Aeon of Strife

Aeon of Strife

            The second mode that has come to my mind is a take on the current MOBA genre (games like LoL, DotA, HoN).  For those who have actually played a Strife map back in Warcraft 3 days, this will seem pretty familiar.  I do believe however that it would fit very well into the Diablo 3 engine and universe.

Goal

            Each map will consist of two bases on opposite sides.  One will be the player base, the other will be the base of the demons.  They will be connected by multiple paths upon which computer controlled minions will travel down and fight.  Players will spend their time pushing enemy minions down the lanes, ultimately attempting to reach and destroy the enemy base.

Lanes

            A good majority of the players time will be spent in the lanes.  As the enemy will only be NPCs, their waves of minions will be stronger than the players and will quickly push towards a player’s base if a lane is left alone for too long.  Under normal circumstances, when a player is in lane, they will begin to push the lane towards the enemy base.  As time progresses, the enemy minions will go stronger and new types will begin to spawn.

            The lanes themselves will each be different.  One may be a straight shot to the base, others may wind through a forest or swamp.  Some may even go through a cave system.  Having paths of different lengths, perhaps even different spawns than the other ones, would force players to decide the priority of each lane, and how far they wanted to push them respectively.

The Player Base

            A large part of player decision making would be made at the player base.  Here, there would be a lot of options for them to spend the resources they will earn over the course of the mode.  Players would have to choose from buying equipment for themselves, upgrading their troops, adding new spawns, creating new buildings and defenses, summoning special troops, and a host of other options.

Champions, Control Points, and Events

            While most of a players time will be spent in a lane, several things will happen that will force players to have to change lanes and shift their focus from simply pushing them.  The first and most common of these will be Champion spawns.  Occasionally and generally in a random lane, a Champion pack will spawn.  These will represent a major threat to the lane they are in and players will be forced to shift their attention to this spawn or otherwise watch the lane quickly make the way to the player base.

            The second distraction from the lanes will be Control Points placed along the map.  These can be directly in the lanes, or off in random places.  Players will fight the NPC’s for these points and the team that controls them will acquire some sort of advantage.  This could be in the form of resource generation, way points, long range defenses, or area/global buffs.  Keeping control of these points would greatly benefit the player and while under their control the enemy would at times send special waves to try to reclaim them.

            A third distraction, would be events.  These could be triggered by the player (such as the construction of a trebuchet), or be random generated (such as a massive enemy wave, or having to interrupt the channeling of an enemy spell.).  Some events could even be the claiming of an objective in which both sides must fight to reach it and bring it back to base

Player Characters

            There are two ways to use the classes of Diablo 3 and players characters in this mode.  The first is an extremely simple implementation.  Just use player’s actual characters.  For most situations this would work out well, basing difficulties off of the difficulty structure of the main game.  The only downside to this would be that players could out scale the challenge at extremely high levels of gear.

            The other option would be give players a starting set of gear at the beginning of the mode, and allow them to use resources or gold gather in the mode to upgrade their gear from shops (as well as potentially having enemies drop loot.  This would allow designers to create a stable level of challenge based on the map/difficulty of that mode, keeping it as something for players to overcome, not overpower.

            Of course, both methods could also be used with varying difficulties created for both.

End

            A mode like this would allow for designers to quickly create content that would be both enjoyable and challenging to players.  It would be different and fresh style of play while still remaining true to the feel of Diablo 3.  Current content could be recycled and used in a new way providing players with a change of pace without a lot of design time.  As the main Diablo 3 game progressed, any new content created there could be used in this mode as well.