Hi, I'm Chris Wilson. Today I'm interviewing  Phil Shenk, Peter Hu, and Erich Schaefer from  

Moon Beast Productions. These three gentlemen  were instrumental in creating Diablo II and its  

expansion pack, Lord of Destruction, and are now  working on a new action RPG called Darkhaven. It's  

great to chat with you guys. Could you introduce  yourselves, explain what your roles were on  

Diablo II and LoD, and what other games you've  worked on, and what your role is on Darkhaven?

Sure, I'll give it a start. Erich Schaefer. You  guys probably know me from Diablo primarily. I  

started Condor, which became Blizzard North  with my brother and David Brevik. We made  

Diablo Diablo II and after that I left  with these guys, and a bunch of others,  

to start Flagship Studios. We made Hellgate:  London. I take full responsibility for crashing  

that spectacularly. After that though, I think  I kind of recovered. Peter and I, and a couple  

others started Runic Games. We made the Torchlight  series, or Torchlight I and II. I always seem to  

leave after number two, I guess.After  that, I made a couple of space games,  

Rebel Galaxy and Rebel Galaxy Outlaw, and now I  find myself here with these guys making Darkhaven.

Phil Shenk, CEO of Moon Beast. Erich sort of gave  the introduction to what the three of us have done  

together. I met both of these guys at Blizzard  North on Diablo II. I specifically came there  

to work on Diablo II. Diablo I was a life-changing  experience, and I really, really wanted to get the  

chance to work on Diablo II, and then I actually  left Blizzard for a while and went to work at a  

company called Wild Tangent doing 3D web games  before 3D was a thing on the internet, and then  

came back for about a year before we left and did  Flagship Studios. And then after Flagship Studios,  

I did a couple of my own companies. I had a  company called Gravity Bear and we were doing  

web games again. Did a small 3D web game called  Battle Punks. We sold that company - I sold that  

company to Kabam and then did some mobile games  for a while. Got to do the whole large startup  

experience and see Kabam's trajectory. Worked  on a ARPG there for mobile called Spirit Lords,  

that unfortunately didn't really do very well. It  was critically well-received and fans liked it,  

but it wasn't making enough money, it was  a free-to-play game.So we shut that down,  

and then I did another company with some folks  from Kabam doing VR work. So, I feel like I've  

done a lot of small startups and a couple of  big things, mostly with these two, and then  

Peter and I joined up to start Moon Beast a while  ago, a number of years ago, to make ARPGs again.

So on Darkhaven I stand in as Art  Director, although I don't really  

do too much art anymore. At Blizzard North  I was Lead Artist on the character side,  

did a lot of the cinematics work, you know,  was really very hands-on, built, animated,  

textured, the Amazon and the Necromancer, did  a lot of the monsters for Diablo II, Andariel,  

ton of the monsters, especially on Act 1 and Act  2, and then moved on to do the expansion pack, but  

I haven't done art in years and years and years,  But I can talk art, so I stand in as Art Director  

and then do a lot of the business development  and fundraising and high level design stuff.

Hey Chris, thanks for having us on your show. I’m  Peter Hu. I'm an Engineer that dabbles in design.  

I ended up doing a lot of different things on  Diablo II. I worked on every single system I  

think, except for audio.One of my major roles was  probably optimisation. A little bit of client side  

optimisation, a lot of server side optimisation.  Getting D2 to run 1k players on a box with, like,  

100 mobs per player and nearly as many missiles  was a pretty challenging task on Y2K hardware,  

but I think I did that really well. Blizzard  was able to keep that game going for 25 decades,  

you know, without feeling a need to  take it down due to costs, so yeah,  

that was really fun. After Blizzard I didn't  quite join Flagship when it was first founded,  

though I was considered a founder. I stayed  on to finish the last patch I was working on,  

but then left to do Hellgate: London where I  was the Technical Director. After that, I formed  

Runic Games with Max, and Erich, and Travis, did  Torchlight I and II. I was a Principal Engineer  

on Marvel Heroes Online and Design Lead for that  as well. That was with Dave Brevik and eventually  

that shut down. I started a little company to  make an indie CCG which I mentioned at the very  

beginning that's called Mythgard with Brian Bazik  who was one of the great engineers I met while  

working at Gazillion. So we did that, and after  that I hooked up with Phil to make Darkhaven.

Nice. Great to see you guys. Erich,  what is your role at Moon Beast?

My role is always sort of Lead Design. I  like to think of myself as lead QA, too,  

because I constantly test and report  probably the most bugs on every game  

I've ever worked on, but so I've always  been a designer and I'm Lead Design here,  

too. Although Peter short sells himself, Phil,  too. These guys are really good designers,  

and that's what I did on Diablo, Diablo  II, Torchlight, Hellgate, all these things.  

I used to do art like in Diablo 1, I did all the  environment art, I did all the UI stuff. That's  

just because we were a really tiny team and I  was, I guess, the most capable of a bunch of  

us who had no idea what we were doing at that  kind of stuff. Diablo II though we got Phil,  

we got a bunch of really good artists on that  and so, I turned into pure design after that.

Nice. Is it hard to fill the shoes of Diablo  II? Are you worried that people have, like,  

impossibly high expectations for  Darkhaven because of your history  

of working on such impressive games in the past?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's kind of been my  whole career in a way, you know, always chasing  

Diablo II. I gave up for a while, you know, with  the space games. I said, I'm just going to make  

small games, that reach a small audience, although  here with Darkhaven, I figured this is a great  

shot again for a big success, but it's impossible  really to chase Diablo because, again 25 years. I  

think Peter said 25 decades, which I think maybe  it might actually last that long. To have a game  

that lasts that you can still play, and still  people make content, and stream for 25 years,  

that's unlikely going to happen again in my  career. So yeah, sort of always under the shadow,  

but at the same time, it's a cool accomplishment  and people all know it, so I'm happy about it.

Fair. Well, speaking about new  content, I mean, as you guys know,  

Blizzard surprised us with the release  of that big update to Diablo II, like,  

a couple of weeks ago with a new character class  and everything, adding a new character class  

a quarter of a century since you guys added  the last ones. How does it feel for you guys  

that a game that you worked on so long ago  is experiencing a resurgence these days?

I mean, it makes me really proud  that it's still happening. I mean,  

it also makes me wish I still had control over the  property and I was benefiting from these things,  

but, I think it's really cool. I have not  played, myself. I've been too busy right now,  

but I've been watching some streams  and people are having a good time,  

and I just love the idea that this  game is still being played so widely.

Fair enough, and Peter, you were working on  Diablo II updates basically single-handedly  

for a while, so how do you feel about  this update that they've put together?

Man, I want to pass on that. Really, it's  something that I haven't really processed yet,  

you know? I'm working night and day  on Darkhaven, and I see this happen,  

and there's a lot of emotions, a lot  of things going through my head, but  

kind of, I have to put that aside, just  to keep going on what we're doing. So,  

it does feel cool. I mean, you know, obviously,  we had a hand in making Diablo what it was, and,  

it's great to see that people still love  it and play it, but, you know, in terms of  

the specifics of like the Warlock and everything  they've done, I think I still need to just like,  

sit back someday and actually play it before I can  have anything intelligible to say about the thing.

Hopefully, once things calm down  a bit, you know, with Darkhaven,  

you'll have a chance that you can stop and  play some other games and check it out.

I haven't played it either. I remember  back at Diablo II days, you know,  

the thought of doing another class was a  really, really big event when we decided  

to do the expansion pack, and like,  what those classes were going to be,  

and coming up with the Assassin and the Druid.  There's so much, especially as a character artist,  

there's so much creative expression that was  available back then, when we were working on  

the classes,you know, like, the Assassin was  a specific thing I wanted to do because I was  

really into the kung fu movies, and kind  of chi power, psychic power kind of stuff.  

But you touched on recently, everybody wants an  act, you know, and I hadn't even considered an  

act, like, classes have become one way that ARPGs  easily produce more content, like, we're doing a  

new class, right? So that's kind of a common thing  that people see, and even new act content, too,  

but, the thought of Diablo II getting a new act  kind of blew my mind when you said that, because,  

I've always considered it as like, there's no way  you could ever do that. How would you retcon all  

the lore that's happened since then? You know,  where would it be? Would it be in a location  

that Diablo III or Diablo IV has already fleshed  out? But that kind of got me thinking like, wow,  

that would be incredible for Diablo II. But yeah,  I maybe have a little less feelings about it,  

because I worked on the expansion pack to get it  started, and then I left, and it was super, super  

bittersweet and painful when that came out because  I just felt like, man, I wish I could have been  

there for a part of it, and I left voluntarily,  but I still sort of really had my heart in it,  

and maybe that's where I made peace with, well,  Diablo II is just going to be whatever it is. So  

I'm just anxious to play it. I think it's really  cool, I think, just having a new way to experience  

Diablo II. I'm not a hardcore player though, so  I'll just be casually bopping through the world.

