Diablo III Interview
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Crispy Gamer: It's been quite a long time since Diablo II was released. All Blizzard games have rabid fan bases. What's it like bringing this game back and trying to balance between introducing new things, while at the same time keeping the hardcore gamers happy?
Wilson: It's a challenge. I think the key is when you're working with a loved license -- and it's not my first time as a designer working with a much loved license; I worked on a Warhammer 40K game, and that's a rabid fan base as well -- I think the key is identifying what the core philosophies are that made the game popular in the first place. It's a difficult challenge for a development team to do. But it's really important that you essentially break off. People have a tendency to look at things in a game and go, "Oh, this game was really successful so everything that appeared in the game is sacred and nothing can be changed." But the truth is, if you make a sequel where nothing changes and everything is held sacred, you're essentially going to rehash and you're not going to give the player something new to be interested in.
So to a certain degree, you're going to have to challenge conventions, and you just have to have the guts to do that. But the best way to do that is to learn what core things are important to the game. So for example, we consider approachability to be one of the core competency features of Diablo. That's why we chose the camera angle. We said right away, "We don't want to change the camera angles, and we don't want to change the type of gameplay." That's one of the things that made the game successful. It was very approachable and offered a type of gameplay that no other game offers. We didn't want to change the focus on cooperative gameplay. We didn't want to change the focus on the item game -- we really didn't want to change the core item game at all, actually. We pulled a lot of the conventions of Diablo II item game directly over.
Now there are details about it that we felt, ehhh. We're not really crazy about Runewards. There are details that we changed, but overall, it was a matter of figuring out what each of those core elements were, and figuring out what wasn't part of it. Obviously, we took the potion game out, which was a huge part of the original Diablo and Diablo II. But we didn't think it was a critical part, and we actually think it made the game worse. So being able to identify those things is certainly a challenge, but it's part of the fun, too.
