Diablo Immortalis set to release its 8th class on May 23: the lightning-quick, dagger-wielding, and water-flingingTempest. Kings and queens of mobility, the Tempest dashes and teleports around the battlefield with support from its summoned Zephyr clones. Its skills and legendary affixes can support various playstyles, covering those who want to play melee or ranged as well as everything in-between.
During a preview event of the Tempest class, Game Rant sat down withDiablo Immortalsenior narrative designer Ryan Quinn and lead systems designer John Yoo to discuss all things Tempest. They weighed in on how theDiablo Immortalteam approaches class design on systemic and narrative levels, the challenge involved in dropping a new class into the PVP meta, various playstyles possible with the Tempest, and plenty more.This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Q: What was your approach to the Tempest’s build variety? How might one Tempest player differ from another?
Yoo:That is a good question. There are definitely a lot of different types of builds you can create with the Tempest. Obviously, you can go melee, you can go ranged, and you can focus on summons, but the class is very diverse because there are a lot of combos that prop up with the Tempest. We did a lot to try to make the abilities synergize with each other in terms of more interactivity and having commands that interact with your Zephyrs. It’s definitely going to be a diverse class, probably more on the unique side compared to what we’ve done in the past.
Quinn:Most of the legendariesthat we have feel like build changers. We’ve got one called Overflow that transforms Vortex–which is an outward damaging AoE– into a sporadic geyser that appears under monsters and knocks them up in the air. Every single one of the legendaries really feels like it will take your build in a different direction. When multiplied by six, you’re going to get a pretty substantial variety.
Q: Before working on the Tempest, I’m sure you bounced around a few ideas for classes. What led you to go with the Tempest forDiablo Immortal’s 8th class?
Quinn:Thematically, one of the things that we knew we wanted to doafter Blood Knightwas to do a lighter-toned class. Historically, inDiablo, our light-tone classes like Monk, Crusader, and Paladin tend to be “holy.” One of the fun narrative challenges on our side was, “Can we make a light-tone class that isn’t holy, and still have it feel special and iconic, and it does things that no other class would do?”
Early on, the first things that we really landed on were that we wanted to use what we call internally, “the northern elements,” basically water and wind, and we wanted to do passive summoning as a core ability and The Zephyrs grew out of that. The idea of it being a hybrid that danced back and forth and was really fluid in combat throughout that. Then there’s the backstory, the notion of where the Tempest comes from and what their social standing is. The Tempest was a character that went through probably most iterations. Some of the early pictures are very, very different from where we landed.
Q: What’s your criteria internally for what a goodDiablo Immortalclass feels like? How do you know when you’ve got things in the right place?
Yoo:I’m more on the systems side focusing on gameplay and balance, and on our side, we just want the class to be fun. We leave the story narrative and wrapper to Ryan and the other designers on the content side. We just want to make sure that it is interesting to play, and that there are a lot of different options for players to be able to build out their character.
We want to ensure that we’re hitting different player types, whether you’re a type who likes summoning minions or you’re a type who likes to get up close and personal. We want to make sure that we provide different experiences for different types of players because everybody’s different, but ultimately, when we’re playing and especially when we’re playtesting, we feel like the classes are heading in the right direction when you may see the fun. Early on, it’s really hard to find the fun because everything is in such a raw state. When you can pinpoint specific nuggets and say “This is definitely heading in the right direction,” you focus on that and you keep iterating on it until you get to something that you’re happy with. Through that iteration, we really feel happy with where the Tempest landed.
Quinn:From a theme perspective, we always want to make something that, when you look at it, you know instinctively what it’s going to feel like to play that class and that that plays into our narrative. BecauseDiablo ImmortalisbetweenDiablo 2andDiablo 3, we talk a lot about the balance between what’s new and what’s familiar.
For the Tempest, if they’re going to throw gusts of wind, does that behave like wind? Does that seem like a player fantasy that we would want or that we would expect? And then there’s the newness. We give them these weird water-channeling daggers that feel a bit different, but it’s important for us to keep those two things in balance and give people enough that they’re acquainted with, and then do something they weren’t expecting.
Q: The Tempest has some interesting lore backing it. How do you approach that initially? Do you look to references in pastDiablogames and try to build from there?
Quinn:It’s different for every class. We were coming up with a new class that we hadn’t done a variation on before. It starts out as “the sky’s the limit.” We throw around keywords that seem like they would fit some of that mold for this class. We tried “siren” and we tried “sage” and we tried things that felt like they were kind of in the rough wheelhouse of “uses water magic and uses wind magic” and the kind of pieces that floated above everything else was this idea of elemental force.
Diablois a game where, ultimately, the core gameplay experience is you fighting and slaying demons, often a really high density of demons. Doing that with crazy elemental control stood out for us above the rest.
The other thing that really captivated us was this fallen empire idea. The fallen empire idea let us develop a new ecology and a new kit inthe world of Sanctuary, while getting into some of these old Nephalem references in there, but then the idea of going crazy with elemental control, fury, and mashing those up together feels knowable and understandable but a little different.
Q: Dropping a new class intoDiablo Immortal’s PVP meta must be super difficult. What was it like this time around trying to get the Tempest to fit in?
Yoo:Nothing is easy when it comes to PvP. Oh man, it is such a struggle trying to get everything balanced, and the fact isPvP is just so much harder to developand build for and balance because of the dynamic that you’re fighting against another player and that interaction is such a different animal compared to fighting AI enemies. With AI enemies, we can do anything we want because we control the AI. We balanced it in such a way that we want players to succeed, and we want players to be successful against our environment.