I can understand from your point of view where you  guys made Diablo II, you had a story you wanted  

to tell, you had content you want to make. You  delivered that, and then the idea of me saying,  

"Oh, they could add another Act." Is your thinking  "Well, you know, the game was meant to have this  

much content. What do you mean just add another  Act?” I think it's because, due to my live service  

history with Path of Exile, adding another act  is exactly what we would do, and so, you know,  

I think of games as perpetually expanding them,  which, I mean more recently my thoughts have  

matured on this a little bit, that there is a lot  of value to planning and scoping something out,  

putting it in a box, and saying this is a complete  product with intention behind it, and that's why I  

quite respect Diablo II for its current size. It  doesn't have too much of anything, which I like  

quite a lot of. And I guess this is an interesting  thing you guys will have to think about with,  

you know, with Darkhaven as it gets  really popular, the extent to which,  

you know, you intentionally  expand the scope of the core game,  

and how you handle players' ongoing,  you know, requirements for more content.

Yeah, for me it's my first opportunity to  really do that. All the games I've made,  

we sort of put them in a box and let them go like  you're saying. I think, even though I wanted to  

keep going with the Torchlight II, the rest of  the team didn't, so I didn't get a chance - we  

didn't get a chance to keep improving, and  iterating on the game, so I'm excited to do  

that with Darkhaven, but yeah, I missed out on  that before. I'm sure it's its own nightmare,  

which you're familiar with, and so I'll see how  that plays out, but I like the idea right now.

Yeah, there's a lot to unpack with that stuff,  but it's, you know, it's rewarding because it  

means that you - it's like making new games  all the time. You get to work on something,  

release it, work on something, and release  it, and that's a very different feeling than  

working on something for five or seven  years before anyone gets to see it.

Right. Yeah, and I think for me, we always put so  much work into these systems, the combat systems,  

and the economies, and the UI,UX, and  then to just kind of toss it out and say,  

"Okay, what's the next game? Let's  start from scratch." I was like,  

"But we've got these cool systems. They  can just be iterated on for a long time,  

let's just work with it." So, I like the idea  of, the systems live on if we support it.

Yeah, the impression I get with the  work you're doing on Darkhaven is  

that it's setting it up so that you can  modularly add new content later. Like,  

you've spoken about modding tools and so on,  and I imagine that not only benefits you guys  

as developers working on the game, making  it really easy to add content now and later,  

but it also benefits the community if  they want to add content in the same way.

Yeah, I think we're also trying some crazy  new stuff with the terrain deformation,  

and the altitude and stuff. So, we're putting  a lot of work into getting the systems solid,  

the building blocks all made, and  I feel like we're in good stead to  

just start dumping in content once we  cross a couple more milestones here.

That's awesome. Well, I have a couple more  questions about Diablo II, mostly to satiate my,  

you know, passion for hearing about how it was  made. One of the topics I'm really interested  

in actually is that, because Diablo II was a 2D  game, you had to render out these sprite sheets  

for everything in the game, and pretty much like  every angle of every frame of every animation,  

and this would have only got more complicated due  to like, you know, stuff attached to characters,  

helmets and pauldrons, and that kind of  stuff, and I was wondering like, you know,  

I can imagine from my point of view what  it would have been like to work on that,  

but you guys actually lived  through this. So, I was wondering,  

what are the biggest production bottlenecks  in that workflow and like, now that you're  

working in modern 3D with Darkhaven, how  does that make it easier, or even harder?

Yeah, I remember rendering out not only the cells  from each direction of the of the characters,  

but we had to then hand cut them up, so  that the arms would be in the right place,  

the arms and the weapon would be in the right  place versus the other little pieces, and it was a  

nightmare of just these, giant sheets of multiple  little pieces. It wasn't just the whole guy,  

you know, we'd have to cut off the arms, cut  off the head, kind of reattach them onto this,  

all by hand at first, and that was mostly me just  kind of figuring it out how to do it at first,  

organising them in Photoshop. I'd make little  errors that would screw up the whole thing,  

but then we got some decent tools to make it  happen, and then we hired a friend of mine,  

Chris Root, to actually do all that work behind  the scenes, but it took a lot, a lot, a lot  

of work, and it was just a lot of manpower, and  that it was always touchy, where it wasn't quite  

working out, we'd have to redo it, rerender out  these sheets. So, it's a whole new world today.  

I can't speak too much of the process anymore  because again, I've gotten out of the art side  

of things, and just into the design, but it  seems like things happen a lot faster nowadays.

I mean, the Diablo II what Erich's talking  about was probably more Diablo I by the time  

I got there. I mean, that was, I lived that for  three years, and you know, we weren't dealing  

with individual sprite sheets by that point, we  had file formats that would pack them into a,  

you know, we never dealt with the sprite sheets.  We had a tool where you would render it out. There  

was a plugin inside of 3D Studio Max that  would render it out to this 24-bit format,  

and then there was an offline process that would  come up with an optimal palette from the 24-bit  

source art, and re-render it as an 8-bit game  file, and it was a sprite sheet behind the scenes,  

but we had a viewer so we could look at each  individual part for each frame of every angle,  

and the hand work that we had to do,  was for every frame of every angle,  

we had to order all the components for each  character. So we'd have the right and left hands  

which included the weapons, and we have the arms,  the shoulder pads, the pauldrons, the torso,  

the legs, I think the legs were just one piece,  we had the head, and then there were a couple  

little add-on bits that we added here and there,  and we could copy like the ordering, you know,  

so you'd kind of set the order for one direction,  and then just paste it for the whole animation,  

and then play back through it, and like if the  hand went behind, you'd have to flip the hand  

behind here. There was a lot of, you know, that  didn't always work because you'd have a component  

that should be in the front, and behind, so, we  had a mat material also that we could put on, say,  

the head, and when the hand would go behind the  head, it would just make that hand disappear for  

that frame. And it didn't always perfectly line  up because the head could be different sizes,  

so, you know, if you really looked at the art  closely, you could probably see places where it  

was overlapping, but everything was moving really  quickly, so you didn't really get to see it. But I  

remember thinking, even at the time, that this is  probably the last and most complicated sprite 2D  

game that's ever going to be made, because it felt  like there was no way we could push the technology  

any further than what we were pushing it, and  the file sizes were getting really significant,  

like, one character would be like, 150  megabytes, which was huge back then,  

you know. So, we were trying to figure out  how many CDROMs we could ship it on, you know,  

and we had the Act that would take up  a lot of the artwork, too, but, yeah,  

it was cool to figure that out, but it was a lot  of work. If we ever wanted to add, I mean, that  

was the limitation. That's why we could only have  three sets of armor, and we would just mix and  

match the pieces of each armor for the inventory  item, and we did palletisation. Yeah, it was  

easily the most complicated, well, I don't know,  maybe there were more complicated sprite games.

But we came up with the whole scheme as kind of,  

trial and error. We had to invent  it, you know, there were no…

Yeah. Yeah. Some of that was in place when I  got there, and, you know, I was the only one  

who knew 3D Studio Max at the point, so that's  kind of why I became de facto Lead Artist,  

because I was sort of teaching people how  to use Character Studio, and 3D Studio Max,  

and those tools were developing, you know, as  we were working. The Amazon was already partly  

made when I got there, but the Corrupt Rogues  were actually the first character that was put  

through this whole pipeline, and they were  kind of the test bed for this all working,  

you know, and they were overengineered,  the Corrupt Rogues. They had, you know,  

they themselves had three different armor  sets. They had the light, medium and heavy,  

you know, tentacle levels, and they also  had all their weapons. Spent a long,  

long time just on the Corrupt Rogues, but then,  you know, we knew that the Amazon was ready to go.

