Diablo III Interview
Anthony Rivero (Senior Character Artist)
     
Bashiok: Hey everyone this is Bashiok your Diablo community manager. Today I’m going to be interviewing Anthony Rivero. He’s our Senior Character Artist on Diablo III. He also worked on Diablo II and the Diablo II expansion as a character artist. Anthony how’s it going?

Anthony: It’s going really good. I got my teeth drilled today but the Novocain has worn off, and I’m ready to go.
Bashiok: [laughs] Excellent. So you actually started at Blizzard; Blizzard was your first game company that you worked for as an artist…
Anthony: Actually no Gravity Incorporated was the first game company, if you could call it that, that I worked at. That was a little start up company in San Francisco, and that was around ’94-’95. They were making a real time 3D game called Banzai Bug, which we actually put out – hit the shelves and everything. Probably sold 5,000 copies but, you know, it was a good experience.
Bashiok: And when you actually came to Blizzard, how did that come about?

Anthony: I worked at Gravity for a little while and did some other startup stuff on the web, all of them real time 3D related projects. I was getting kind of tired of that, and I wanted to work for a cool game company really. I had applied at a few different places, LucasArts, and some places like that. I saw that Blizzard was looking for people, I saw an ad in Game Developer [Magazine] and so I worked really hard on a new demo reel, because I wanted to impress them. Sent it in and I got a call from Matt Householder, who was the producer at the time.

Bashiok: On Diablo II.
Anthony: On Diablo II, and I came in and interviewed and everything worked out and I got hired, and that was it. That was the beginning.
   
Bashiok: When you started working on Diablo II what were your first tasks?

Anthony: Yeah, let me see let me look at my notes. The first thing I worked on I remember asking my boss, “Hey what can I do?”, after being there a few days getting situated, and that was Erich Schaefer at the time. He and Stieg [Hedlund] said they needed some type of flying insect monster for Act 3, so I came up with the mosquito demon. What’s now called the mosquito demon, and that was the very first thing I worked on. It was kind of for a swampy area so I figured that was appropriate, a mosquitoish-type monster, and yeah that was the very first thing I worked on.
Bashiok: Ok and are there any other notable creatures or monsters you worked on for Diablo II specifically?
Anthony: Probably the most notable monster I worked on was Mephisto. Phil Shenk had concepted Mephisto, so I already had something to start with. I modeled and textured him and set up the initial rigging, and then handed that off to Cheeming Boey to animate. I actually helped a little bit with the effects as well, the effects that are at the base of Mephisto. He has like swirling smokey skulls that kind of swirl around the bottom of him as he’s moving around.
Bashiok: You mentioned you did multiple things on that character, and it works a little bit differently now…

Anthony: Yeah things back then were quite different. Most of the time the artist did everything from concept, to getting it you know with effects and everything in the game. So you did your concept stage, your modeling, your texturing, your rigging, and your animation and then effects. You know whatever skill effects you may have needed for the monster or for the character, and then got that in to the game. On some characters we decided ok let’s have one guy animate it, and I’ll model and texture it, and we started to do a little bit of that back then. It was very different from what we do now.

Bashiok: And now it’s a little bit more piecemeal where…

Anthony: Yeah now ... you know modern art production [and] pipelines for games are way more specialized. They have to be, it’s just the nature of getting things done. So definitely on our team we have things more broken down, not so much as some companies I hear about, but you know I do modeling and texturing mostly. I do some concept work. I help with effects sometimes if the guys need certain things modeled or textured for their effects. The animators pretty much animate all the time, but they also contribute concepts and stuff like that as well. Like sometimes we just want to brainstorm on new ideas, you know everyone will pitch in on the concept phase. But for the most part things are definitely more specialized; you know we have a team that’s just dedicated to rigging.

Bashiok: And rigging being?

Anthony: Setting up the characters with skeletons and enveloping the characters, and stuff like that. Making sure things are named properly so they export correctly, and all that kind of stuff.

