A frustrating aspect of any creative process is having a good idea, but not the right means to execute it. Thankfully, if you're a studio the size of Blizzard, you can transfer mechanics across series if something's good but not quite fitting into the game it was designed for, which is how a notion for Diablo 3 wound up becoming central to an encounter in World of Warcraft.
Wyatt Cheng, a former game director at Blizzard, went through what happened on his Instagram account. In 2004, he was part of the devs working on Diablo 3, and they started experimenting with what set enemies might look like, as in ones that followed the logic of wearing green equipment to get an added bonus.
"Maybe a set monster pack is four enemies with one ability each, and each monster would grant its ability to the other three upon death," he explains. "We prototyped it internally. It was not fun."
He mentions that Diablo players don't tend to pay as much attention to the creatures they're battling on-screen, always going for the fastest kill and the best loot. The transfer of abilities would frequently go unnoticed.
Then, Cheng was transferred from Blizzard North after Diablo 3 was put on ice to assist in making the then-rapidly growing World of Warcraft. He was assigned boss encounters, and one of those battles happened to involve four beefy bros players would have to face, the Anubisath Sentinels at the Temple of Ahn'Qiraj. "Every single reason set monsters failed in Diablo was solved right here," he says.
To give some RNG, he made it so the Anubisath each randomly pick from a pool of eight abilities, forcing players to carefully assess each encounter. Everything fit, and Cheng learned that sometimes context is all it takes to make an idea shine.
