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IGN: How does the team go about making [so many] skills that feel different from the next, yet all serve a specific purpose?
JW: We do it in waves. The first wave of a class is just capturing the feel, so for the barbarian we focused on abilities like seismic slam and bash, things that were leap attacks. Those were some of the first ones we ever did because they're very showy and they're very barbarian. Massive strength, big hits, leaping through the air -- they're physical
Once we had those skills in the game we could very easily say to people: "here's a new skill we want to add and it works kind of like this," and the art teams and the design teams could just run with it because they already had examples of what the barbarian should feel like.
So those first sets of skills are character defining. Then we do the next round which I call the "filling in the holes" round. We need some control abilities, we need some defensive abilities, we need a travel ability, we need different ways to do big AOE attacks versus single-target attacks. We go through and fill in the holes. Again, still trying to look at the original set that we did and do signature skills.
Then the next round is fixing the problems. The monk was a good example. For a while, he just didn't feel "monk-like." We've actually done multiple what I call "fixing passes" to try and give him more kung fu skills. We gave him a big kick ability at one point so players could switch up their attacks. So that pass -- I say it's the third pass, but it's really the third, fourth, fifth, sixth...
Read more at the link below.JW: We do it in waves. The first wave of a class is just capturing the feel, so for the barbarian we focused on abilities like seismic slam and bash, things that were leap attacks. Those were some of the first ones we ever did because they're very showy and they're very barbarian. Massive strength, big hits, leaping through the air -- they're physical
Once we had those skills in the game we could very easily say to people: "here's a new skill we want to add and it works kind of like this," and the art teams and the design teams could just run with it because they already had examples of what the barbarian should feel like.
So those first sets of skills are character defining. Then we do the next round which I call the "filling in the holes" round. We need some control abilities, we need some defensive abilities, we need a travel ability, we need different ways to do big AOE attacks versus single-target attacks. We go through and fill in the holes. Again, still trying to look at the original set that we did and do signature skills.
Then the next round is fixing the problems. The monk was a good example. For a while, he just didn't feel "monk-like." We've actually done multiple what I call "fixing passes" to try and give him more kung fu skills. We gave him a big kick ability at one point so players could switch up their attacks. So that pass -- I say it's the third pass, but it's really the third, fourth, fifth, sixth...
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