Diablo III Interviews

A selection of Diablo III-related Q&As have emerged from this weekend’s BlizzCon, the first of which is at AusGamers with lead world designer Leonard Boyarsky and lead level designer Dave Adam:

AG: Diablo II vs Diablo III. Obviously technology has come along way since Diablo II; how has level design changed for you since then, both aesthetically and from a gameplay perspective? I mean, you can essentially do anything you want now, right?

Leonard: Well I think players are just expecting a lot more from us – in terms of our delivery systems; our story delivery systems – the way we’re delivering story stuff to the player. So we have our out-of-door areas, and they’re a fixed layout in terms of their overall shape so that we can have landmarks and places that you can identify interspersed with random elements. So one time you might come into an area and see a specific sequence happen, and another time it might be the entrance to a dungeon. So it’s a little bit more random in that you don’t have the randomisation of these areas, but you still have randomisations of events – so we’re delivering story that way; it’s randomising the story – we still have the main story arc, but we’re randomising other story elements that way.

So that’s one way we’re delivering story and technically it’s a bit different. In D2 we gave you quests and story in the hub, you know in town whereas we have a lot more stuff happening in the field I guess, is what I’m talking about. And Dave could probably talk more about the technology on his end, which is a lot more affected by…

Dave: Yeah, I think we have a lot more versatility now for how we build stuff. The 3D element is much more prevelent in this and we can take advantage of this. And I think technology doesn’t matter as much as the game itself, like, how we deliver all this stuff, how we tell the story now; how we have quests and our character customisation, you know, the tech is cool and it makes everything (wow), you probably saw the demo stuff already and that makes all the ‘˜punch’ and the ‘˜pepper’, I guess as Metzgen would call it, but at the end of the day what we’re trying to deliver is the game stuff, so the tech is…

AG: Secondary to that…

Dave: Yeah. It’s really just a way of looking at it and what players are expecting from it.

Next, we move to Gameplanet for an interview with lead designer Jay Wilson:

GP: On death, how are you guys handling death penalties in the game?

Jay: Right now when a player dies the get a durability hit. We want there to be some kind of penalty but we don’t want to make it too harsh. We don’t have any corpse running or collecting of your gear as we did in Diablo II. We found that too often is was a frustration point that caused people to quit the game. So instead, the checkpoint system respawns you a little way back. So you’ll lose a little time and a little gold through the loss of durability of items.

Then a stop at VG247 gets us some comments from Jay about the game’s progress:

Speaking during the BlizzCon’s Diablo III and World of Warcraft press conference, game director Jay Wilson said that Diablo III’s (way over half-way done.)

He also noted that even though the game’s not quite feature complete, it’s certainly not lacking for content.

So, the obvious question/froth-coated groveling: please please please please please tell us when it’s coming out already!

(We’re not really close until you’re playing it,) Wilson said, pointing to a friends and family beta test as a good indicator of that.

He also added that while Diablo III’s not (close) to clawing its way out of development hell yet, a friends and family beta test is. So we’re close to being close, basically.

Finally, GameSpot is hosting a video interview with lead technical artist Julian Love and senior systems designer Jason Bender about the newly revealed Demon Hunter class.