Diablo III Interview

Gamasutra has cranked out a three-page interview with Blizzard’s Julian Love and Kevin Martens about the approach the team is taking for Diablo III, specifically from an art and design perspective.

On the topic of Blizzard North and Blizzard Entertainment though, I do feel there was a difference in style between the Blizzard North and South games. The Diablo titles had a more baroque, intricate look, more tilework and stonework “along the grid.” Diablo III is more of a blend of that style with the current Blizzard South style. How long did it take you to settle on the look for Diablo III?

Julian Love: Well, it took a while for us to settle on the actual style, but I don’t think it was due any kind of difference between Blizzard North and Blizzard South philosophy. It had more to do with the fact that we were moving the game from a two-dimensional technology platform to a three-dimensional technology platform.

Issues like lighting and separation between the characters and the backgrounds are handled in entirely different ways — ironing out how to get what we felt was a Diablo vibe while still managing to get the characters to pop.

Looking at D2, for instance, those characters are super bright, super colorful. They pop out of the backgrounds. So, we had to try to bring that forward, but at the same time we don’t want to just rest on that art style and do the exact same game.

We want to elevate that. We’ve got to look at the other games that Blizzard does, learn from the things that they’ve done that make those games better, and really progress. I think what you’re seeing in the art style is our idea of the actual progression of the Diablo universe.

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And more broadly than that genre, there is of course always widely-publicized pessimism about the PC platform, and has been for a long time. Does that concern you ever, either in a long-term sense for Blizzard as a company that is so devoted to the PC, or otherwise?

Kevin Martens: It has never affected us yet. The death knell of PC has risen and fallen over the years, and we keep releasing PC games, and they keep doing incredibly well. I think that there is a market out there for PC games. The latest consoles are great; it’s easy to get the game running and all that. They’re useful.

But everyone has a PC, and we try to keep our system requirements down as low as possible. That’s one of the ways that we can make sure to appeal to enough people. Some of the really cutting edge games that come out for PC require a brand new video card and probably more RAM at least, if not a new CPU as well. That’s really rare with Blizzard games. I think that’s one of the reasons we still keep doing well.

Kevin Martens: If I could add to that — the best evidence that the PC market is not actually dying is the 20,000 people that showed up this year at Blizzcon, and the fact that those tickets sold out in one minute flat. That doesn’t seem to me that it’s really good evidence of a platform with a problem.