PVP is such a different animal because of the human element, trying to ensure that everything is balanced and that people are not going to get upset because of the upset to that balance. Whenever we introduce a new class, there are always risks, and we iterate and we try to playtest as much as we can.
In reality, we know sometimes we’ll get things wrong, but that’s where we have to quickly make changes and listen to the pulse of what people are saying. I’ve been in the industry for 25 years and the reality is, as much as we playtest internally, we’re just no match for the millions of people out there playing the game. They’re going to find things out much faster, much more precisely than we are.
So for us, it’s really about figuring out what we can do to check all the boxes in terms of the knowns about PVP and the balance that comes with knowing our game. But after that, it’s really listening to the feedback that we see and making adjustments. The hope is that we’re able to get 80-90% there and then we can iterate on that last 10% in terms of the balance, but PvP balance is something that we are constantly and always going to be modifying and updating because of the ever-dynamic changes within the game.
Q: This is your second time introducing a new class toDiablo Immortal. Were there any lessons learned from the Blood Knight that guided your approach to the Tempest?
Yoo:We do recognize thatplayers love the brand-new classes. That was something that we had in mind when developing the Tempest: we thought that would be super exciting. One thing, though, is that it’s so much harder trying to come up with a brand-new class with no information and no backstory, like Ryan mentioned, “the sky’s the limit.” That’s not always a good thing. There’s just so much that you can do, so sometimes internally we start ending up going too crazy on certain things and trying to figure out how to rein things back in.
In terms of the new classes, we recognize how important it is for the community and how that content is super exciting. The reality for us is it is an incredible amount of work. It’s so much work that we sometimes question whether we should do more classes. At the same time, we know that this is something that our fans love and they’re always looking forward to, so it’s work that we feel is important to the game.
Quinn:From the Blood Knight, our introduction to that class was very gameplay-forward with the Crimson Plane at that time. Coming out of that, we wanted to do something that was a little bit more narrative and questing-forward on top of that. We’re doing the Deluged Plane, which you may have already tried out, as the build introduction. Then we’re doing the origin quest, Relentless Tide, as the narrative introduction.
Our content designer Scott Burgess and I were really, really eager to see if that makes people feel more in tune with the Tempest at launch, knowing what the fantasy is and knowing how the class plays as opposed to the Blood Knight where you just jumped in and figured your way out. So that’s something that we’re paying super close attention to.
Yoo:We didlearn a lot from the Blood Knight, and we’re hoping that we take those learnings and apply them. For instance, with the Blood Knight, we made a lot of changes to attempt to make class changes easier. With the Tempest, we’re trying to do more to improve that. We’re constantly making changes so that players can more easily get into the brand-new class, to get up and running with it, and to enjoy it as quickly as possible.
Q: What would be your elevator pitch if you wanted to convince someone that the Tempest might be their favorite class?
Quinn:They are the master of the northern elements. They are an agile blade dancer that crashes upon their foes with all the fury of a storm. That’s the essence of the class. Zephyrs are cool too, but we’re in an elevator and I only have a few seconds.
Yoo:It’s just a fun, dynamic class. You tried it out. It’s a very, very different class from what we’ve done in the past. Some of the other classes are more fire and forgetlike a Necromancer summonstheir guys and then just fires from behind. The Tempest is a blade dancer; they’re dancing across the field. You have all this ability to move around and teleport around and be really, really precise with your actions. It’s definitely something for people who really want to have more control over their experience.
Q: You mentioned build-changing legendary items earlier. Are there any others that come to mind as having a significant impact on how abilities behave or how the class plays out?
Quinn:I talked about Overflow earlier, which is one of the one-handed edges, but there’s another item called Spiral Guidance. There’s a wind skill called Squall, which is your teleport dash kind of thing. You dash and then your Zephyrs dash with you. What it does is change that to a channeled ability where you and all your Zephyrs are firing these super fast gusts of wind almost like a bullet hell experience.
I personally love positioning a couple of Zephyrs around the battlefield around a big bruiser-type enemy, somebody with a lot of HP, and then catching them in a triangle of death and blasting them over and over from every conceivable angle. It really feels like something that provides that critical moment where you’re like, “Oh, I’m going to take a couple of seconds setting this up, and then I’ll feel super rewarded when I pull off a cool move at the end.”
Q: We touched on this a bit earlier, but the Tempest is a brand-new class to theDiablofranchise. What was the most challenging part of designing it with that in mind?
Quinn:If you think about the originalDiablo, orDiablo 2, we’re talking aboutthree or five classes at launch. Once you get to class eight, for a game that’s been live for a while, there’s always this question of “How do we differentiate this character’s personality from the other classes?” We can do different visual effects, we can do a different play style, but if you just listen to the audio of the Tempest talking in the same scenario as the Blood Knight or as a Crusader, can you tell which class is which?
To me, that was the biggest challenge. Dialing in on the personality of this character from a completely new part of the world in a class that we haven’t had any experience to draw upon, and knowing that we wanted to do something a little bit different with this. The Tempest is a little bit less archetypal compared to “I’m a Barbarian, I’m loud and brash and boisterous,” or “I’m a Crusader, I’m super zealous.” Trying to do that “calm in the eye of the storm” thing with the Tempest and have that feed into our voice performances was a lot of work. We took a couple of stabs at early casting documents, but the performances that we got from Nicole and David are just so good!
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