Bashiok: Going back to your work on Diablo II, you did a little bit of work on Diablo II most of your work was actually on the expansion…

Anthony: Yeah, yeah I guess so. I mean I did some work on Diablo II, Mephisto, mosquito demon, the tentacle that comes out of the water and stuff, and some items that you’ll see in the inventory like Silks of the Victor. Then I moved on to the expansion pack, and we started with a small group of guys. It was myself, Tyler Thompson, Phil Shenk, and I think a couple other guys in the begging. As guys were getting freed from Diablo II they would move over to our team. So on that project I think I started working on the Druid pretty soon, like pretty much at the beginning. We were brainstorming on monsters and stuff like that, and Druid designs, but yeah that’s where I started. That was the first hero I worked on, which was a pretty massive undertaking for an inexperienced guy. Just because of the complexity of dealing with just pre-rendering sprites and then compositing them all together so that they work in every direction and all that kind of jazz.

Bashiok: So on that note would you say that working in 3D is more difficult than working 2D or both have their trade-offs?
Anthony: Oh, 3D is a lot easier. I actually came to Blizzard with no sprite experience; I was working in real time 3D before that. Now that has its inherent difficulties as well but it’s just so much easier to do things like create armor sets for characters and what not, for your heroes, like all that kind of stuff. You don’t have to worry about your data size in terms of you can only render so many sprites and fit them on a disc. You don’t have that limitation. Your limitation is mostly man power, and how much can you get done, and how much texture space do you have and stuff like that. But it’s a lot easier, like you can have … if you want your character or hero to be able to wield 50 different types of swords and 50 different axes and what not, that’s really easy to do. Your only limitation is how fast can you make them.

Bashiok: For the expansion, aside from the Druid, are there any other notable creatures…

Anthony: Well, like his pets, some of his effects, the Death Mauler, and you know I had a lot of management duties on the expansion so I was doing a lot of that as well.

Bashiok: What was your title for the expansion?

Anthony: Lead Character Artist.

Bashiok: And for Diablo II?

Anthony: Just an artist. Just Character Artist.

Bashiok: Working management in a character artist sense, what does that generally entail day to day?

Anthony: You’ll work on some assets but you’ll go around see what other people are working on, give feedback where necessary, scheduling, a lot of meetings, working out issues between disciplines, things like that, communication with the programming team/designers. You know it depends it varies from day to day.

Bashiok: When you were working on the Diablo II units, what was design and creation process start to finish more or less, and how has that changed for Diablo III?

Anthony: Well the creation process was fairly different, like I said before, a lot of the artists did everything from the ground up. Then there was the sprite rendering part of it, you would have to pre-render your assets, and so basically you’d wait forever for all the stuff to render out, and with the heroes you’d have to render out all of their body parts separately. Things like the gloves and the boots, things that would change on the character. Then you would have to composite those together, for every direction he was rendered in for every frame of animation. So if he’s rendered in sixteen different directions and he has a … whatever, an eight frame animation, well you have to go through all that and composite all those separate elements in the right order for it to look correct on the screen. So you don’t have an arm that’s supposed to be behind the body in front of the body. And… that was a real tedious process.

So thankfully with real time 3D we don’t have to worry about that, and that’s kind of what I was getting at, with things being a lot easier. Also your animation frame count is not an issue any more. We can have nice fluid, smooth animations now whereas before they were really choppy because, you know, we were only given six or seven frames for a walk cycle. You need a lot more than that to make a convincing walk cycle, but you had to make it look its best within the limitations. So the technical part of it was very different, the creation part of it… I think back then things were a bit more tight-knit and collaborative I guess. You know because the team was smaller, you know when you came up with ideas or designs, there was just a lot more back and forth with designers and artists and programmers. It really felt like everybody was more cohesive in that sense, whereas now the department is bigger, there’s more people on the team, it’s more specialized. There still is that collaboration, I mean I can get up and go talk to anybody on the team that I want to, but when they’re way down the hall you start to get lazy and you don’t want to go chit-chat with somebody. You want to get your tasks done. The design process is a little different, but we still, when we come up with an asset now, there’s a particular monster needed for an act for instance, before we really start working on the asset we’ll get together with a designer, a technical artist, character artist, and producer, anybody that needs to be involved and we’ll talk about it and spin ideas around and make sure we can troubleshoot anything we can in the beginning stages. Come up with ideas for how it may die, what else can it do that would be really cool, and we didn’t have that kind of organized meeting when we were working on Diablo II or the expansion pack.
Bashiok: So how would it work, would the artist themselves come up with maybe a function for…

Anthony: It was more… I don’t want to say disorganized, but it was more freeform back then. It was kind of just a natural riffing off each other, and not an official kind of “Hey let’s get together and make sure we’ve discussed everything that needs to be discussed” and sign off on that and move forward. It was just more organic.

