Diablo III: Reaper of Souls Interview

There’s an interview with Diablo III: Reaper of Souls’ lead designer Kevin Martens and lead writer Brian Kindregan over at AusGamers, with some interesting replies about the upcoming expansion from the duo of Blizzard leads. Given the interview is fairly lengthy, I’m going to take the liberty of quoting a couple of questions and answers:

AusGamers: On the aesthetics side of things, it was mentioned during the resentation that ultimately, this expansion is a darker slice of the world. When the game was first announced, you guys spent a lot of time at loggerheads with fans about the perceived darker versus cartoony style. It was all a bit silly, but is there a reason this one is darker, or is it just that Westmarch is that place?

Kevin: Westmarch is only one of the zones that we have in the game. It sounds like you’re familiar with the argument already, and you’ve played Diablo II and Diablo I. Diablo I, I would say is horror fantasy, some would call it dark fantasy. It was a horror-inspired thing, very lovecraftian etc, and horror is best in an intimate setting. Then Diablo II was world-spanning, you crossed continents and things like that; Diablo III is more in that vein. Diablo II obviously had lots of variety in appearances; there was light areas, there was dark areas — there was the bright desert, there was the green misty jungles etc. Both of those games, Diablo I and of course, where Diablo II started, and where Diablo III started, those all had that horror influence. So in every case, we’ve been making that nod to our roots, and Reaper of Souls is no exception.

So when we say it’s darker. Diablo III actually ended on a hopeful note, the game was about doom. The armies of hell were coming, Diablo was returning, we’re all going to die. You managed to stop that, even though you were betrayed, and Tyrial declared this age of angels and humans together. What Tyrial didn’t count for — and what you saw in the [trailer] — was that Malthael had returned. Tyrial, and even Imperius — who does not like humans, and thinks they’re abominations — had to agree that the humans did save them. So humans and angels were allied at that point, with you, the hero, the Nephalem, being the primary human contact with angels. As far as he was concerned: (we’re good); malthael disagreed. Malthael used to be the leader of the angels, and when he left, he pondered this issue as well.

So the backstory is pretty simple: it’s that angels and demons are the parents of humans. The eternal conflict is that angels and demons have been fighting forever, essentially since they existed. A long time ago, an angel and a demon got tired of conflict, they stole the worldstone, and they created Sanctuary — a fresh world — and they tried to start a new life together. The demons found out about it, and the angels felt like they needed to step in a little bit — at least Tyrial did, against the wish of Malthael — and the conflict became humans being caught in the middle of that.

So where Tyrial looks at people and sees that potential for good — and realises that the Nephalem hero did not get corrupted, and did save us all, including the angels — Malthael looks at the same situation and sees all the evil that humans have — Zoltun Kulle being a prime example, from Act III — and thinks (Holy crap! The humans are so powerful. They stopped the Prime Evil) — something he had failed to do — (I’d better stop them before they get any more powerful).

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AusGamers: Can we broach how you’ve approached a lot of the negative feedback that stemmed from Diablo III, in terms of what has been implemented. With vocal fans that essentially wanted Diablo two-point-five as opposed to three, can you talk about how you might have sated some of those guys at all?

Kevin: Sure. I think there’s lots of valid criticisms of Diablo, and there’s criticisms that didn’t come out until a lot of people have played for a lot of time in many cases. Early on, we just had errors in the difficulty, it was just wrong. At a certain point in Hell difficulty, it did get too hard, and the gear didn’t keep up, and we did patch that pretty rapidly. We do believe that we did make Legendaries wrong, and we do keep making them better and better and other build-changing as well. So I think we’re finally nailing what the fantasy of the Legendary items is, and it’s still a little different than Diablo II, but is much more in that direction than it used to be.

So not all of the changes that we made in Diablo III are better than Diablo II, and a good example of that, that people complained about, would be the ability for people to customise their stats, to spend in different ways. We wanted to solve a problem that we think was endemic throughout Diablo II, and that was that people would get locked into a built that wasn’t quite what they thought it was going to be; they had to spend a point before they knew what that meant, and then they couldn’t re-spec it — for a long time, there was no re-speccing available, and eventually they solved that problem.

Often, people would learn — usually at the end of Act II, where they tried to kill Durial — they’d learn that they had made a huge mistake, and this build was not going to work out, and they’d have to start over. Some people love that actually, and I have to say that we’re not supporting that, and we’re not going to in the future.

AusGamers: In this day and age, I don’t know that it is supportable.

Kevin: Right, and some people will never be happy with that answer. That’s an unqualified no, and we just have a disagreement on philosophy there. What we did instead, is we gave people a lot more ability choices, and we tried to give them ways to change their build instantly, and that’s where that skill-system in Diablo III came from. That said, we weren’t necessarily opposed to stat-spending, and we simplified that out of the system. We’re now adding it back in at the paragon levels. You still have the advantages of the skills system — this is our goal — the advantage of that skill system is that you’re not locked in. You can change your gear often, that can even affect your build, and you can still customise your character stats for a long time, with the endless paragon system.

So we’re trying to find the best of both worlds there, and that would be one example. We’ve done a tonne of patching as well; it’s hard to even cover all the changes.