@playtlgame Dead game. Blatant cash grab. You had the chance to keep the best community that supports this game and yet you still decided to screw them over because of GREED.
RIP.
Server Merge – Timing Details
As a reminder, server merges for North America are planned for March 11. To support this work, maintenance will begin earlier than usual at 9 AM PT (4 PM UTC).
Due to the scope of the merges, downtime this week will take a bit longer and may last up to 30 hours. Find more details on these merges, including participating servers here: playthroneandliberty.com/en-us/news/art…
Thank you for your patience.
🚧 Steam Survivors,
Lost Colony cinematics have been updated with newer versions and the correct “Lost Queen Defeated” cinematic.
Xbox and PlayStation Survivors will get the same update shortly.
❄️ ARK: Lost Colony is now live, so get ready join the fight for Arat Prime!
🩸 Will you cling to your humanity, or will you undergo the Turning to become the monster this place demands you to be?
youtube.com/watch?v=0fPUJx…
🚧 Server Maintenance Notice
Some official servers will undergo scheduled maintenance tomorrow, Dec 17 at 10:30 AM ET, and are expected to be offline for about 4 hours.
During this time, affected servers will be unavailable while we perform backend adjustments in preparation for Lost Colony.
⏸ Time will not progress on any affected servers.
Server list 👇
survivetheark.com/index.php?/for…
The Lord of Sin returns hungry.
Bring your blade, your fury, your will.
Join the Season of Divine Intervention December 11 at 8:30 PM PT and face him yourself.
Some news to share with everyone: my last day at Blizzard will be on November 19th.
This was my second time back at Blizzard in my career. It’s a company that means a ton to me, as it created my most memorable gaming experiences as I was growing up. Blizzard has become more than just the games for me, as it has for so many others here. It’s very much about the people, and I will miss them dearly every day.
Team Diablo is a special part of Blizzard that I truly love. I have met some of my best friends and some of the smartest, most passionate people within this fold. These devs truly care and want what’s best for the players, and working with them through all of it was the best highlight of my day – every day. The opportunity to lead Community on the franchise that defined so much of what I would do in my career was a dream come true. I can’t thank the players enough for the Reddit threads, random tweets, late night DMs and more – sometimes with critical and much-needed feedback, sometimes to showcase your love for the game, and sometimes just a reassuring “thanks”. Every single one of those messages and threads means a ton.
The stellar Diablo Community & Social Teams I’ve had the privilege of leading will continue carrying the torch after my departure, as they have since the beginning. Please keep bringing your passion for this franchise through your feedback, posts, and thoughts. The community team will be checking all our various spaces to ensure everything is relayed back to the dev team.
Diablo has a ton coming up, and I can’t wait to see it all unfold as the franchise heads into its 30th anniversary. Best of all, I get to experience this as a fan from the sidelines. It’s gonna be a wild ride!
As for me, I have something new on the horizon that I’m incredibly excited about! I’ll talk more about it at a later date, but for now, I’m going to relish these final moments with this wonderful team here on Diablo.
Secrets are a big part of Remnant. One of the many pleasures of working on the franchise has been finding new ways to hide stuff. Sometimes it's clever, sometimes evil, sometimes in plain sight, and sometimes a bit pretentious (depending who you ask!).
Figuring out where to place stuff comes from all over.
Quest designers often work secrets right into their initial designs. Since alternate outcomes are part of the overall adventure, considering them happens from the start in many cases. The designer plans an entire quest around a secret as the primary focus, and the default reward ends up as the extra piece. Sometimes it happens the other way - the designer plans out a simple quest and then they or someone else has an idea to add some spice to it.
Other times we have extra rewards to give out and we need to find places to put them. This can happen because we try to keep a similar number of rewards per area, and not all areas have an equal number of secrets pre-planned. With the extra items, we think about where they might fit. Could it be in an existing quest? What if it's just placed in a corner somewhere that requires simple exploration? Maybe it shows up on a vendor after X Y or Z has been completed, etc.
Opportunities also pop up that we didn't plan for. In Remnant 2, one of the Environment Artists found a place in the Labyrinth that allowed the player to go off the beaten path. It wasn't intentional, but it FELT intentional, so they thought it might provide a cool opportunity for a secret. We ended up cleaning up the area and it became the inspiration for the Polygon questline (one of the larger secrets in the game). Never initially planned, but became something because someone just thought "Hey, this might be cool!"
Sometimes secrets merge together to create a super-secret. If you remember "The Red Door" from Remnant 2, that was a combination of a few different ideas coming together to create one of the most well-known (infamous?) secrets in the entire franchise. One designer suggested having a specific "location" (unnamed to prevent spoilers), while another had the idea for a secret that could only be unearthed by going through the game code. After a lot of back and forth, they ended up becoming part of the same secret!
Secrets can also influence gear design. In one N'Erud quest, you are tasked with figuring out a code. The code was related to the date the game was released, so the name "Genesis" ended up fitting. Of course, there were other references related to the word itself (a certain video game console), but the initial idea came from the secret itself. Oh, and we also put a clue in a blog post weeks before the DLC was released, but that one may have been a bit tooooo obscure.
Conversely, gear design can spark an idea for a secret. The Shovel was initially a funny "Wouldn't it be funny if we had a Shovel melee weapon in the game?" idea. Then it became "OK, well now we have a shovel... we have to do something secret with it." In fact, we made couple related to it. Why? It's a Shovel. Once you have one, the rest writes itself!
Speaking of "You know what would be funny?" opportunities, I'm sure some people remember flop-rolling their way to an unlock. Or dying to get a Participation Medal. What about listening to an NPC drone on and on the history of a biome, or even their checkered past? Perhaps you shot a blocked drain and thought nothing happened, only to return much later in real-world time to find out the drain had since filled up the room and enabled a new path. Ever stand around in quicksand for what felt like forever?
Really, the inspiration for secrets can come from anywhere... even outside of the studio. In fact, I mentioned one in a previous post that revolved around checking on a boss's feet/toes after a successful kill. That whole meme eventually led way to a related reward, but it would never have come up had the meme itself not been created through the community.
Remnant secrets can be big or small. They can range from "obvious" to insanely obscure and esoteric. Some will require logic while others may just require being in the right place at the right time.
The only thing you can be certain of is that there will always be tons of secrets to discover... and that their origins may be intentional... or accidental.
#Remnant2