Max Schaefer and Matt Uelmen on IGN Unfiltered

Max Schaefer and Matt Uelmen, a couple of veteran developers who worked on the early entries in the Diablo series over at Blizzard North and are now busy with Torchlight III at Echtra Games, joined IGN’s Ryan McCaffrey for the latest episode of his monthly Unfiltered show. They spent about an hour discussing Diablo and their ongoing work on Torchlight III. Check it out:

Additionally, you might want to read this partial transcript focused on the rumored remaster of Diablo II. A snippet:

“[The development team on the remaster is] going to have to spend a lot of their time [on capturing that feeling], not just on recreating maybe slightly higher fidelity graphics and all that… that’s the easy part. It’s easy to go back and kind of 1:1, make the game look better. It’s going to be the feel and the atmosphere that are kind of inherent in the technology that was behind it, which was… at this point we can look back and say it’s kind of ‘spaghetti code.'”

“It was [built using a] custom engine… it was stuff that hadn’t been done before. I would assume that a remaster is going to be done using an established graphics engine with its own conventions and its own quirks, and so much of what made [Diablo II] special was the feel and the intangibles, so it’s a daunting task. The ideal remaster would be something that actually retains that feel and that atmosphere, that has a modern take on the graphics. Honestly, I hope they pull it off. I’m glad they’re doing it and I don’t have to.”