Diablo III Interview

Eurogamer has finally gotten around to posting an interview they did with Diablo III lead designer Jay Wilson during this year’s GamesCom. The conversation primarily revolves around the action RPG’s artisan crafting system, though a scant amount of new ground is covered, as well:

Eurogamer: The action RPG is a genre that frankly hasn’t changed a lot since Diablo II. There have been good games, Torchlight is a recent example, but it doesn’t seem to have advanced much over the intervening years. Do you think you can do much with this game to change that?

Jay Wilson: Yeah, I think we look at a couple of things as not good enough. Whenever we decide to make a game, especially if it’s a sequel, it’s always because we look at a game that we’ve made or a genre that we like that we see flaws and problems in. And we go, “We want to fix that. We love it, but it would be even better if it was like this.”

So when we looked at Diablo II, the main things that we really focused on were: the combat model doesn’t have as much depth as we’d like; it can be a very simple, one-button game, and that can be good, but we’d kind of rather it be a mostly one-button game and occasionally a three- or four-button game. That’s got more depth, it’s more interesting, it’s got more mechanics to it.

And that funnels down into class design and monster design; when you’ve got more mechanics to play with, they can be deeper as well. That’s why we changed the health system, that’s why we created the skill hotbar, that motivates a lot of the changes we’ve made, right down to the resource mechanics also.

The other side is story. This genre, even though half of its blood is RPG which is a story genre, most of these games are not very story-intensive or don’t tell great stories. So that’s something we really wanted to focus on: creating a world where story is pervasive, that felt like as you moved through it, even though it’s randomised, there are events occurring that tell you what’s happening in the game world.

Hold on now, Jay. In an industry where developers are continuously making their games as simple as possible, you’re going to actually add more depth? I like it!