Riley Bufton

Game Designer specializing in world and systems design

DIABLO IV: VESSEL OF HATRED

Background

Dates Worked On: January 2023 - Present
Releases: Game Development/Release, Live Ops Content Updates/Patches
Roles: Associate World Designer, World Designer

Once work was winding down on the base game for Diablo IV, I was moved on to work on the game’s first expansion: Vessel of Hatred. My job as a World Designer was to create an open world experience in the new zone for the expansion (Nahantu) that would live up to, and in some places surpass, the experience that was delivered to players in the base game. This included work I had already done on the base game, like spawning passes and designing/creating small form content, as well as new work that expanded my role as a world designer, specifically heading up design for one of the expansion’s three new strongholds, Kichuk.

Kichuk Stronghold

Strongholds in Diablo IV are designed to be longer form content, which should take the player about 15 minutes to complete. This content is separate from the game’s main campaign and opens a new area for the player upon its completion. For Vessel of Hatred, I collaborated with multiple teams including level designers, environment artists, narrative designers, and encounter designers to create the Kichuk stronghold. Going into the expansion, we decided to make the strongholds twice the size as those found in the base game since the audience enjoyed the content they offered. With the increase in size we wanted to design Kichuk to have a strong narrative focus with memorable set pieces that players would appreciate and remember.

After paper design, prototyping, and iteration, we decided to create three major set pieces that felt unique within Diablo’s gameplay: freeing NPCs that fight alongside you, destroying pillars causing a cave collapse to stop monsters from threatening a village, and a distinct boss fight where the boss transforms halfway through. Feedback from fellow developers and our audience made it clear that we accomplished this goal. Above is a playthrough of the finished stronghold in the live game and below is documentation I created for Kichuk during pre-production of the expansion.

Final design document for Kichuk

Document illustrating the layout of Kichuk before and after its completion

Document to convey the quest objectives the player would receive throughout the stronghold

The first rough draft of the stronghold layout

The second draft of the design doc, with initial rough outline of the gameplay beats

Third iteration on the design doc, focusing on the play space and iteration on flow and gameplay beats

Second to last design doc with further overall iteration

Cliff Ledge SMPs

During the development of our first expansion, our animation and raid teams collaborated to create new leap spawning animations for the monsters that we introduced in Vessel of Hatred. Capitalizing on these spawning animations, I created a new cliff ledge vignette type. Above is a video of a few of the vignettes I designed and implemented into the game for the Lacuni monster family.

Summon Pentagram Puzzle SMP

In the early development of the expansion, our team was tasked with creating pitches for new ideas we could add to the game. One of the pitches I created and eventually prototyped and implemented into the game was for this Summon Pentagram Puzzle SMP. The idea was to create a small form piece of content that could be found in cellars that would involve combat in an interesting manor. In order to complete the puzzle the player must kill a monster on all of the circles surrounding the pedestal.

After some iteration, I decided to simplify the initial idea of the pitch to immediately spawn monsters when the player enters the circle, and if the player kills all the monsters before completing the puzzle more monsters would spawn. This allowed players the time to intuitively learn the mechanics of the puzzle. Included here is the original pitch document I created.