Bashiok: I think that’s generally how game design has evolved for most companies. It seems like game design back in ’95 to 2000 was more, I don’t know the game industry itself was a little bit less refined.

Anthony: Yeah definitely, but there was a real charm that came with that too.

Bashiok: For sure. So as a Senior Character Artist on Diablo III what are your main responsibilities?

Anthony: They’re pretty straight forward. I mean in the beginning of this, I’ve been on this project for a while, and you know I was helping a lot with helping to get art in to the engine in its very early stages. Jason Regier, our Lead Programmer, has been working on this engine for quite some time, so I used to help him get assets in to the game to help him figure some things out. I helped develop the system that we still use, although it’s more refined now, for displaying the armor on the heroes. The various types of armor and things like that. Nowadays pretty straight forward modeling, texturing, some concept work. You know, help other artists if they need help, but most of the guys are kick ass artists and they teach me more than I teach them, so you know that’s changed a lot too.

Bashiok: Are there any creatures that are announced that we can talk about that you’ve provided some modeling for or have contributed to?

Anthony: The female witch doctor’s heavy armor set, her look is my design and work.

Bashiok: That was seen at WWI, the large feather headdress look.

Anthony: Yes, yes. And the scavenger monster.

Bashiok: Those are the little burrowing dudes.

Anthony: Yeah the little burrowing guys. The Corpulent, the guy that blows himself up, I did some retexturing work on that. Let’s see, the tree that explodes, I helped with some effects work on that. I helped provide some modeling/texturing needs for the effects team. The shaman goatman I built and textured, the other goatmen I did some touch up on, their textures. The ghosts, I created and modeled and textured the ghosts.

Bashiok: From the announcement video the orbs they were spawning out of.
Anthony: Yeah exactly. I think that’s all I can think of right now.

Bashiok: On the website, we plan to have at least, the ... pretty much we’re showing a new monster for everybody listening to BlizzCast right now, is the Malformed. I believe you worked on those quite a bit.
Anthony: Yes I did. I modeled and textured those off of Josh Tallman’s initial concept design.     
     
Bashiok: Yeah we should have some concepts. If you’re listening to this on iTunes go ahead and check out the actual BlizzCast website for that artwork.

I think that about wraps it up. I want to thank Anthony Rivero for talking to us.
Anthony: You’re welcome.

Community Q&A
World of Warcraft Interview with Alex Afrasiabi (Lead World Designer )
Bashiok: Hello this is Bornakk from the World of Warcraft Community Team and welcome to another Q&A session of BlizzCast.   

First up today we have our World of Warcraft Lead World Designer Alex Afrasiabi here to answer some questions from our players. Welcome to the show Alex!

Alex Afrasiabi: Hey thanks!

Bashiok: First up from the player Akercocke on the European Turalyon realm. Will there be a new line of class quests in Wrath of the Lich King, aside from ones that are for the Death Knight?

Alex Afrasiabi: Not at release. We do have some things planned for the upcoming patches but for release nothing. We love to do more there is just some trickery involved with class quests, the main problem being that – at least we’ve learned in the past – that we don’t want to roll these things out piecemeal, so a couple classes at a time. We did that with the hunters and the priests and the fan reaction wasn’t really good. Although they did like the quests it’s just that I think everyone wants their own class to get a quest and we agree we think that should.

Bashiok: The next question is from Preliatus on the realm Kirin Tor. Are there any updates as to the whereabouts of General Turalyon?

Alex Afrasiabi: So Turalyon, last I heard, he was locked away in some legion home world but you know that’s just a rumor. But really there are plans for Turalyon, it’s one of those things that we keep every content patch we try and work out something. Invariably it goes another way and so we’re hopeful that eventually we’ll get to him.