What Phil said actually reminded me of a small  tidbit that might, you know, you might find  

interesting. So, I think Diablo II shipped  on six CDs, something like that. It was big,  

right? It was actually costly to manufacture,  but what we ended up doing in order to fit all  

of that art onto the six CDs is, we lowered  the quality of all of the characters. Like we  

compressed them all, and so we actually had  high-res versions of all of the characters,  

like higher res, higher colour fidelity,  and I don't think we ever shipped it,  

and I believe it was completely lost to time  like you know sitting in a junkyard somewhere.

Yeah, there were 24-bit source files,  there were DH5s, which was the 24-bit ones,  

and then DC5s, which were, I don't know  what that stood for, and then we did a  

16-bit version. Was that the expansion  pack that had the 16-bit rendering? Or,  

that was only in the 3D? The  3D was rendering it in 16 bit.

What I'm saying is, that we  actually cut it down from there,  

like at the very end, just  to fit it all on the CDs.

It wasn't even 8-bit sprites at that point?

No, not even 8-bit.

That is fascinating. I have a hundred questions  about this, and I mean, even the palletisation  

stuff, like, my understanding with Diablo II is  that you had a pallet per Act. When I forced a  

Diablo II client between Acts, I noticed the  pallet is scrambled for the terrain stuff,  

but it's consistent for characters, and  inventory and so on, so that means you  

would have had to have some budget out of  your 256 colours to allocate to environment,  

and the math required to like, work that  out correctly, and then like the stuff it  

restricts you from doing in a given Act, like  if you've got a very yellow and brown Act II,  

you couldn't have a pink area because there's  just no palette budget available for it.

There was reserved areas for characters, reserved  areas for UI, and reserved areas for background,  

and they could borrow, and at several points  along the way, I mean, it was really cool the way  

that - I guess it was mostly Dave that set this up  - is that, if we ever added a lot of new content,  

the backgrounds were usually this way, because  when we'd start an Act we didn't have anything,  

you know, there wasn't anything to palletise,  right? So, they would go ahead and build out  

Lut Gholein and build out, you know, a lot of Act  II, and then we would do a repalettisation. So,  

we just run it through all the 24-bit sources,  and it would come up with a new optimised palette,  

and we could lock certain colours, I think, you  know, like don't change these, you know, like for  

the UI for sure, you know, and for the characters.  But I think even then, we could, and want to make  

sure you have a ramp because we're doing lighting,  right? So, you're not only trying to reserve  

the colours, but you're trying to reserve enough  values for each colour, so that there was a ramp,  

you know, and you could light it or at least  approximate the lighting, but sometimes we’d  

do that palette and everything would look kind  of weird, and it's like, okay, we’ve got to get  

in there and figure out how to artificially give  it more of this colour,or less of this colour,  

so it doesn't overindex for a certain thing  or, you know, there's a really important like  

red or something in the environment, and it  wasn't really in the source very far, so we  

have to specifically say like, carve out this  red so that, you know, that's going to show up.

Yeah, I remember explicitly saying “Hey we got to  have some reds to get the blood to show up right”.  

I guess it probably needed it for the mana ball  too. I think that was Mike O’Brien from Blizzard,  

you know, went on to Arena.net and everything,  he came up with the palette scheme,  

this idea of how he could do a dynamic  palette based on the levels we'd made. It  

took him a little while to sell us, but then we  had to iterate with him to reserve these ramps,  

and for the character stuff. It was a  neat process, and it came out really,  

really good because the game looks a  lot richer than just an 8-bit game.

Steven Woo actually ended up implementing it  for Diablo 2, after consulting with Mike. Yeah.

What I'm noticing here is that in Diablo  II, you broke significant technical ground,  

like with Battle.net as well, right? Like there's,  you know, the random level generation, pretty much  

every area of the game was years ahead of the  competition, which is why the game is, you know,  

so crazily impactful, but I'm noticing that on  Darkhaven, you're also taking on hard technical  

challenges, right? Like the terrain destruction  stuff. I mean, that's not easy, you know? Like,  

Minecraft made billions from doing that, you know,  and then popularising it, and it was a very hard  

technical challenge, and you know, you're rolling  that into like, what people may not understand  

when they're evaluating this is, okay cool making,  you know, terrain destruction is hard, but then  

doing it in a consistent multiplayer environment,  like this stuff needs to be serialised, like,  

it's got to be represented in memory, you've  got a huge world, you're changing parts of it,  

there's all this stuff here, and like, you're  taking on incredibly hard technical challenges  

so that you can have a game that's years ahead  of the competition. Is this intentional? Like,  

is it your game plan of just solve all  the hard stuff like no one else can do?

I mean, I think it's just something  naturally that we try to do based off  

of what we want to do for the game, right?  Like we get all these ideas and we're like,  

how do you implement it? How do you make it  happen? Darkhaven actually has a completely  

different network infrastructure and architecture  than we've ever used before in an ARPG,  

and there's so much more, like people being  able to edit online, live, collaboratively,  

worlds. I mean, I don't think anyone's  doing that, but it's just so fun to like,  

think of these systems and implement  them, so, yeah, and they add to the game.

We don't try to make it hard on ourselves, but we  have. I think it's just the fun of the challenge  

to keep development fresh. I mean, I'm getting to  be an old guy, but I still, every day, you know,  

just love to think about what we're going to  tinker on, how we're going to make these things  

work. So, I think it kind of, has to be complex  for me to be really interested in working on it,  

and then Peter obviously loves this  stuff, too, so, we have a great time.

When we started, I remember, you know, Peter  talking about what he wanted to do on the engine  

side of it, and it was a very specific decision  to make it, it’s effectively a 2D engine really,  

like we have heights, but you know,  everything is on a grid, and I mean,  

Peter would be the guy to explain it, but the way  I understand the way he explained it to me is, you  

get vastly more efficient servers that way, you  know, because we're really not, it's not like a  

3D world where you have to track the XYZ position  of of everything and, you know, the server isn't  

running Unity at all, you know, it doesn't know  anything, it doesn't even know it's a 3D world, it  

just knows that it's a grid, and things are moving  on the grid, and you have a position on the grid.

No, that's all wrong now. That's not what we're  doing. No, no, no. We're not doing that. It's 3D.

Well, why can't you go over things then?

Oh, I mean, there's limitations on the path  finding that we haven't implemented yet in  

terms of, you know, pathing in 3D can be  hard, right? And so, we haven't done that,  

and there's aspects of it that are a little  bit 2D, but the world itself is fully 3D, like,  

we track everything in 3D. All of the terrain is  tracked. You can jump over missiles and, you know,  

we track like, what you hit where, and  so it's pretty much a full 3D engine.

Okay.

With like a couple of limitations that  

we're probably going to solve  before the end of the project.

Now Peter, correct me. I'm with Phil. I kind of  think of it as, do we get efficiency or something?  

Don't we do like, oh for each xy position  in the world, isn't there a stack of like,  

eight types of rock, and then four  types of dirt. Is there an efficiency?

It's not like that, no. It's really funny  that we're talking about this now, but,  

yeah I mean, we can have unlimited different types  of strata like, stacked on top of each other,  

and we track all of it. There's efficiency like,  for an isometric game primarily, and also just in  

terms of human like, visualisation of the world,  right? Like in terms of spatial partitioning,  

there's definitely efficiencies you get in  terms of like, we're not making a space game,  

right? We're not like, spaceships aren't like, in  every single possible direction from each other in  

full 3D, or whatever, so like, the world itself  like, we encode it in a way that is optimised  

for like, sort of an isometric experience,  like a real world on the ground experience,  

right? There's certain optimisations in  how we represent the world in that regard,  

and we take advantage of that, but that doesn't  mean that the actual representation of the world  

isn't full 3D, and the servers are doing  all of the 3D math that makes that happen.

The explanation Phil gave of his  impression of how it worked is like,  

basically exactly how it works in say Path  of Exile, as an evolution of, you know,  

the way it works in Diablo II. So that would  have been my guess as well, as to how it worked,  

except behind the scenes you added a third  dimension, you know. Yeah, I am impressed at  

the amount of technical challenge that you're  undertaking because, the work you've done  

there in order to properly represent the 3D,  will, once you get 3D pathfinding and stuff,  

probably let you do some really cool stuff that  a lot of other action RPGs just don't allow.

