Diablo III Interview
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GameSpy: Although we've seen some interesting stuff overseas and in the free-to-play sector, action RPGs have stagnated since Diablo II came and went. How do you feel about launching Diablo III in this day and age?
Jay Wilson: I think the RPG market in general is very interesting. I think we can look at an isolated genre, like the Diablo genre, and say, "Oh, it's not a very good genre." There haven't been a lot of successful games that have come out, and the ones that have haven't even approached Diablo II's success. But I think that's kind of true in almost any subgenre of RPGs.
I think that if you look at the BioWare games, which are great, [you'll find] that there are not that many games that are like them. They're almost like their own genre in and of themselves. I think it's because RPGs are generally very challenging to make, and each one for different reasons. The hardest thing involved in making a game like Diablo is that you have to rely very heavily on replayability, randomness, and scope of content. On the surface, it looks like a very simple game to make, but name another game out there that has over 100 monsters -- individual, unique types of monsters -- that isn't an MMO. There's not a lot, and it's because that's not easy to do. It's a lot of content to create.
Or games that have randomly-generated environments with randomly-generated encounters. Not easy things to do, but those things are key. It's what keeps Diablo interesting over time. And it's one of the reasons that, I think, you haven't seen many games succeed in that genre.