Bashiok: Some players are particularly interested in quests that will involve these famous lore heroes, do you find these quests more challenging to implement than others?

Alex Afrasiabi: Oh yeah, they are way more challenging to implement. The main hurdles basically are that our established lore characters have histories and stories, there’s memories attached to all those characters so players remember them from not just World of Warcraft but all the Warcraft series. So we have to be really mindful of giving them the proper due respect. We’ve done things in the past where they weren’t received as well and even doing something as simple as changing the appearance of a hero that currently exists causes some uproar. It’s definitely getting that entire questline or storyline built up is a challenge more so than just introducing a new hero. 
Bashiok: What do you think of the new Sylvanas model? 

Alex Afrasiabi: I personally like the new model much better than the Night Elf that we had but we are getting a new custom built model which looks amazing.   
     
Bashiok: Is there any particular storyline from the original game that you are excited to be picking up again in Wrath of the Lich King?

Alex Afrasiabi: Several. It’s been a nice expansion, it was a good break from Outland where things got a little… different I guess is the best term for it. Anything that involves Arthas, Lich King, we’re all over, we love that stuff. Expanding Tirion Fordring’s line and roll rather in the expansion is huge for us. A personal favorite of mine if the Forsaken’s involvement in the early zones with their plague, their blight, that’s something we’ve been forming for years with the old world and we obviously paused it for Outland and we’re coming back. I think we’re just releasing some new stuff in this next build that will kind of bring all that to a head that I’m pretty excited about.

Aside from that there’s also a whole lot of new stuff that we’re also excited about, so Vrykul and Brann and his involvement with the Titans. The power struggles in the Horde, we’re going to start seeing some of those in the next upcoming beta pushes that I’m really excited about. The whole Wrathgate series which we’re just getting ready to release that movie and I hope the fans will love it, I know I love it, so I’m pretty confident they will.

I think the good thing with Northrend is the whole atmosphere of the world just lends itself to a more natural storytelling environment. I think myself and all the other designers really kind of attached to it.

Bashiok: Another thing is, we talked in the past about is how we plan for Arthas to play a bigger role in this expansion, a bigger role than Illidan did in The Burning Crusade, so without giving too much away how well would you say this has gone so far?

Alex Afrasiabi: I think it’s gone really well. If you start as a Death Knight, the first person you see is the Lich King. Going through our zones, Howling Fjord, Borean Tundra, Dragonblight, Grizzly [Hills], Zul’drak, I think almost every zone has at least one encounter with the Lich King, some with Prince Arthas himself - the Alliance get a series in Dragonblight for that - so I think it’s gone really well. Then in Icecrown again, you’ll get several interactions with the Lich King and then going forward in patch 3.1 and beyond there will just be more.

Bashiok: Awesome! That’s everything we had for you today Alex.  Our players are really looking forward to seeing everything starting on November 13th. Thanks for your time today.

Alex Afrasiabi: Thank you.
Bashiok: In the next part of the Q&A we have our Starcraft 2 Lead Designer Dustin Browder here to help us answer some questions from the community. Welcome back Dustin!

Dustin Browder: Thanks.

Bashiok: The first question is from Zoltrix at starcrafttwo.com. Can you tell us about the evolution system for the different units? Like how will this be used for upgrading different units like the Hydralisk and the Zergling and what specific upgrades it will bring to these units?
Dustin Browder: We’re still working obviously on the whole upgrade system and trying to make sure it’s as good as it can possibly be for Starcraft 2. For the mutation, for morphing one unit to another unit for the Zerg in particular, we’ve been working on obviously – you’ve seen a lot of these guys already – we’ve been working on the baneling, we’ve been working on the lurker, we’ve been working on the swarm guardian. This is an old mechanic from the original Starcraft that we’re carrying forward into Starcraft 2 and we’re going to try to keep adding to. We think it’s a really interesting way for the Zerg race to deal with their army, they can sort of look at their own army as a resource. You look at your zergling and that zergling could ultimately run up to that marine and kill him or that zergling might want to morph into a baneling and then roll up and kill a whole bunch of marines all at one go.  So you got to kind of choose how you want to use these units and they are very different units. When you morph a hydralisk into a lurker you get a completely different unit or you’re morphing a mutilisk into a swarm guardian it fundamentally changes the role of the units so it really allows the Zerg player to a limited extent sort of customize their forces on the battlefield. They morph their overlord into an overseer, it really changes the kinds of things that unit can do on the battlefield.

