Diablo III Interview

The guys over at Hellforge have slapped up a four-page interview with Blizzard’s Leonard Boyarsky about the lore surrounding the Diablo franchise and the contributions he’s made to Diablo III’s game world. A sampling:

Do you also draw inspiration from your previous games for example Vampire or Fallout?

Leonard Boyarsky: One of the most interesting things for me is that Diablo has a very distinctive voice and you know it’s really something that we’re trying to stick to. We really want to get that feel of the horror the underlying psychological horror. At its basis it’s an action game, so there’s only so much of that kind of feel you can kind of get. But I think Diablo 1 did it really well , and I think that it’s one of the things we really wanna hit.

Whereas, I think some of my past games I’ve been a bit more flippant in some of the dialogue writing. It’s just a different style, and we really wanna be true to that, and we really wanna make the dialogue as quality as possible, but we really wanna evoke the psychological horror feeling. You know, the whole Lovecraftian vibe of the universe. There’s all this stuff going on behind the scenes that’s just waiting to crush man.

…

What about the political setting? Does anything change from the previous games? Like you had the Zakarum stuff in the second game. Do we actually see the aftermath of what happened in D2?

Leonard Boyarsky: You’ll hear about some of it, and some of it’s gonna play out in this game. It’s not central to it. A lot of the stuff a lot of things like that and a lot of story threads that have been going through all the games will probably be things that you’ll have to maybe deep a little bit deeper into the lore books to get into because we really like to tell the story on several levels.

There’s the action story, which is like where I need to go next and who I need to kill, all the way down to what is the reason for this government being the way it is. So if you read all of the lorebooks you come across in the book you’ll get the full story on that stuff.