Didn't these guys break off to form Flagship studios?

The now broken up Flagship studios?

Don't get me wrong I have a lot of respect for the guy and everything he has done. Diablo and Diablo 2 are some of my favourite games of all time, but it sounds to me like he's just sour that he's not working on it.

mikehuang.com seems to be kinda dead.

What, no QQ about how there were shades of actual color in the game too? This guy must be a failed wine maker along with a failed mmo-but-not maker, what with all those sour grapes.

Don't hate, congratulate.

Joystiq has (as usual) managed to twist his words and make it into some form of flamebait attack on diablo3.

If you can get the site to work it turns out to be a mildly interesting but totally non-inflamatory comment about the mildly different approaches of the different Blizzard studios.

"for the day that he'll be able to play the game with his thumbs."

Yeah, never...

I don't really care about the numbers, although I do agree that it would be nice if they were totally different classes (I mean, as totally different as the sorceress and mage, and rogue and amazon were, at least).

Most importantly, I hope the 3D perspective means I don't have to constantly play with the map overlay. That killed the visuals of D2.

Given the ex-Diablo team's masterpiece that was Failgate London, I wouldn't piss and moan about things you don't like about Blizzard's games. They seem to be doing just fine without that group.

I played titan quest just fine with a controller. No reason you couldn't do that with a game as simple as diablo.

haha @ barbarian being broken cause it can jump. The barb is super lackluster later on when you have your sorceresses and necros are killing eveything on the screen from far back with like 2 spells. Then there's the barb who has to jump up then take the time to individually smack everything on screen.

Sounds like this guy is a bit whiny.

Barbarians the "most broken" because of leap? That dude don't even know the game he worked on. Shit, Sorceresses get to teleport everywhere, skipping the all the random dungeons in seconds.

That dude is just grasping for straws and he is just jealous for the attention. Don't give guys like him an article, Joystiq.

No doubt the guys at Blizzard North made a great couple game in their days... but I for one think it's great that Blizzard is not looking at Diablo 3 through the perspective of what the defunked Blizzard North would have done or choices they made when creating a game 8 or so years ago. I personally don't want iterations Diablo to become mindless repeats of stagnant recycled designs (even winning ones). The designers at Blizzard are some of the best in the business and I can’t wait to see their take on a Diablo game. In regards to Barbarian’s ability to leap… that seems more like a balancing flaw with Diablo 2 rather than a valid criticism of Diablo 3’s design (as we’ve seen so very little).

i would like to play any blizzard game with my thumbs,
gimme anything blizz

"When I left Blizzard in '03, Blizzard North had done quite a bit of pre-production work on Diablo III, as well as some protoyping on the 3d-game engine. Today at the Blizzard Invitational in Paris, they announced the release of Diablo III. Since much of the work we had done on Diablo III was concept and prototype work, seeing the development they've done over the last 5 years was very interesting; while some of the concepts we were developing definitely looks like it made it through to the version of the game they displayed, some of the design choices they appear to have made seem counter to the decisions the original Diablo team members would have made had they remained on development of the title -- the most apparent change that I can point to is the appearance of "floating numbers" as seen in the gameplay video -- this was a feature that Blizzard Irvine continually "suggested" during development on Diablo II, which Blizzard North refused to implement -- with development now located within Irvine, the decision to add floating numbers to the game isn't one which surprises me.


One of the design choices which again shows Blizzard Irvine's hand in the changes made is the re-appearance of the Barbarian character class -- the original design documents for Diablo III included a set of all new character classes, with no reappearance of old character classes (our reasons for this was simple -- since we were enhancing and improving the skill system, we didn't want to try and adapt old skills into a new system -- we'd rather create all new skills for the new character classes. The return of the Barbarian class feels like a change that was made after development of the title was moved to Irvine 3 years ago.