And just the real-time nature of it is really  cool, too. We didn't actually start off wanting to  

make the game like deformable terrain. We started  off wanting to make an editor, an online editor,  

where you could edit the terrain the same way  you would in like, Warcraft 3 or Starcraft,  

you know, any of those editors, like the most  recent editors that, you know, but Erich got  

there and he was like, well, why can't I do this  stuff? I mean, I'm doing it in real time in the  

editor anyway. Why can't I just do it in the  game? And so we just started pushing the game,  

and it was really cool. I think, it's not like,  finely tuned yet, right? Like there's definitely  

people where it's like, "Oh, this is a little  bit janky, but you know, it's the very beginning  

of the game in that respect, and we have a lot of  time to polish it up until it's just really good."

Yeah, I've been impressed with the bones. I  played an early version of the demo last year that  

Phil shared with me, and the bones that it has in  terms of technical underpinnings and capabilities  

were very impressive. Obviously, most people  don't see game demos that early, like, normally,  

you know, in a regular game development  cycle, company will like, you know,  

sit on its secrets, and polish the thing to  be very consumable before people play it, so,  

this is a great opportunity for the public  to see a game that's at a much earlier stage  

in its development than they otherwise would see,  which is a really cool insight that they get, but,  

yeah I greatly enjoyed my time with the demo, and  actually, credit to Erich here as well that, the  

thing that hooked me in was the Diablo-II-isation  of the item system, or the remnants of that,  

you know shone through. I felt when I was playing  it “Wow this like feels like home in terms of  

itemisation” and that wasn't something I was  expecting, because, normally when people share  

demos of action RPGs with me I'm so picky,  you know, about that kind of stuff that I,  

only have a hundred bits of criticism about  itemisation and various other feel factors,  

but in this case like, you know, we could tell  that you were involved which is very cool.

Thanks for saying that, but really Peter deserves  the credit here on the itemisation. I mean,  

we talk about it a lot and I offer my opinion on  a lot of things, but he started the systems, sold  

me on them when I didn't agree, I wanted to push  it in the ways I usually think about these things,  

but this is the first game where I would say I'm  not leading the itemisation and it's Peter's baby.

Well great job, Peter!

I agree. He's doing an excellent job, and again,  

just laying the groundwork for where we go from  here. We're in great shape in that respect.

That's cool. Yeah, I have noticed,  Peter, that you've been talking a  

lot about itemisation on the Reddit post you  made. So, I should have inferred that, but I  

assumed from Erich handling a lot of that on  Diablo II, that it was his hand at work there.

I mean, his hand's definitely in it  because he's constantly giving feedback,  

right? and tuning like, that's his superpower is  constantly playing the game over and over again,  

and fine-tuning the things. So  even though I might have designed  

some of the systems early on, they're  fine-tuned by Erich in a lot of ways.

Yeah, fair enough. I actually have a question for  you, Peter, going back to Diablo II stuff very  

slightly. My understanding is that you were  primarily the driving force behind the 1.10  

patch for Diablo II. I mean, I've heard people  describe it to me as like, you know, you're the  

sole person sitting there writing it yourself,  but I understand there probably would have been  

other support infrastructure within Blizzard.  As a really active 1.09 player at the time,  

the idea of getting such a substantial update  for Diablo II released was a huge deal to me and  

my friends. Like, the fact that 1.10 was being  made was just this extra gift that we received,  

and we kind of got it out of nowhere, and so,  there's a lot of players who would want to like,  

personally thank you for delivering that  update, but do you have any like, you know,  

a brief story about like how it came about?  Like what was happening behind the scenes then?

I mean, there's also players that would want to  kick me for that update, but yeah, I know it's  

a mixed bag. I was actually pretty much the  only developer working on any of the patches  

after 1.07, which was the LoD patch. Pretty much  we had crunched, just like, I was working 100 hour  

weeks for years, just to get D2 and LoD out the  door, and I don't think anyone had much appetite  

to continue working on it, except for me, and  so yeah, I mean I just loved the thing, and kept  

working, and wanted to see it being supported. I  was still new at the time, in some ways, and so I  

made mistakes in the 1.10 design that I wouldn't  repeat, like I know like, you know, some of the  

Runewords weren't well balanced, and you know,  synergies were probably a mistake in many ways,  

but you know, it was a different time, like, there  was no QA. I pretty much got Julian Love and Wyatt  

Chang to play whatever I did because they were  new, and I knew they were hardcore D2 players,  

so I was just like, "Hey, try this out, you know,  give me some feedback." And yeah, I mean, it was  

a weird process. I think at the time I had sort  of established myself as someone that, you know,  

Dave, Max, and Erich could at least trust a little  bit, and they gave me free reign to do what I  

want, and what I wanted to do was at least half my  time spent on supporting D2, and so that's what I  

did. Yeah, and I really wanted D2 to be moddable.  I really saw a lot in Warcraft, and Starcraft,  

and how custom games kept those franchises going.  So, I made a lot of changes to make that happen,  

and, yeah, it's weird. There's no PTRs. There was  a lot less support infrastructure than you would  

think. I think I had Mike, Matt Householder, and  Christian Archie supporting me as Producers on it,  

but yeah, and of course there's the Battle.net  team. I didn't do everything. Brian Fitzgerald,  

who's on our team now at Darkhaven and was  like, Director of Technology at Blizzard  

from almost like, original Warcraft  to Overwatch, was supporting me a lot  

from,sort of the Battle.net side of just the  database type stuff. I think he implemented like,  

the Rust Storm and things like that, so yeah. But  it was weird because I was halfway through 1.10  

when Dave, Max, and Erich just came in, called  the studio meeting, said that they were leaving,  

and it was just like, that day like, right after  they gave that speech to the studio and everyone  

was in shock. I just went up and I said, you  know, I'm going with you. Whatever you guys do,  

you know, just take me with you. But I still had  to finish 1.10 and I didn't want to leave like,  

the community that I've been communicating  with the whole time. I didn't want to like,  

leave without giving them you know what we  talked about, and so I ended up staying like,  

I think at least six months to just finish 1.10.  I don't think my heart was in it at the time,  

but it was just something like, I  felt I had to do, and then you know,  

as soon as that thing shipped I was out the  door, and joined Flagship to make Helllgate.

Given that 1.10 opened the doors to so  much modding capability for Diablo II,  

and how over the last 20 years between now  and then, much of the community's enjoyment of  

Diablo II has been through mods, I think the  work you put in there was very appreciated,  

even if, you know, you feel that some of the  Runewords or synergies weren't quite perfect,  

the, you know, 90% of people's play time in  terms of the enduring legacy of the game has  

been in the wide variety of mods that you  enabled, so, that was a decision that really  

helped the action RPG genre, right? Like a lot  of stuff is innovated through mods, and that's,  

I guess a good segue into the modding stuff with  Darkhaven, because you've been quite outspoken  

that that's a thing that's very important to your  team. I guess to what extent did you learning  

about facilitating modding with Diablo II, help  the way you've structured it with Darkhaven?

Actually, not too much. I mean, Diablo II wasn't  meant to be modded, and so, anything I did for  

patch 1.10 was really just like hacking it in, in  many ways, you know, I learned a lot more about  

modding actually from paying attention to Warcraft  and Starcraft, which were, you know, built to be  

modded, and so I think a lot of our decisions  around how to make things moddable probably draw  

more inspiration from those games, than they do  Diablo II. I think Diablo II does have one part  

to play, which is that the database of items and  skills and monsters is enormous compared to what  

you would normally see in a Starcraft or Warcraft  mod, or like at least a typical one, and some of  

the mods, like, there are mods out there for  D2 that have like well over a million recipes,  

like for cube recipes, right? So it's like, that  part of it in terms of being able to support like,  

data manipulation for modders, being able to  wrangle that much data, I think is something  

that we've learned from D2, and want to be  able to support, you know, with Darkhaven.

With regard to the way that modding works and,  this is going to be a little bit complicated,  

you guys will have to explain to me. So, my  understanding is the multiplayer model in  

Darkhaven is that there are large shards that  you can play on publicly for players who want  

to have bustling, you know, interaction with  other players, but that an individual player,  

or, streamer, or community, can run their own  shard, and these shards are all hosted on your  

authoritative servers to prevent cheating. So  it's not like I can run it on my computer and  

fiddle with the memory and that kind of  stuff, and so you have server authority,  

but it's split into several different  independent games, and those games could  

have separate rules. Does this mean that  you can run a mod as one of the shards?

