Diablo III Was Originally Planned as an MMORPG

Diablo: IncGamers has shared a short teaser from an interview they did with Runic Games CEO Max Schaefer about his time at Blizzard North and the team’s original plans to design Diablo III as an MMO. The full interview will go live Monday, but here’s a bit to whet our appetite:

Flux: What were Blizzard North’s plans for Diablo III, when you really got started on it back in 2001? What were you expanding from Diablo II, and in what new directions did you want to take the concept and design?

Max: We wanted to make it a bigger game. We were going the MMO route. We wanted to support many more players in the game. When I left the company in 2003 the project was still very early on; far from the point where we could have revealed anything about it publicly, since so much would still have changed. There’s lots and lots that goes in inside game companies that never hits the light of day, since projects change so much in their early iterations. We may have changed our own path radically had we kept going on it.

But at the time our thinking was to go more MMO on it. We wanted to foster big in-game communities. Not just session-based with four or eight people. We wanted more than just 4 or 8 people per game. We wanted a big overworld and a giant shared community.

Flux: You’d have hosted lots of players in the same instance? Or like a perpetual world?

Max: A really big instance. Basically a perpetual world.

Flux: At the time you guys left and Blizzard North started to break up, there were rumors that you guys had wanted D3 more of an MMO, but because WoW had Blizard’s MMO locked up, you guys were unhappy.

Max: Not at all. We didn’t really think that… WoW didn’t drive our decision at all. What the guys down south were doing didn’t really impact our work. It didn’t dawn on us that having two subscription based games would cannibalize each other. They were historically different communities; the Warcraft and the Diablo communities. It was just a desire to make something cool and take advantage of the newly-emerging MMO mechanics. And having a cool and chaotic interaction between lots of different people in the world. Experiment with how that worked with our camera style and control scheme and the aRPG genre.

Flux: Were you happy with how it was going? Or it was it too early to say?

Max: Yeah, there were some fits and starts, as we experimented with stuff. Yeah it was going okay. it was going fine. We were working on 2 projects at the studio at that time…

Personally, I’m glad this version was scratched and the current title in development is of the same scope as Diablo II. There are way too many MMORPGs to choose from already, and the market is completely devoid of any decent PvE/PvP-oriented, server-supported action RPGs. Well, except Diablo II.