Diablo III Interview

Our favorite senior world designer in the industry, Leonard Boyarsky, was interviewed by NAG Online during last month’s BlizzCon about several topics related to Diablo III. In the Q&A, Leo tackles questions about the game’s newfound focus on storyline, lore, and dialogue:

Are you surprised at how much writing has gone into Diablo III?

I used to work on like, single-player RPGs with full-on dialogue trees, and stuff like that. So I came on to Diablo thinking (okay, we’ll just throw some story in there and it’ll be y’know, we’ll get some more in-depth story going and it’ll be great). And uh, it’s been, it’s really challenging. It’s deceptively difficult to add like a, good in-depth story to a Diablo game because the pace is so quick. The action comes as you so quickly, that you don’t want to stop the player and make them stop and get story. You want to have the story integrated into the gameplay as much as possible. And uh, it’s easier said than done, I can tell you that.

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Anything our readers should keep an eye out for when they finally get to play Diablo III?

Don’t skip the dialogues! (laughs) Don’t just mash the space bar! Just enjoy it, just have a great time. Slow down, take it in. There’s players. and one of the things we’ve really done is so that, we want the game to be, we realize that there are players who couldn’t really care less about the stuff we’ve written, um, but we want the story to even make sense to them. So if you skip all the dialogue, and y’know, even just looking at your objectives that you have on your quests. Even that should kinda give you a hint of where the story’s going. That’s another one of the challenging things writing in layers. We have the layer where people who dig up every piece of lore you can find in the game, get a much more complete story. But we also want the people who just can’t be bothered with it, we still want to convey the story to them as well.