Yeah. I mean, that's why we let people mod online,  you know, so that they can mod our servers,  

which is actually an insane thing if you think  about it, like, just the implications of that,  

and the technical challenges that we have to  solve to allow that to happen is pretty crazy,  

but yeah, I mean, we want people to be able  to create persistent online mods of Darkhaven,  

run them, and let people actually network  mods together, work on mods collaboratively,  

let characters travel between mods, if the  operators of the mods, or the admins of the mods,  

or the mod servers, or whatever you  want to call, it allow, and, yeah.

I have a lot of technical and business questions  about this. It's quite unique. Like I get,  

you know, games like Minecraft, for example, have  modding and so on, but Minecraft servers aren't  

run authoritatively by a trusted developer.  They're run just on random Linux machines  

that kids have spooled up on the internet,  which means that there could be hacking and  

duping and stuff like that, that, you know, isn't  policed as well as you guys will be able to do,  

and I firmly believe that an important  thing, the thing that's very important  

to many Action RPG players is playing on an  economy which validates progress, right? Like,  

you know you want to be there for when an economy  starts and push really hard to get the good items  

and get the levels before other people, knowing  that the server is validating the fact you didn't  

cheat to do that. We see this with Diablo,  and Path of Exile like, ladder resets where,  

you get a lot of people turning up to  play because they get to demonstrate their  

mastery of the game, and skill at it, in an  environment where they couldn't just fake that,  

and so doing this on the server of course  is the correct way to do it I feel. Now,  

there's a lot of questions here, right? Like, I  mean, there's business questions about how, like,  

for example, you know, are you monetising mods?  Is this a thing where like creators who have mods  

are going to get a share of that money? And if  so, you know, are you covering the server costs  

of running these mods? What if the mods consume  a lot of resources? You know, if I make a mod  

that spawns a million zombies, what's policing  that? You know, there's so many questions here.

Yeah. So already, you know, we have like, a  basic editor that ships with the demo. So you  

can actually go in, check it out. People have  spawned like a hundred instances of the boss,  

like Narlathak is the boss, has the most  complicated AI, you know, the most skills  

or whatever, and they can just like, plop him  down. They're all running on our server, and  

actually the server has been much more performant  than we actually anticipated at the beginning,  

even though we haven't optimised it as much as  we could. Every single person that's playing  

the demo right now, at least online,  are playing on a single home computer,  

like, the servers on a home computer  in someone's house, you know, and,  

it's working. I mean, it probably has very  little utilisation, even now. So, that's cool.

You haven't done like a large cloud  roll out to support this, you've got a…

Not at all. Yeah.

That's impressive. It performs well.

Yeah. Yeah. It's, like I said, totally new network  architecture. We have people playing all over the  

world. One of Erich's friends was playing  from Japan, and said he was playing online,  

and didn't even notice lag at all, like, we really  designed this network architecture to reduce like,  

the feeling of latency when you're playing  the game, and I think it's done its job like,  

better than we had even hoped. And also,  it's really easy to like, program for it,  

like, it's almost like you're making a  single player game. So a lot of the cost,  

like the development cost, of building  content is lessened with what we're doing,  

so once we start building content, it'll be really  easy,and we'll have like, less bugs and less,  

you know, you don't have gameplay programmers  having to know exactly how to write like,  

client server code. So, a lot of this is  just stuff that has been like, you know,  

we've been thinking about for a really long time,  like working on all these ARPGs that we've been  

working on, like a lot of the technical team  anyway, you know, over the years, and so, yeah,  

I mean, it's pretty cool stuff. I mean, in terms  of business, I think of course, it's possible for  

a mod maker to create a mod that overutilises  CPU like, way beyond what I've described,  

and if that's the case, yeah, we do plan on having  a monetisation models similar to like Roblox or  

whatever. Mod makers can monetise their mod with  like, an in-game currency, and I think like,  

you know, we haven't gotten to this point yet,  but I think if a mod maker does something really  

crazy, we'll probably just end up at that point  being like, "Okay, your mod is too crazy. We're  

going to limit it unless you want to pay us, you  know, some fees to cover the cost of compute."

The business model stuff is kind of up in the  air. I think we're super flexible in the design,  

but then we can make limitations as we decide  how we're actually going to fully monetise all  

those decisions. Also you mentioned ladders and  season type stuff. I'm sure we will have some  

way to mark characters as pure, as our rule set  only, and haven't been tainted by some kind of,  

you know, treasure mod, where they just hop  into the world and somebody's gives them all  

the loot in the world or whatever. So, we'll  be able to restrain things in a lot of ways,  

we're just building it super wide open,  and haven't picked out those ways yet.

One of the things that, between Blizzard  and Moon Beast, at every company I was at  

I started noticing, I mean even at Flagship we  were noticing this, but just started noticing  

where new game genres were coming from, and where  like, innovation was coming from, and I think it  

was at Kabam where a couple of us sat down and  really made a business case, and like looked  

at all the data, and historically saw like, where  there were big shifts in the expansion of a genre,  

and some of it was like, there's a new platform  like, you know, a new Nintendo console comes out,  

and Mario Kart comes out, and if you consider  Mario Kart a racing game like, the total racing  

genre just went bloop. It was all because of this  new game that came out, but a lot of the times it  

was from a mod, you know, like you would have  Half-Life, you know, and Counter-Strike and you  

know, we all saw what happened with Dota, and that  turned into League of Legends. I was at Gravity  

Bear when the designer who was working for me,  actually Peter's brother, Allan, we were trying  

to figure out what game we were going to make, you  know, and what game we were going to pitch, and he  

came in and he was talking about this mod that  he was playing on Warcraft 3, and it was like,  

you know, there's lanes, and they got these creeps  that are coming down the lanes, and you have to  

pick a hero, and you go down, and it just sounded  so weird, and specific, and kind of like, I don't  

really - what's the big picture? You just keep  doing this over and over again? It's like okay,  

I don't know. We played it and I was like, okay,  this is kind of fun. Maybe let's try to prototype  

something, you know, we'll try to prototype our  own version of this, and in the middle of doing  

that, it was announced that Riot got funding,  and they were going to build their own version  

of this, and you know, it was kind like, so  many times in my career, I'm sure in all of  

our careers, right? We have an idea, and we think  it's the best idea in the world, and then lo and  

behold somebody else is already building it, but  that idea that a genre tends to stagnate. I mean  

it turned out, MOBAs turned out to be perfect for  the genre because, RTSs were not the best esports  

model, you know, there was a lot of problems  with RTSs as a esports for the masses, you know,  

and to really popularise it, but just organically,  modders came up with this solution that was way  

more friendly to watch, you know, they were  shorter matches, it was more exciting, there  

was more back and forth, you know, you could, you  know, almost losing and then you turn it around,  

and then you come back, and that rarely happens  in an RTS, so just organically, the community  

came up with this game genre that no publisher,  or designer, or studio ever would have taken a  

gamble on. It was just too weird and specific. But  modding is doing this all the time, like, modding  

is all the time expanding the genre, creating a  new thing out of something that was there, that  

just, at the time it seems like it came out of  nowhere, but if you look back at it historically  

it's like, oh it makes perfect sense. So that was,  when we started, Peter was talking about making a  

moddable ARPG at Flagship, and that didn't get off  the ground, but when we joined up again to talk  

about what we wanted to do at Moon Beast, that  was front and center, and a core idea was that,  

ARPGs are really difficult to make, it's a big  investment, there hasn't been a lot of innovation  

in ARPGs, like big innovations on the order of  magnitude of what, you know, MOBA was to the RTS,  

and so if we can create a platform that allows  people to really experiment with all the systems,  

and the gear and the mechanics, and the online  persistence and the economies, you know, with  

all that ARPG stuff out of the way, we might be  able to capture the MOBA equivalent of the ARPG,  

like the next big weird innovation. And so that's  why we want to keep those modders incentivized  

to stay on our platform, like they can make money  doing it. Blizzard, I know, well, I've heard this,  

you know, I don't know if culturally they know  this, but like, they missed out on that because,  

you know, the modders couldn't make money on the  back of Battle.net, you know, they were competing  

with Blizzard, or Blizzard saw it that way. At  least that's my understanding of it. So, they went  

off and started a new company. So, Peter mentioned  Roblox, right? If we can capture those modders,  

and get them to stay on our platform and, you  know, make money on our platform, or build their  

communities on our platform, you know, that's  kind of the big picture. It is the big picture.  

