all, Blizzard got to take a healthy cut every time a player sold an item. Blizzard’s developers argued that they had more noble motives, insisting that they’d built the auction house to improve the experience of trading items for players. Back in 2002, Diablo II: Lord of Destruction had become infested with third-party gray markets, in which people would trade real money for powerful items on sketchy, insecure websites. Blizzard’s goal was, as Kevin Martens put it, to provide “a world-class experience” for those players, one that was safe and secure.

  Not long after Diablo III’s launch, however, it became apparent to Blizzard that the auction house was hurting the game. Some players enjoyed trading, sure—especially the ones who were farming loot and selling it for a healthy profit—but for many, the auction house made Diablo III a significantly worse experience. It reduced the thrill of hunting for gear. What was the fun in getting a great roll on a cool new piece of armor if you could just hop on the market and buy a better one?

  One group of players, who called themselves the Ironborn (after Game of Thrones’ House Greyjoy), made a point of refusing to use the auction house. They even sent petitions to Blizzard asking if the developers would consider adding an Ironborn mode to Diablo III. “This was a community of players who were saying, ‘Hey guys, Diablo III is the exact same game, but I’m having this whole new experience choosing to play it without the auction house,’” said Wyatt Cheng. “You can look at Diablo through that lens and say, you know what, we’ve got this really amazing game, but the auction house is having this distorting effect on how some people might perceive it.”

  One day in September 2013, as Reaper of Souls was in full production, Josh Mosqueira sat in a meeting, doodling in a notebook. It was one of Blizzard’s routine monthly strategy meetings, at which CEO Mike Morhaime would get together with company executives and project leads to talk about the business, and much of the technical finance talk was bouncing off Mosqueira. Then the conversation turned to Diablo III, and suddenly they were talking about the auction house.

  “[Mike] said, ‘Well what do you think?’” said Mosqueira. “If I was anywhere else, I probably would’ve said, ‘You know what, I think we still need to figure things out,’ or ‘I’m not quite sure.’ But looking at those guys, and knowing how important having our players have faith in us was, I said, ‘You know what, guys? Maybe we should just kill it.’”

  After some brief discussions about how the logistics might work—How would they communicate it to players? What would they do with current auctions? How long would they need to wait?—the decision crystallized. It was time for Diablo III’s auction house to die. “I was [thinking], ‘Wow, this is happening,’” said Mosqueira. “I think to Mike’s credit, Mike’s a huge gamer. He loves the games. He loves players more than anything else. And he’s just willing to make those decisions, and say, ‘You know, this is going to hurt. But it’s the right thing to do.’”

  On September 17, 2013, Blizzard announced that it would shut down the auction house in March 2014. Fans were, for the most part, thrilled by the news. Now you’d be able to go hunt for loot in Diablo III without the nagging feeling that you could just pay money for something better. Wrote one Kotaku commenter: “Good job Blizzard, you’ve actually restored some faith in me. I may actually play this again.”

  “Diablo is best experienced when, as a result of slaying monsters, you get better items that allow you to make your character more powerful,” said Wyatt Cheng. “And if the activi
ty that I do to make my character more powerful does not include killing monsters . . . then that’s not a good place to be.”

  Now it felt like they’d found the perfect formula for Reaper of Souls. In addition to the new area (Westmarch), and boss (Malthael), the expansion would come with Loot 2.0 (free to all players via patch), Adventure Mode, and an overhauled difficulty system. The week before Reaper of Souls released, Blizzard would remove the auction house. As they finalized the development of the expansion and prepared for launch, Mosqueira and his team felt like this was the big moment. They were going to win people back.

  When Reaper of Souls launched on March 25, 2014, there was no Error 37. Blizzard had bolstered its infrastructure this time around. Plus, the company had decided to improve the error messaging system so that even if something went awry, the warning wouldn’t be so vague. “I think one of the other lessons that we learned is if you were there, anxious, and you logged in, and you got Error 37, you [thought], ‘What is Error 37? I have no idea what this is,’” said Josh Mosqueira. “Now, all the error messages are more descriptive. They say, ‘This is the problem we’re having. Here’s a time frame where you can expect this problem to be fixed.’”

  As they watched the reactions pour in, Blizzard’s staff collectively breathed a sigh of relief. So did Diablo players. “Diablo III has finally rediscovered the moment-to-moment gameplay that made the series great,” wrote a reviewer for Ars Technica, “and fixed—or removed—almost everything that got in the way of that greatness. Reaper of Souls is the redemption of Diablo III.”

  Two years after launch, people were finally falling in love with Diablo III. “When you went to the forums, or when you started getting feedback directly from fans, the issues they were complaining about were more specific and less broad,” said Kevin Martens. “That was when I really thought, ‘OK we’re finally getting there.’” As Martens and other designers browsed through Reddit or Battle.net, they were encouraged to see players complaining about underpowered items or asking Blizzard to buff specific builds. No longer were people offering the three words of feedback that serve as a death warrant for any game: “This isn’t fun.”