So we’re just trying to make sure that Zerg sort of carry forward this sort of core ideology that they had from the original Starcraft, this ability to mutate, to morph from one unit to another, and it really gives the Zerg a lot of additional flexibility, it makes them a lot of fun. So you get a chance or some players will anyway or are going to join us for BlizzCon in a little bit to look at we are doing with these units in the Zerg and how these mutations affect these armies as a whole but it really does shake up the gameplay quite a lot. You may think you know what the Zerg are, you may think he’s got a bunch of hydralisks or he’s got a bunch of zerglings but you always got to watch out for the mutation, you don’t really know what those units may later become.
Bashiok: Cool. The next question comes from gamer-source.com. With the all the anti-armored units like the marauder and the hydralisk - is this meant to counter the end game units? And also what role do you think end game units will play on the battlefield?

Dustin Browder: : I’m not really sure what an end game unit is, I guess it would be like a battlecruiser or a carrier or a thor or ultralisk, I guess it’s what we’re talking about here. But the hydralisk has always been anti-armor, even in the original Starcraft had a strong anti-armor role.   

The marauder of course gives the Terrans some additional anti-armor capability from the barracks which we felt was very important since we moved the ghost back so far allowing the ghost to fulfill more of a core role on the battlefield for the Terrans. We didn’t think that the ghost made a lot of sense as fundamentally anti-armor with his sniper rifle. If he’s going to be anti biological and sort of taking head shots and taking out individual targets then we really needed the Terrans to have some way to deal with stalkers and immortals and to a lesser extent siege tanks and roaches. So that’s really what the marauder is pointed at, the marauder is pointed more at stalkers and roaches and you’ll see marauders used in that role. They also can tear apart a colossus or thor which is an added advantage for the Terrans from the barracks again.

One of our ideas initially for the Terrans for the infantry for the Terrans was to make sure that the infantry were viable throughout the whole game whereas much as they possibly could. Obviously at a certain point when a lot of psi-storm comes into play or there’s a lot of splash from enemy weapons fire you’re going to see the infantry start coming off of the map very quickly but we really wanted to make sure that the infantry were viable throughout the gameplay experience and that’s one of the things that the marauder is getting for, he’ tough, he can take a lot of hits, and he dish out a lot of damage to some heavily armored units and so if the threat is like roaches, and immortals, and stalkers the marauder has a lot of firepower.

And the hydralisk has a similar kind of role in that sense, obviously the hydra can shoot air, he is also a lot softer than a marauder but the hydra has some very powerful abilities to deal with some of these heavily armored threats that are very low down in the tech tree. Units like the thor, the mothership and the colossus all have their roles and we see them in games probably about a half or a third of the games that we see will actually see these units even come into play.  And when they come into play they can be extremely dangerous of course but there’s a lot of counters already in play and the marauder is just one of the choices you have when dealing with an enemy unit like the thor. You can also obviously bring in mass siege tanks, even mass marines ultimately can be very effective against a small groups of thors because the thor is just not doing enough splash, he can absolutely obliterate a marine in a couple shots but there are simply too many marines at that point in the game sometimes for a thor to tear them all down so we’re really not worried at this point of these end-game units sort of eclipsing the core gameplay experience. They’re definitely finding their place, they definitely have their uses but they are definitely something you can counter and the marauder is part of that counter list but it’s not really the reason the marauder exists.  The marauder really exists for stalkers, immortals, and roaches. Threats like this that are massable, can be fast but they’re heavily armored, they are something that a marine has trouble dealing with.

Bashiok: Very nice, thanks for the information Dustin.

Dustin Browder: Alright, thank you.
Bashiok: In our last segment of the Q&A session we have our Diablo 3 Game Direct Jay Wilson. Welcome to the show Jay!

Jay Wilson: Thank you very much.
Bashiok: Our first question is from Vandro from Diablofans.com – Will we be able to use the old overlay map instead of the mini-map?

