I see this topic a lot. People hear that "we want Diablo 3 to be accessible" and it's like a red flag to a troll..urm, bull.

I think that people get "Accessiblity" mixed up with "Casual" games and imagine Diablo 3 - Peggle edition. Similarly, a lot of us who have been gaming for a long time forget that Challenging doesn't mean annoying or frustrating.

I mean...I remember DnD games where you had no respecs. And you needed a certain party skill to get past some points. And there were only a few good builds anyway. And most of the good weapons were well hidden. I also remember the console era where savegames didn't exist and things seldom came with a manual or tutorial.

I remember games like Turok 2, Ultima and the like where you spent more time walking around trying to find what to do next and were basically impossible sans a walkthrough or a LOT of patience.

I also have fond memories of games like Sonic, Megaman, other Diablo games and God of War which had a wonderful difficulty curve and really eased players into things - and those games could be *balls* hard at times. And in many of those, when I got frustrated it wasn't because of a boss or jumping puzzle. It was because I'd made an innocent mistake with my build, or had killed myself learning a fight and had no more lives, or some other thing irrelevant to the 'difficulty' of the game.

Yes - you get the odd throwback - Ninja Gaiden, Demons Souls, Bayonetta and such games that are really hard, punishing and unfriendly to new players on a civilized difficulty.

Seriously - an Accesible game can still be very challenging. The difference is - it is challenging where it should be. Just figuring out a game should not be the hard part. It should lie in fights, bosses, endgame, pvp...all that good stuff.

From this blue post:

---

Q u o t e:


Quite right, but on that point I'd say we agree that talent trees in Cataclysm were great in that you really couldn't screw up, but they also removed pretty much all choice. It's something we talk a lot about and hope to fix.

I don't want to talk about WoW here, but I also don't want you to think that the change we made was something we look at and think is the perfect solution.



Uh, hrm. I'm sure there are plenty of examples people can come up with where we've changed or removed the more 'hardcore' aspects of the game. Respecs are a huge one, but 99% of people didn't like rerolling new characters when they placed a point incorrectly. "Auto stats" are another, but hopefully we've provided enough info to let people know that we're only shifting customization, and adding more, not removing something meaningful.

In any case, I think all of these types of things (feel free to list the ones I left out) all feed into a feeling of uncertainty. Which is totally reasonable, but when people get their hands on it, I don't think they'll be able to deny it's a Diablo game. And if we screwed up somewhere we're going to work to make it right. Hopefully though we can talk (or have talked) about where you think we may screw up and we can try to make sure our position is known, or otherwise get that feedback and work with it.

---

---

Q u o t e:
I think that people get "Accessiblity" mixed up with "Casual" games and imagine Diablo 3 - Peggle edition. Similarly, a lot of us who have been gaming for a long time forget that Challenging doesn't mean annoying or frustrating.

---

There's also a lot of different ideas about what "casual" means. It's different for everyone.

Casual, in our minds, generally means that you can choose to jump into a game at any time, on any day, play for a relatively small amount of time, and make some kind of progress. Diablo II was a casual game, as is Diablo III. You can, of course, sit and play for 6 hours straight if you like, but the ability to jump in, kill some monsters, and get something out of it (drops, XP, story progression) makes it 'casually approachable'. You won't be able to keep up with the people that dedicate more time to it, of course, but you'll still be able to make meaningful progress.

That's what allows it to be casual, purely depending on the amount of time someone can put toward playing.

As far as accessible vs. easy, we attempt to instill all of our games with an easy to learn, difficult to master approach.