Diablo III Interview

Gamasutra brings us an excellent three-page interview with Blizzard Entertainment’s Leonard Boyarsky, during which they briefly discuss his past development experience before charging into the challenges involved with making Diablo III as story-driven as a multiplayer action RPG will allow. The usual excerpts:

In your long career of working on different franchises from Fallout to working with Vampire: The Masquerade, you’ve definitely dealt with very passionate, vocal fans. Would you say that’s given you thicker skin for coming into Diablo III?

LB: [laughs] Yes. You would definitely have to have thick skin, because there’s always going to be people who don’t like what you’ve done or are objecting to your latest decisions. So, you get used to it after a while. Try not to take it too [personally]…

It’s a double-edged sword because it’s very helpful to hear what people have to say, how people see things and what people want to see from a franchise, whether it’s one that you created or whether it’s one that you’re carrying on.

It’s not to say that we always have to blindly follow what the fans want, but it’s nice to know what the fans are looking for, if that makes sense. [It’s important to know] what people are expecting, what people are looking for, the questions that they feel that they need to have answers to. Because if you don’t deliver on at least some of those things, then you’ve kind of failed.

…

What are some specific challenges of building and designing a world that’s versatile enough for one person and bots to play, and for a chaotic party that’s sniffing around for stuff to break and exploit?

LB: Well, as far as multiplayer goes, we tried at the beginning — approaching this from the story angle — we were really trying to make sure that the story came across, even in multiplayer.

We’ve come to the conclusion that when you’re playing multiplayer, the story of the game is more about the story you’re playing with your friends as opposed to the actual quest line. Now, if you’re playing with a bunch of people who are really interested in getting the story of the game and the quest lines, that’s a different thing, but Diablo can be very frantic and fast-paced, so a lot of times, you’re in there and you’re just playing it… You know, it’s all about the fun of just playing with your friends.

So, the story and the story delivery is really focused on the single-player aspect. And the multiplayer, you can still get that, but we’ve tried to leave it open so you can have a great multiplayer experience, as opposed to forcing the story on people or forcing these things that are like, oh, you have to jump through these hoops to get the gameplay experience because of the nature of the game in itself.