Flux
21-08-2008, 06:14
Interesting bit from Jay Wilson in a new interview with Gamespy.
GameSpy: Other games have tried to do randomly-generated content without much success. Why is it that Diablo can make it work?
Jay Wilson: I honestly think that randomness is incredibly hard to do, and incredibly expensive. And so, to a certain degree -- and I hate to throw it down to just this -- it's a resource problem more than anything else. If you're going to make a really cool dungeon -- let's say a good-sized dungeon probably would be, if you use our dungeon as an example, 12 to 15 rooms is what you need to create. Maybe even a little bit less; we find six to eight rooms can take you 15 to 20 minutes to get through. That's actually a good amount of time for a single level. Maybe you repeat it a couple so times so you get up to 20 [rooms]. It takes about 80 rooms to make a truly random dungeon -- a dungeon that feels random. So you look at that, and it's about four or five times the amount of content. And the creation of background content is one of the biggest bottlenecks in the creation of games.
When you look at games, they don't have problems creating characters. Animation is a bit of a bottleneck, because there's so much animation required nowadays, but if you look at any game company and see who they're trying to hire at any one time... I don't know anybody who isn't trying to hire background people. Part of it is that there's so much background to create, and part of it is that most people would rather create a big, giant monster than a tree. But boy, what we wouldn't give for some good tree creators! People who love to create trees are worth their weight in gold!
Is blizzard uniquely able to create enjoyable, semi-randomized levels? Is their art design uniquely pleasing, in the RPG industry? Or are their whole games just so good that we tend to think every element is great, when maybe it's the whole > sum of the parts?
GameSpy: Other games have tried to do randomly-generated content without much success. Why is it that Diablo can make it work?
Jay Wilson: I honestly think that randomness is incredibly hard to do, and incredibly expensive. And so, to a certain degree -- and I hate to throw it down to just this -- it's a resource problem more than anything else. If you're going to make a really cool dungeon -- let's say a good-sized dungeon probably would be, if you use our dungeon as an example, 12 to 15 rooms is what you need to create. Maybe even a little bit less; we find six to eight rooms can take you 15 to 20 minutes to get through. That's actually a good amount of time for a single level. Maybe you repeat it a couple so times so you get up to 20 [rooms]. It takes about 80 rooms to make a truly random dungeon -- a dungeon that feels random. So you look at that, and it's about four or five times the amount of content. And the creation of background content is one of the biggest bottlenecks in the creation of games.
When you look at games, they don't have problems creating characters. Animation is a bit of a bottleneck, because there's so much animation required nowadays, but if you look at any game company and see who they're trying to hire at any one time... I don't know anybody who isn't trying to hire background people. Part of it is that there's so much background to create, and part of it is that most people would rather create a big, giant monster than a tree. But boy, what we wouldn't give for some good tree creators! People who love to create trees are worth their weight in gold!
Is blizzard uniquely able to create enjoyable, semi-randomized levels? Is their art design uniquely pleasing, in the RPG industry? Or are their whole games just so good that we tend to think every element is great, when maybe it's the whole > sum of the parts?