That's the big vision. You know, we want to make  a game. We want to make it fun. We want to make it  

because we love this game, and we want it to just  be fun out of the gate, but we're really looking  

forward to what people do with it when we start  to really flesh out those tools, and we think  

there's some really exciting ideas that nobody's  thought of yet that might come out of this.

Just when I'm playing, I think of other kind of  games we can make with the engine here, like, just  

one of the fun things to do early on was, I would  just fire fireballs across this chasm, and destroy  

the other side of the chasm. I was saying you  could just like, make a Castle Siege game where  

it's just one guy versus the other firing these  fireballs, to destroy the other guy's terrain,  

and so it's kind of easy when I play to imagine  different games based on our exact engine here.

It occurs to me that even aside from monetising  the mods, there are other benefits to supporting  

it, right? Like from your point of view,  if there's a popular mod, people then have  

to buy your game in order to play that mod,  like if the new Dota spawns from Darkhaven,  

then people may be buying it to play that, rather  than the core rules, if it happens to be so sticky  

and viral, and then the other thing, of course  is, while it's great for creators to earn money,  

even if they don't earn money, this is a platform  that supports persistence and multiplayer,  

which are both incredibly hard to spool up  in their little Unity project. Like yeah,  

they can make their game rules in Unity, but then  they don't exactly get the ability to deploy that  

at scale, and that takes millions of dollars of  effort to develop, and you've already done that,  

and they're providing that to them, and when  you think about it like, game development  

tools usually cost more than 40 bucks to buy,  right? Like this is actually a pretty good deal,  

you know, for its versatility, you know,  compared to the significant costs of  

actually paying for proper, you know, Unity  and Unreal stuff of what it ends up costing.

It's very difficult to write those systems, too.  Like, the first thing anybody ever wants to make,  

it seems like when a new moddable  game comes out is an RPG, you know,  

and it's hard because, if you really  start to especially do the itemisation  

and the between session persistence and  all that, it's hard to stand that up.

Yep.

Can we get Chris to help like, come on as like,  Chief Marketing Officer or something like that?

Very happy to give you some free marketing advice,  but I think you guys have this sorted. You've  

been in the industry a lot longer than I have.  Yeah. So I have a question here. I was rereading  

Erich's postmortem of Diablo II, you know, as  I do. You wrote like 25 years ago an article,  

before LoD came out, it's on like  gamedeveloper.com or something,  

and in there you mentioned that, you felt that the  tooling for Diablo II was separate from the game,  

and that if you know you could go back in time  you would have integrated the tooling with the  

game. So my question here is with Darkhaven,  it feels and sounds like you have integrated  

all the tooling with the game client. Is that the  case and what benefits are you seeing from that?

Yeah, for sure. Diablo II had, for me as  a designer, remarkably terrible tools.  

I couldn't even like edit data, I had to just  like, suggest, literally hand people paper of,  

reduce this guy's hit points to this, there's  no in to in-game tools, there was no - read  

from Excel is the obvious thing I wanted people  to do, we didn't even have that, so the tools  

were just terrible, the turnover time for me to  iterate was, at best one day on these things,  

instead of like right now, I could try  a hundred different values in Darkhaven,  

which I'm sure though, this is pretty common.  We had it much better by the Torchlight days,  

and since I'm sure you had much better tools  than we had back then, so it isn't that radical,  

but the idea that I can just, keep adjusting  the run speed just while I'm playing, is  

remarkable advance, but I feel like most of that  advance actually did happen with with Hellgate,  

and then in Torchlight for me, and I suspect  everybody's working with better tools these days.

Yeah, I think the big difference here is  that you can do it in a multiplayer game,  

right? Like you could actually get a couple  people in, and start like tweaking values,  

and making stuff, and having it work, which  is I think, the big thing that Darkhaven has.

And also non-trivial, yet another  hard technical task you've undertaken.

And yet it's working pretty well. People right  now are, they have editor wars where they spawn  

up big towers, and try to pour lava into the  other guy's lands, so, what's kind of one thing  

that immediately comes to mind is, hey if you can  do this in the editor, why don't we make a skill  

that does this in game? So that's kind of informed  how we've gone about this, and I think it'll help.

Yeah, the editor lets you see what's  actually really fun to play with,  

and then that's a toy you can  add to the palette in game.

Right. Yeah, that's cool.

I found it's a lot of fun to just run around  in the world, find a location, and you think,  

this would look better if I did this or whatever,  and we don't really have the loop right now to do  

all that, and save it out as a preset. We kind  of do, but it, you know, we don't have a way to,  

you know, as a designer, an artist to say,  okay, now spawn this preset in these worlds,  

with these rules, but the editor is so easy  to use, you know, you're not fiddly, you know,  

snapping things together or whatever,  you're just kind of painting, you know,  

and we're not the only editor that does that,  but it's very fun to just make the world more  

beautiful, and come up with little scenes, and  little encounter areas and things like that.

So, a topic that I've been thinking about a bit  recently is, I feel there's a spectrum with action  

RPGs where the genre came from turn-based games,  you know, like pre-Diablo I, and in that game,  

the way combat works is, you allocate your  points in your character, you decide what  

skills you're using, and then the math calculates  how well combat goes. You as a player just select  

your target, and you know, it's turnbased.  There's no timing or anything like that,  

and Diablo I's innovation was that now there is  timing. Now, there is positioning and movement,  

and it's a bit real time. But still most of the  calculations are the result of like, whether your  

character has enough strength and dexterity and so  on, and a lot of action RPGs work like that where,  

the fantasy is that is the character that you were  investing in. The character is the skilled warrior  

who's doing the stuff, and you as a regular person  at home aren't capable of fighting to the same  

extent the character can, and a thing I've been  noticing in more recent modern action RPGs like,  

you know, Diablo IV, Path of Exile 2 and so on, is  that, they start to include more kind of, twitch  

based, your skill matters kind of stuff, like,  there's dodge rolls, and telegraphed attack areas,  

and it's a case where you as a player have to  actually be more dextrous than you otherwise would  

do if you were merely issuing instructions, and  so there's a spectrum where on one hand you have,  

a fantasy of the character is skilled, and on the  other hand you have a fantasy of my player skill  

matters more, and everything exists on this  spectrum. Like even in Diablo II, you know,  

you can still run around away from enemies  and that does matter a bit, but you know,  

there's hit chance, there's dexterity, and that  kind of stuff. You put points in dodge, evade,  

avoid, as an Amazon, rather than dodging, evading,  and avoiding as much as the player, and I've  

noticed with Darkhaven, because of the 3D terrain,  and because of the ability to jump and stuff,  

there is a large amount of player expression there  with regard to the ability to weave in and out of  

combat, and I wanted to know, is this intentional?  Like, is the goal here that you have a more like,  

a player driven kind of combat system than some  of the more traditional turn-based-like ones?

I don't know if it's the intention. In my mind,  my balance, my rule of thumb is always, it's  

one-third player skill, one-third skill build, and  one-third loot contributes to your success, and to  

be a great player, you’ve got to do all three, but  really even doing one is okay. One of my secrets  

on ARPGs is that, really you always win, right? No  matter what you do, you're going to win the game.  

It's kind of, we don’t like to say that too much  out loud, because it doesn't sound like people do  

anything. Of course, there's competitive and good  players and stuff, but no one fails at Diablo II,  

you know, everyone's going to succeed, and really,  I think the path to success is, you learn the  

systems, you learn the builds, or you just, you  keep earning the loot, or you're a good player.  

All those will work, all of them together, to be a  great player, but I find that in Darkhaven still,  

I could play that way. I could just be lazy, play  it one-handed, I just take it a little slower and  

I got some good loot that drives it. Or I could  push. I'm pretty good at it right now obviously,  

I play it a lot. I could push the skill angle,  you know, a couple levels ahead. So, I'm fighting  

higher level monsters, just by jumping, and kiting  to some degree. Now, that only gets you so far.  

So to be really good at it, you’ve got to kind  of master all three of those. Loot and stats I  

kind of combine together, and I say one third,  one third, one third - I don't know if that's  

the case, but that's how I always think about  it in my head, and try to make it so it's not  

totally player skill dependent. It's not totally  loot dependent, or not totally build dependent.  

This is the way I approach that, and I think I'm  sticking with that same thing in Darkhaven. It  

might be a little more actiony than the old days,  than Diablo II, but not too much. Diablo II even  

though you say that, there's a lot of position-y  stuff that comes into play, especially early and  

midgame. Later on - and these days, there's  more, you know, clear the screen all the time,  

of every monster as you kind of just hover through  - it gets a little different, and the endgame  

of Diablo was like that too I think, to some  degree, and we don't really have that right now  

but I anticipate we'll probably end up a little  bit more like that towards our end game too.

