Diablo III Interview
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RPS: I think there are quite a few of us out there who know people that we played Diablo II multiplayer with and haven't really had a similar co-op experience since. Hopefully we get to see them again now, but do you think there's something specific about Diablo's world that brings them back, or do they just like clicking on monsters?
Boyarsky: I think that Diablo I and II, while we would have changed some stuff about the story delivery systems that were in place at the time, they did deliver a very rich world, and a rich world that had a very interesting history. That was something that we wanted to pay off.
Obviously you don't need to play the first two games to understand this one or to enjoy it, but there are a lot of hooks in there, and stuff we talk about that people who played the previous games are going to pick up on and think, '˜oh, that's definitely the world I love'. I think it is important for those things to be in there for people who are fans of the game and want to revisit a specific world.
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RPS: My question was actually going to take it further back. When I first played Diablo, having grown up on roguelikes, I thought '˜hey, this is from that place'. How much does that heritage still matter? Is it still in the mindset?
Love: Very much so. That's the root of the game. The core combat experience is linked to all that stuff. A lot of attention was paid to all that. We spent a lot of time working out how we could max out the effect of randomness on the world, rather than just making everything random, so it becomes mindless, we put it in just the right spots, just the right places.
So, for instance, preserving the feel of the overworld by having a lot of fixed locations but making it possible to plug in random scenarios, right? That's one of the ways to express randomness that's new to Diablo III. And then looking at the different ways that dungeons can be randomised, rather than just picking every room randomly, or every encounter randomly, you can take it to different levels.
We played around a lot with trying to find what were the right levels of randomness, the right ways to express it.
