In the modern day and age of gaming, players are looking for every possible way to see a reflection of themselves in the heroes/villains they play as in their video games. The tools for character customisation, industry-wide, have been growing in siza and scope for years, and for one of the tips of the spear, Blizzard and the Diablo franchise, the pressure is on from players and press to maintain or exceed what is currently available from their competitors. Recently, a pair of senior Diablo IV developers, Lead Class Designer Adam Jackson and Producer Ash Sweetring spoke to Australian outlet, Press-Start to discuss the addition of extended character customisation in June’s Diablo IV.
Speaking to Press-Start, both Jackson and Sweetring addressed the first time appearance of the extended character customisation and the prospect of more coming post-launch, saying,
We’ve gone through a lot of painstaking work to make sure that character customisation is as robust as possible. I can’t really give anything away, but the list of things that we would like to do is very long, and we’re always adding more stuff. It’s one of the nice things about having this game as a live service. There are so many ideas that everyone on the team has like – ‘wouldn’t this be cool?’ and we’re definitely putting a ton of those into the launch version of the game, but we’ve already got a backlog of stuff that we want to do that we already know is going to be cooler, so we’re leaving space.
The players kind of control the content of the game a little bit too, right? We don’t just build a game by ourselves. Diablo IV isn’t Blizzard’s first rodeo when it coms to building a live service game. the team has a ton of experience making games and making them with the community over a long period of time. We’ve done it with World of Warcraft, we’ve done it here and in Overwatch and Hearthstone. You name it. We’ve done this before. A lot of what we decide to prioritise will be based on player feedback. If they really want some type of feature, we can decide we’re going to do that first before all of the other things that we care about because we know that the players really want that and we’re willing to do that.
Adam Jackson
I think that’s a part of growth. We want to continue iterating and making Diablo IV the best product possible. There are always going to be opportunities for us to look back and ask, ‘how can we improve this? What can we do better? What are people asking for? What are our needs and what are our wants at this time?‘ It’s a constantly moving flux of things that we want to do. We’re always looking into what we can do and what we can improve.
Ash Sweetring
Diablo IV launches on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PC on June 6, 2023.
