Diablo III Interview

Diablo-Source has cranked out a fifteen-question interview they recently conducted with Diablo III lead technical artist Julian Love. Topics include Battle.net 2.0, high level content, the size of each of the game’s acts, and more. Check it out:

DS: Expansions and download-able content, are you guys – I know it’s really really early in the development cycle to talk much about this, but can you talk a little bit about the plans for the higher level content and how you’re going to keep players coming back? I think Jay hinted during Blizzcon that there might be updated quests to keep higher level content exciting to keep people coming back and playing again.

JL: It’s not so much actually high level versus low level. I think we have a plan that facilitates high level content. What I think you’re really getting at there is replayability, and what that gets down to is the way we’re exercising randomness within the game. We’ve put a lot of focus towards what kinds of randomness are really beneficial in supporting replayability and what things are just, heh, not all that important or not all that awesome. One of the things that we have in the system that we have is something that we call – well, we have a really technical name for it – sub scenes

What it comes down to is we can sort of like create a hole in the world that’s like a socket that we can fill with just about anything that we want. It could be empty ground with a bunch of monsters on it, it could be a giant canyon that a really elaborate scripted event happens, it could turn into a caravan walking across the desert that you have an escort quest on. The point being is that this hole in the earth can randomly, at any time become something totally different. It could even be a doorway to a whole new dungeon that you’ve never seen before. So, the fact that the world is able to change things up and actually deliver different events, stories and quests is what’s really going to make the game a lot more replayable at the both the low and high ends.