Jay Wilson: Right now we don’t have any plans to do a fullscreen overlay. We really felt that the overlay was more there because the mini-map was not very usable as a small map. We feel like when you put that map and you cover it over the whole display it actually adds a lot of clutter but we are planning to do like a fullscreen map that just covers the whole screen so that you can kind of see an entire area like if want to check out if there are any areas of this dungeon that I haven’t explored yet, you can really see more of that. But right now we’re really focused on trying to make the mini-map is very usable at the size that it’s at and so we’ve put a lot of work and the maps are actually custom made. The ones in D2 were kind of auto-generated where as ours we literally we custom make every piece of it. We have an artist go through and draw out so we can make sure that they’re really visible and very usable and so far we’re finding that it’s working really well.

Bashiok: Awesome. The next question is from Immelmann from Diii.net. Will there be special player deaths in various situations? Like when the Siegebreaker bit the Barbarian in half during the gameplay demo.
Jay Wilson: Well what we want to do with that, especially for particular bosses is have when essentially when the player is very low on health and they’re about to die the boss essentially checks like when it attacks you, did I just do enough damage to kill you? And if so then instead of just doing his normal attack he’d actually play some kind of special I pick you up and eat you or I throw you up in the air and knock you around like a baseball or something like that. It’s a system that really our announcement video we tested it for the first time, mainly just to see – can we actually do this kind of animation interaction between the characters but the actual system itself is still not in there but we do plan to do that and that’s primarily where. We might do some other things, we’ve talked about physics based deaths we’ve talked about having the characters if they like die to a cold monster he might completely freeze solid into a statue and then shatter or things like that but we haven’t decided at this point if that’s exactly what we’re going to do.

Bashiok: The last question we have is from Sly_dawg19 from blizzplanet.com. During the gameplay video an “Elixer of Vitality I” dropped. Can you explain Elixers and the benefits and roles they will play in Diablo 3?
Jay Wilson: Well right now elixirs are primarily to provide a short term benefit to the player. I can’t remember exactly how many off the top of my head, I think there’s maybe six different kinds of elixirs and they do things like give you health boosts or give you damage boosts, give you different stats, things like that. So whenever you find one you can essentially use it whenever you want to give you a short term buff. And then as you go through the game the ‘one’ indicates quality so the ‘one’ is kind of a low end, not very good item, it’s not bad – at low levels it actually makes a pretty big difference, at high levels it doesn’t matter that much but as you go through the game they become more and more powerful. So we have a variety of different kinds of items like that we have added in to give the player some interesting buffs. Some of them are something like that were it’s just a nice bonus to have, whereas some of them are actually game changing kind of things like you can fire them off in an emergency to be able to deal with a particularly tough encounter. 

Bashiok:Do you think they will be purchasable or will it mainly just be the drops?

Jay Wilson: My guess is that they will be drops only. We essentially added them into the system to put more items into the drop game. One of the things we found is that because we removed things like potions and changed the nature of some of our other drops, like for example – I’ll let this out – we don’t really have ammo anymore, if you use a kind of weapon that would normally use ammo we just let you use it, we don’t make you go collect more ammo, it just has infinite ammo. It’s kind of to support more action aspect of the game. Then if you go back to Diablo 2, a lot of bolts drop! That fills up a lot of the “trash” that drops and when we started pulling a lot of those things like potions got reduced way down and bolts got completely removed we that it really threw off the item drop like you never had anything drop that was less important. So we looked to a whole class of items and we don’t necessarily want to drop trash, we didn’t want to drop stuff that was just vendor trash like that was never our goal. We said maybe we can find things that the player is not necessarily like “Oh my god that’s the best item in the world!” but it’s like “Oh cool, I could use that, that gives me a little bit of a buff” and elixirs are kind of that class of item.
Bashiok: Okay, awesome! Well that’s it for the questions today, let’s thank Monte, Same, Alex, Jay, and Dustin for their time today and thanks to all our listeners for downloading this episode. This is Bornakk from the World of Warcraft Community Team and we’ll see you next time!

2 comments

« Wrath of the Lich King Breaks Sales Records

Athene's Mother Gets Involved in Level 80 Fiasco »

You must be registered and logged in to post comments.