Diablo III: Reaper of Souls Interview

AusGamers has cranked out a sixteen-minute video interview with Blizzard Entertainment’s Leonard Boyarsky and Jesse McCree, with the added bonus of a full transcript being made available just below it. While I continue to be disappointed that he’s not actively working on traditional CRPGs anymore, it’s always nice to get some direct feedback on any game from our old pal Mr. Boyarsky:

AusGamers: Where did all of that stem from? Obviously some of that stuff is not really part of any Diablo legacy, so were you perhaps trialling that for a while to sate people because there is no PvP at the moment? Can you talk about the genesis?

Leonard Boyarsky: It really has nothing to do with the whole PvP situation. It’s just a matter of: no matter how much we can do with the story, once you’ve played through four or five times, you really don’t want to go through that all again, it really turns it all into loot runs and the things we’re doing now with Nephalem Trials and the bounty system — we kind of just open the whole world to you.

It’s kind of the way that people have been playing Diablo forever, it’s just that before they would have to pick specific runs to do. You know, (this run is the most advantageous for the period of time I’m going to play and I’ll get the most loot). That wasn’t necessarily quote: (the most fun way to play), but it was just people really finding ways to maximise their time in the game. So we thought we should create, not a system, but a whole way to play that doesn’t force you to keep doing the same thing over and over again to get that kind of result.

Jesse was talking about the Nephalem Rifts, and the Nephalem Rifts are fantastic, because you can go from a level of the cathedral, to a cave, to some totally different dungeon — different lighting, different weather systems, different monsters — so it’s always this randomly generated situation or experience that you’re going to have.

Jesse: And the way that we come up with a lot of that sort of stuff, is we play the game and we watch what our players are doing, and we try to adjust and find what’s really fun. Now that we have an expansion, it’s a great opportunity to add a whole bunch of new features, that we couldn’t just piecemeal in with patches and things like that.

AusGamers: Is that stuff available from the outset for players, and if so do you guys foresee a problem with players just grinding those to get as good a loot drops as they can, to be able to just breeze through end-game content?

Jesse: You can play adventure mode right from the beginning — you can make a new crusader and jump into adventure mode — you can also play the campaign mode. So it’s up to you; you can play however you want to play. As far as getting upgrades and actually doing these things though, that’s actually what we want you to do. We want you to play the game and find upgrades and experience that process, and it’s been super-fun to play it internally.

Leonard: As far as the Act V content, we’re still deciding as to whether you can just jump right into that, or have to play that before you can do loot runs for it. I’m not sure if we’ve 100% completely decided on Acts I through IV yet, but those were a little bit more open to. we figure you’ve already played them if you’re playing the expansion set, so you can just get right into those and play in adventure mode.