One of the reasons why the Barbarian return shocks me so much is that I always felt that the Barbarian character class was the most broken of the classes in Diablo II. The Barbarian's ability to Leap, for instance gave him advantage over other classes which had to walk around the barrier -- it is the showcasing of this skill in the video (during which a bridge crumbles away, leaving no way to cross the gap) which makes me wonder if they have an alternate way for other characters to cross the gap or if all the characters have Leap now.


Of course, going 3D means that a lot of the things that were hard to do with sprites (such as actual armor looks being reflected on the character) is much easier using polygons and textures, as well as real 3d lighting. The use of a physics engine (Havoc, according to the game specs) is also a nice touch.


While I have more or less given up on the PC as a gaming platform, I'm glad to see that Blizzard is still committed to releasing titles that aren't first-person shooters; such a shame that we won't be seeing this title on the shelves for another year or two at the earliest."

Wait.. Diablo 3 will have floating numbers when damage is dealt???? That's pretty lame if true!

I fine this post hilarious, it show the reasons why gamers receive no respect from the industry. And I will leave it at that.

Sure a Barbarian could get wherever they wanted on screen. So could a Sorc with Teleport... or anyone who happened by a 3os armor and had a few spare Jah+Ith+Ber.

If you want to go and look at a broken character go and check out a Blessed Hammer spamming Paladin with that exact runeword I mentioned above. Nothing like being teleported on and hammered to death.

P.S. A Barb's best way of large scale movement wasn't leap. It was leap attack as it had no range on it.

"Stop it! Stop having fun with Leap Attack!"

Oh c'mon!! I just want senselessly bash monsters!!!!!

And Barbarian was, is and will always be broken in the bashing games: it doesn't have any intellect and *surprise* it was never needed to play Diablo to begin with. So it is most fitting class for the game.

Wow, bashing Diablo 3 is getting pretty popular. I'm just getting a kick out of all the negative crap about a game that we've seen a whole 20 minutes of.

To be fair, Huang does't really hate on the game like many ill-informed fans. Yet just because he is a former Diablo dev doesn't mean his opinion is somehow more "correct" than anyone else's. Just because he worked on a blockbuster game in the past doesn't mean he's some super-dev that can turn sh*t into gold. Example: Flagship Studios and Hellgate. (Yes, I realize Huang has nothing to do with Hellgate, but the team was made up of a lot of former Diablo devs.)

And for the record, Vivendi has little say with what Blizzard does. They bought them and then pretty much said "Keep doing what you're doing." From what I understand, the top guy in Blizzard communicates with the top guy from Vivendi and that's it. Vivendi doesn't even do QA for Blizzard.

Wait, why exactly does the Barbarian's ability to jump make the class broken? What about teleport? If you ask me that was more useful than jumping.

Weren't barbs immune to damage/untargetable when leaping? That may be what he means. But I don't remember many barbs on bnet using leap a ton, since most people seemed to build them as the (especially yawn-inducing) whirlwind barbs.

I don't really remember barbs being very much of a factor in PVP, although I wasn't a huge participant. That seemed to be mostly overrun with Sorcs and Amazons, although it changed with each patch.

But really, the biggest broken bit in Diablo II's classes was the tendency to encourage builds that just spammed out one ability, like whirl barbs and nova sorcs. It would be nice if the new game made people focus a little more on flexibility.

If Blizzard treated their employees better, they wouldn't have to constantly "refuel" with talent after every release. In that sense, they've become the microsoft of gaming software...and it will probably catch up to them soon. I'm not sure I agree or disagree with this guy, but I feel his pain. Getting hired by blizzard sounds like a compliment and a blessing...then you get shat on both work-hours wise, and don't get compensated pay-wise. Then that blessing has flipped on you. What do you do? You stay and take the spit in your eye with a smile or do you leave and try to make it right with your own company? Well, you're probably damned if you do and damned if you don't. And while you're struggling to make sense of the industry, blizzard (not their employees...but the company) just rakes in the dough.

*english accent*
Aw, fuck! I cant believe youve done this.