Diablo III Interview

Joystiq cornered Diablo III lead world designer Leonard Boyarsky and lead content artist Kevin Martens during BlizzCon for an assortment of questions related to the highly anticipated action RPG sequel.

Diablo has never officially supported modding although they haven’t really banned it. Is there any thought towards modding going into this or even map editing? Have you guys thought about including a map editor?

Leo: We talked about it early on and we considered it but the way we put together our maps and the fact that it’s random … it’s very artistic-centric. And, on top of that, the fact that it’s so random it’s like, would people just change the random number generator? You know what I mean? [laughs]

I suppose not, if It’s already random.

Leo: We don’t hand-build our dungeons anyways, but the way we build our maps kind of makes that prohibitive. But we’re always looking at what the end users might want so we did look at including a map editor and we just said that it’s never been a big part of Diablo. So we didn’t feel it was necessary.

Kevin: We’re certainly not opposed to modding it.

Leo: Yeah, we’re not going to put in things that, “Oh my God, you can never mod this!” If somebody comes along and makes this great editor and makes this great mod…

Kevin: At this point, we’re knee-deep in just making the game. That’s sort of at the periphery of our discussions at this point.

…

Without knowing how much of the game still needs to be developed, what’s been the most sort of challenging facet?

Kevin: You know I’ve been really happy to get the amount of quests and adventures in that we got for this demo. There’s a ton of them and they’re random and their placement is random and some of them have multiple endings and everything. Seeing that all come together in an area this big it’s much bigger than anyone can finish in 15 minutes of game play. You know, that was a lot of hard work and I’m happy that we got there. Now I’m really anxious to see people’s feedback on this. So that’s my personal one.

Leo: Yeah, it’s just right now I think probably, because me and Kevin worked a lot on that stuff for the demo, it’s probably where we’re most focused right now. If you asked Jay or any of the guys, they’ll probably talk more about the systems stuff because that’s probably what they’re focused on.

Kevin: Another thing I think to mention is co-op. Co-op is getting much more fun all the time. I’ve never had this much fun testing a game that’s still in development as I’ve had with this demo.