Reaper Of Souls Preview: What We Learned
by JR Cook - 10 years ago show comments
The Diablo 3 Reaper of Souls Preview has now finished, and the big new feature that was shown is known as Adventure Mode. This new feature will allow players to play the parts of Diablo 3 that they want to play and earn rewards. It basically opens up the entirety of the game, including all waypoints, that you can jump around to at any time. It does have some structure through the use of bounties, which provide you with riftstones that then open Nephalem Rifts, which are completely randomized areas of play.
Also teased within the gameplay trailer was the addition of clan and group support, which will expand the online experience the game offers. Here are the main points from today’s panel. Tomorrow’s gameplay systems panel should yield more juicy details.
High level goals
- Epic heroes: players need to feel bigger than life as they battle the forces of darkness
- New monsters designed to die
- Pandemonium the final battleground
- Endgame for everyone with many different options: Adventure Mode
Adventure Mode
- Takes core elements of the game that weren’t working well together
- Big world across 4 Acts that you had to play four times
- Randomness of loot
- “Go anywhere, slay anything”
- Play when you want to (non-linear)
- Not just for end game
- Play where you want to: all waypoints and acts unlocked including Act 5
- Separate to Campaign/Story mode
- Bounties and Nephalem Rifts the core mechanics
- Nephalem rifts combine all the randomness of tilesets and monsters eg. Act 3 and Act 4 monsters fighting in Whimsyshire.
- Bounties offer guidance during adventure mode
- Random quests that are given to you at the start of the game
- 25 bounties at the start of an adventure mode, five bounties for each act when you start
- Bounties include killing bosses, completing events, killing unique monsters, and clearing a dungeon (compared with Diablo 2’s Den of Evil)
- Bounties reward gold, xp, items, and Rift Keystones
- Nephalem Rifts are randomized dungeons: takes all tilesets and all the monsters and randomised them
- Number of monsters are also randomised so sometimes a lot, other times a level
- Rifts can go from 1 to 10 dungeon levels which are randomised too
- Nephalem Rifts will also provide extra buffs like lightning and invulnerability
- Bosses will spawn at the end of each rift, and they are not sealed off from the rest of the dungeon
New monsters
- Monsters belong within their environment and support the story
- New monsters in Westmarch include summoners, death maidens, and punishers
- Blood Marsh new monsters include the Boggit, Bogan trapper, and Brute that are all part of the same family of monsters
- Monsters are designed to appear as part of the experience, eg. scarabs coming out of walls
- Monsters “live to die”, so they need to have simple but memorable abilities that make an impact
Environment
- Design started with brainstorm with artists
- Diablo sometimes feels a bit too futuristic
- Design then takes some of the ideas of the brainstorm to combine into what we see in the environment
Gameplay
- Act 1-4 exteriors are mostly fixed
- Act 5 will have fully randomized exterior
- New features throughout the level such as abandoned garrisons, battles frozen in time and more deadly hazards and traps spread across the environment