Diablo III is a game that deals in numbers, and given the sheer output of digits that a combat counter can produce, Blizzard’s engineers have been struggling with the issue of what to display on screen without overwhelming the player. The team has come up with two solutions in the most recent update and penned a dev diary to explain the changes.
“Patch 2.4.0 introduced a couple of new features to address this,” Blizzard explained. “First, we’ve introduced a new in-game option to truncate numbers and display them using abbreviations. Second, we’ve added an entirely new feature that highlights some of your largest damage numbers in a new color.”
The issue of portraying important numbers on-screen grows trickier when you factor in localization, as all of Diablo III’s 13 languages don’t handle numbers the same way. Even picking out a color for important number events (the studio went with orange, by the way) took some serious consideration on behalf of the team.
