Diablo 3 – ett spel för hela familjen

blizzardSyftet med införandet av förenklade tooltips verka vara att alla, inklusive din pappa, dotter samt respektive ska kunna sätta sig ner och spela Diablo 3 utan tidigare erfarenhet från datorspel. Bashiok vidareutvecklar Blizzards resonemang.

Just a few counter points to some of the discussions this has raised:

Simple tooltips benefit almost everyone. Just because they may not benefit you, they’ll indirectly benefit you by helping non-gamers get into the game. Right now most of us are only thinking about when we play the game, but when the game is released, or quite possibly years down the road, you may want to be able to teach your dad, your daughter, your significant other to play. Simplified tooltips will certainly help when you walk away and they’re trying to learn to play for themselves. And we can always hope they put stuff up on the auction house for way less than its worth! Mwahahahaa.

The in-game reference guide/book idea for skill and game information has a number of UI issues, but as a player of the game it’s not a great solution because:

  • You’re not always in-game. More often than not when you’re dissecting a skill at a massive level of detail you’re on a website/forum discussing things, or you’ve got an excel spreadsheet open. Or you’re getting in some extra Diablo time while at a friend’s place. Or you’re at work on your lunch break.
  • A web page lets us present far more organized detail than an in-game book would allow (without ceasing to look like a web browser embedded in a book which would just look silly). You want tick rates, scaling formulas, proc interactoins, etc.
  • A web site allows us to provide the most timely information. If questions come up on the forums, we make a hotfix, we find errors, or come across more information we’d like to pass along, we can get that information out to players immediately. If it was in-game it would require a patch.