Would you say, Erich, that the player skill  - you did say this - but like player skill,  

you can never win the game completely with player  skill, and that's true for every ARPG. That's the  

formula, you know, but the player skill lets you  get a little bit, there's kind of a, you know,  

the high performance part of the graph  and the low performance part of the graph,  

and the player skill, you know, can kind of make  up this delta, the space between the two lines. So  

you can push a little bit further ahead, but  at some point you'll hit a wall and just the  

difficulty of the monsters, and the inadequacy  of your loot, and your and your level. But  

it's rewarding as a player to feel like, hey, I'm  good, I can get a little bit further, and that's,  

you know, I'm not at that level of play, but you  know, when you watch the really competitive ARPG  

players talk about it, it's like, they want to  feel like their skill matters, and when it doesn't  

matter in a game where, you know, you just have to  do everything by the numbers, and it has to be a  

specific build in order to beat a boss, or beat  an encounter, and it's really boring, you know?

Yeah I don't know if there  was a question there, still?

No I'm just kind of…

Right, but that's how I think about it, yeah. You  can push it in any number of ways. You can push  

it temporarily, with a really good drop, you push  it temporarily with a great skill, you know, build  

combo and really know what you're doing, know  this is the way to really get this build, or push  

it temporarily with player skill. Also kind of  makes fights, long fights that might be long boss  

fights, a little more fun if you can overpower  it. One of those dimensions, I feel like.

Yeah, you have to feel like you're cheating  the system at least a little bit, right?

Yeah, I love that. I love it when players are  like, "You've made this way overpowered!”,  

but then it turns out, you know, in a level or  two, whatever they were complaining about kind of,  

doesn't become that important anymore. Or they're  struggling really hard and they think this game's  

impossible, but all of a sudden, you know, one  drop or a new skill, or figuring something out,  

a new technique, those put them over, and so  I just love the up and down spiky balance.

Fair enough. So the next topic I wanted to  talk about, which is another business one,  

is funding, and obviously games of this  scope cost a lot of money to make. This  

is a complicated game. There's a lot of content.  It's being made by industry experts. It, you know,  

it's going to have some budget behind it, and I'm  sure you've already spent a lot of money on it,  

and one thing that the audience may not appreciate  is, how bad a state the games industry is in with  

regard to funding over the last couple of  years. Like, I've had 10-12 times in the  

last couple of years people have come to me and  said, "Hey Chris, I've got this studio. Look,  

I've got a game and I am not having any luck  finding funding. Can you help out?" and I think  

the reason they're approaching me is, because I  know Tencent well, and I know other investors,  

and you know, there's the possibility that I  can introduce them to someone who can help,  

and I've dutifully introduced them, and you know  demos have been shown and that kind of thing,  

and out of all of those people, zero have received  a dollar, and I don't know of a case literally,  

I don't know of any case, of anyone in the games  industry getting any money for their games from  

traditional investment like, you know, investment  and publishing routes, whereas in the past during  

the high point in the cycles, you know, some  companies are closing a deal a day with games, you  

know, publishers are signing everyone like during  COVID when gaming was incredibly hot obviously,  

like there was money being thrown around in vast  amounts, and I suspect this is all getting sucked  

up with the AI bubble at the moment, and you know  all the the money's heading in that direction,  

but the reality is, it's very hard to  raise money for projects and I'm sure  

this has affected you guys. So you're running a  Kickstarter at the moment and I kind of wanted  

to ask like how has it gone? How did you get  here, and what are your thoughts on funding?

Yeah, I mean we've talked about this, right?  The funding is, and all of the game developer  

friends in, you know, my community, are in the  same boat. It's the same experience. It's very,  

very difficult to raise money. And even four  or five years ago, that wasn't the case.  

Maybe between 10 years ago and 3 years  ago, it was a gold rush of investment  

into game studios. The AA and you know,  whatever you want to call those studios,  

high-profile big investments in studios that were  founded on the promise of, you know, we're going  

to be the next Blizzard, or we're going to be  the next Riot or, you know, the next Valve,  

and a lot of that hasn't come to pass, and that's  part of I think, the reason why the money went  

elsewhere. You know, like you said, AI is also  the new bubble, the new hot thing to invest in,  

and unfortunately, we as a studio missed out just  a little too late to capitalise on that. We were  

able to get some funding a while ago. We talked  about our seed round that we got because 1AM and  

a couple of other investors believed in us, and  saw our vision and were willing to support it,  

but the amount of money that has gone into  Darkhaven and Moon Beast is pale in comparison to,  

you know, what a lot of other high-profile studios  have been operating on, and the fact that we've  

gotten as far as we've gotten, is really 100%  a testament to the team. You know, this is a  

very small team. We're running very lean. We've,  you know, we've put some amount of our own money  

into it, proportionately a lot of money, you know,  because none of us are independently wealthy, and,  

you know, the team has been working under, you  know, it's been a passion project for everybody,  

and so yeah, we found ourselves with a game that  is nearly ready to show people. This is at the  

end of last year,you know, we did a streamer demo  in August. That went over really well. We had a  

play test before that. That went over really well,  and it was the first time we let anybody outside  

of the studio seriously, you know, in volume,  play the game, and they all really liked it,  

and we got really, really positive feedback,  especially from streamers who had never even  

played the game,you know, people like Rhykker  and MrLlamaSC have always been supporters of us,  

and they knew what we were building, but then  you get Zizaran and others that had have really  

no idea what we’re building and played it for  the first time and just like, oh my god, this is  

amazing. So that was really, really confidence  boosting to us, and we thought, okay, let's  

you know, we have to start showing this to people,  because we have to figure out where the rest of  

the money is going to come from, and that's when  we decided that we were gonna put out a demo,  

and we were going to participate in Next Fest, and  then we would just do a Kickstarter. We had put  

off doing a Kickstarter for a long time because,  it's not really, you know, there's pluses and  

minuses to Kickstarter, you know, and Kickstarter  has obviously been very volatile in the games  

industry. There's been a lot of high-profile  failures or just, you know, not good outcomes,  

and, you know, we don't want to ask players  for money. We don't want to ask them to take  

a risk on something. You know, it's inherently  risky. We feel like we're a really good bet,  

because we know our capabilities, and we know what  we can build, and we know what we're, you know,  

intending to build, but it's still, you know, it's  like, this is people's hard-earned money, but,  

you know, we had a lot of people in our community  saying, how do I pre-order this? How do I give you  

money? You know, and the fact that people were  liking the game, that became our best option,  

and still is our best, most immediate option for  getting funding. We're still talking to everybody  

that we can talk to. I'll be at GDC talking to  publishers and everybody. The thing that we have  

now that we didn't have before is, we have a  game that people are playing, and we've got a  

number of wish lists and it's going really well,  and that, hopefully, will make the difference,  

and if we have a successful Kickstarter, that's  another big vote of confidence. So I think,  

one thing players and, you know, non-developers  might not know is that something like Kickstarter,  

it's partly about the money, right? It will help  us develop the game, and 100% of the money goes  

towards the development of the game. We're not,  you know, there's no extravagant expenses in this  

studio. We work at home and we just, you know,  spend the money exactly where we need to spend it,  

but it's also a big vote of confidence. So, when  investors and publishers see that people are  

willing to pay for the game in the current state,  that's really confidence boosting, you know, it  

gives them confidence that everything is working.  So that's why we're asking the community, hey,  

if you like what you see, and if you believe in  what we're doing, and you can afford it, you know,  

we will gratefully and humbly welcome you to walk  alongside us as we build this thing, you know,  

and that just gives us an audience that's really  committed that can give us feedback. So yeah,  

that's a lot of words about it, but  yeah, it's a tough time, you know,  

and we're determined to find a path forward, and  you know, Kickstarter was one part of that puzzle.

Just to add to what Phil was saying is  that, when we decided, hey, we're gonna  

go this Kickstarter route, we really we don't  want people to just blindly trust us or say,  

hey, we are the guys behind Diablo II, just  give us some money or, that's why we really  

made it a strategy of putting out the demo at  the same time, just so that people could see,  

okay, it's not completely made up. There's  problems with the demo, but they'll see that,  

hey, there's good bones here. There's a lot  of fun to be had, and this is the real deal.  

