Diablo III Interview

Seemingly unrelated to the ongoing 15-year anniversary festivities, GameSpot AU has cranked out a Q&A with Diablo III world designer Leonard Boyarsky about his past RPG development experience, the challenge of ensuring the next installment lives up to the Diablo heritage, the lessons they’ve taken from Diablo II’s development, the goals he and his team had when building the world, and more.

GameSpot: You joined Blizzard in 2006, but you’re no stranger to the RPG genre, having worked at Interplay and helping form Troika. What does experience with other development teams and a fresh set of eyes bring when you begin working on a game like Diablo III?

Leonard Boyarsky: I can’t speak to how other people have approached the franchise in the past, because I didn’t work with any of the previous designers, but, when I approached it, I came in looking at it from a deeper story standpoint than I think it had in the past. Shockingly, I found out there was a deeper story there; it just really wasn’t presented in the best possible format. There was huge dialogue, paragraphs and paragraphs of dialogue when you talk to an NPC, and it didn’t grab me the way it could have in previous iterations. I came in and [vice president of creative development] Chris Metzen and I had a lot of conversations about bringing the emotional resonance to the series. It was all there in the background, and we just wanted to bring it to the forefront.

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GS: Blizzard is incredibly close to its community. What are some of the things fans have been calling for inclusion of in Diablo III, and have you implemented any of them? Are there ideas that simply wouldn’t work from a balance or gameplay perspective?

LB: From a story standpoint, it was very interesting early on. I read our forums a lot to see what people expected, because we didn’t want to give people exactly what they expected, because that would be kind of boring. But you don’t want to go off in a totally different direction than what people are expecting to see, because that would feel like you cheated them. They’ve invested this time into the series. Diablo II’s expansion, Lord of Destruction, ended on a bit of a cliff-hanger, so we really felt there were certain things we had to deliver, and just touching base, looking at the lore forums, and seeing what people were talking about and what their theories were as to what was going on in the world, were very helpful in knowing what they expected from our game. One of our villains in the game is the Maiden of Lust, and her concept was up on the web, and two years ago at BlizzCon someone at the costume contest was dressed as her. She was originally a totally different character and she had been cut from the game, but we saw that costume and it was such an awesome costume that we said we had to put it back in the game. So that was an instance where we were really inspired by a fan and had to change the content of the game.