No one's doing a scheme to make out with  it. So, that was kind of a joint effort,  

we'll start the Kickstarter and  we'll give everybody a demo to play.

So a concern that I have with Kickstarter is  that, historically you know, games that use  

Kickstarter often don't necessarily deliver  to the players or are of potentially lower  

quality than games that didn't need to use  Kickstarter at all if they had enough funding,  

and it's only a result of circumstance  that you're using Kickstarter. I'm sure  

your primary method here would have been to just,  you know, do it with private funding, and are you  

worried a little bit of being lumped in with  other Kickstarter games as a result of this?

Oh. I mean there's different levels of caliber  even on Kickstarter, right? There's true indie  

games, that are trying to raise a couple  hundred thousand dollars, and that's the  

whole budget for the game, and then there's been  a number of higher profile games that, you know,  

were funded through other sources, and also did a  Kickstarter, and I think when those don't succeed,  

that's a much darker spot, I think, on the  whole proposition, and I think those are the  

ones that players remember, you know, somebody  came in and said, I mean, we're not going to  

talk about names at all, but, you know, there's  been some high-profile, not very good outcomes,  

and I think players are bitter about that. You  know, it's tough for players, too. You know,  

it's tough for everybody. The economy, and  the funding source, and everything. So yeah,  

it's definitely, that went into our consideration,  you know, we didn't want to ask players to take  

a risk. We don't want to ask them for  hard-earned money because, you know,  

we don't want to be lumped in with that, you know,  and like Erich was saying, we hope that having the  

demo available alleviates some of that risk like,  you can play the game, you can see where we're at,  

you can imagine in your heads and we can  talk about where we need to go from here,  

and the Kickstarter isn't going to fund all  of that, you know, it'll help us move forward,  

and it'll make a big difference, and we'll be  very, very grateful for it, and it could easily  

make THE difference right now at this point in  our journey. So yeah, we're trying to be humble,  

and grateful, but we understand that, you know,  that there's a… Yeah, I don't know how to put it.  

We all know how Kickstarter has been, you know, so  it's not like, it's not all been a bed of roses.

I think the point you made earlier as well where,  you're planning to go to GDC next month and  

secure a publishing deal, and it's worth stating:  to anyone who's worried about the Kickstarter and  

hasn't backed it yet, that, a better result from  the Kickstarter makes it much easier for these  

guys to go to publishers, and say, "Look, there's  demand for this game. Can you please just give us  

some bridging money?", because it's easy money  for the publisher there. They put some money in,  

the game gets finished, which it will be  because these guys have like the pedigree,  

and the demo to show where they're  up to, and a plan to finish it. Like,  

there's very low risk with the money available.  It's getting done and it's going to be good,  

and so the publisher will see with demand for the  game, this is easy money. They put the money in,  

they get the money out later when it does  well, and life is good. So an advantage of  

backing it not only is, of course you get to  take part in the journey, but it also means  

that you make it exponentially easier for the  game to get additional funding that it needs,  

and that's why I feel that if you're on the fence  about it, and as Phil said you can afford to,  

it's a nice thing. Not only because like,  obviously the individual $25 or $40 you put  

in just pays for a small amount of development  time, but every bit helps to cause a publisher  

to then throw millions more dollars in, to get  the game way bigger than it otherwise would be.

Yeah, it's a massive lever. It's, you  know, you think about, it might be, oh,  

if a famous creator endorses this game,  you know, a publisher will take notice,  

and say like, oh, we need to fund these  guys. That's rarely the case, you know,  

because everybody, you know, influencers can be  paid for, you know? They'll say one thing one day,  

and another day. It's just one person, you know,  they have their own community. The biggest,  

biggest thing by far that will influence  a publisher or an investor's opinion is,  

have players said they want to buy this game?  Are they wishlisting it? Are they reviewing it?  

Are they funding a Kickstarter? Like that kind  of thing proves that there's an audience there,  

and that's that's the biggest single  thing that will give, you know,  

that will unlock a bigger amount of funding,  that will let us turn this thing into what we  

all want it to be. What we want it to be, and  what players are telling us they want it to be.

Yeah. 100%. The point that was made  earlier as well about the modding where,  

even if someone is on the fence about this and may  not necessarily, you know, fund the game, is that,  

votes of confidence for the game that get it made,  also mean that that modding ecosystem will exist,  

where the next generation of action RPG design  that none of us are going to come up with,  

comes out of that modding ecosystem and means that  5 years from now we're all playing much better,  

different, innovative action RPGs as a  result of the fact that there exists this  

the scaffold for people to make it, because,  you know, as as cool as Diablo IV is,  

you're not going to be able to make the  next action RPG by playing Diablo IV,  

but you potentially could by fiddling  around with Darkhaven and discovering  

the secret sauce that other people haven't,  you know, Dota, Counter-Strike, and so on.

That's the vision.

Yeah.

Somebody told me once, I don't know if they  believe this, but they were saying like,  

every mobile game in existence started off as a  Warcraft 3 mod, and you know, I think it is an  

exaggeration, but like, there's so much potential  when you add in deeper systems, you know, that  

you can't do in even Roblox, or you can't do in  Fortnite, or you can't do it in any of these other  

moddable games, you know, so that's, yeah, that's  our hope. That's what we're working towards is,  

if you have a vision for an RPG that you want to  make, you'll be able to build it in Darkhaven.

And you mentioned wishlisting as well, which  is literally a free thing people can do,  

like, even if you can't afford  to fund the Kickstarter, like,  

I've wishlist this game on Steam, and I would  encourage viewers to do the same thing because,  

it's a vote for this direction of action RPG  development. Even if the game itself isn't,  

you know, something you want to buy right now,  it's still a really nice gesture, because,  

if they can go to a publisher and say, "Look,  you know, we we need some more money to top up  

the amount we made from the Kickstarter, but we  have a million wish lists." The publisher says,  

"Okay, I'm getting my chequebook out.", and  that's, you know, that makes it a lot easier.

Yes, please. Please wishlist us.

Yeah, the easy free stuff that people can  do is; wishlist the game, play the demo,  

review it if you like it, you know,  don't say anything you don't believe in,  

but join our Discord, sign up for our  mailing list. Those are all things that  

just prove to publishers that people  are interested in what we're doing.

What about feedback? Like if people have played  the demo and they want to give you feedback,  

what's the best way of them addressing that to  you in a way that can be actioned most easily?

On our Discord is the most  direct way that we'll see it,  

and we'll be able to see it forever, you  know, like, reviews are good, but like,  

if you want to talk to us directly, and talk  to the community that's also playing it,  

like, our Discord's the best place to do  that, wouldn't you say, Peter and Erich?

Yeah, a lot of us are pretty  active on the Discord these days.

Yeah. And the feedback we've gotten from the  demo has been, I mean, some of, you know,  

the critical things are hard to read sometimes,  you know, like “Ah I hate this thing” It's like  

wow really? But by far most of the people  are like, ”This is really good. It's really  

fun. There's things here that I'm excited  to see what they do with it”, you know,  

but it has given us a lot to think about, and it's  made our next steps a lot more straightforward  

I think, because we know now from a lot of  players, you know, what they are looking for,  

and what's really connecting, and  what you know maybe needs more work.

Well it's been great having you guys on  the channel today. I really enjoyed the  

deep dive into the technical stuff, and some  of the game design things we talked about.  

I found out a lot of new info about Diablo  II, which will be very, very pleasing to me,  

and a few of the viewers as well, and  it was actually really cool how candid  

you guys were about the funding stuff,  because it's difficult at the moment,  

and I appreciate the transparency there. Thank you  very much for joining me. It's been good to chat.

Yeah, thanks for having us.  Had a good time talking and  

hashing through this stuff. It's very interesting.

Yeah, thanks so much.

Really appreciate it. and thanks  to your viewers too for, you know,  

hopefully they're getting something interesting  out of it, because we love this genre and,  

you know, you've done arguably, I don't know,  we were there at the beginning, you know,  

and then you took it to the next step and,  you know, it's just been really cool to see,  

you know, where you've taken it and where, you  know, the next generation is going to take it.

Thank you.

Well, to the viewers, I hope you enjoyed  the interview and make sure to wishlist  

Darkhaven on Steam. Please check out the  Kickstarter and back it if you can afford to,  

and thank you very much for your time.  I look forward to seeing you next time.