Diablo III Interview
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IGN: How much do you have to consider making sure that the world works and it's coherent for the hardcore versus the average player? Are they even going to care about this? How do you factor that in to how you build the world, and introduce the player to the world?
Leonard Boyarsky: I think that's what's really great about I feel like such a cheerleader working at Blizzard, because they could have easily put out another Diablo game and very lightly skimmed the surface of these kind of things, and it would have sold very well, but Chris Metzen he's the creative director of the whole company - is a very big champion of the lore and the story and that stuff, and that is what the really hardcore players care about. [While] a lot of other people don't and it can't be allowed to impede on the fun of the game. but if we take it into account when we're developing the game, I think it comes across in the feel and the mood.
A lot of what I've done in my past games - even though they've had a lot more dialogue and hardcore RPG stuff than we're going to have in this game - the thing I'm always trying to do is to create a mood for the player first and foremost, and that's going to hopefully colour the player's experience from the minute he steps into the game; the way people talk or the environment he's running through. Diablo 1 had this really haunted, horror mood, Diablo 2 lost a little bit of that, and we really looked at the difference of those two things, so that's the kind of thing that we're trying to get the players to experience.
And when we get deeper into it, it's kind of an opt-in kind of thing. We're not shoving things in the players' way that they have to decipher or go into these huge dialogues or read 15 different lore books or research the novels outside the game to understand this stuff, but it's there for the more hardcore people if they want to search it out inside the game. One of the things we're using the Adventures for is to hopefully intrigue people about this world. Y'know, if we have this knowledge about all this stuff that goes on, we can create intriguing little mysteries for people playing the game, and plus, this is a game that people play a lot. If you look at the Diablo series, people play these games for years and years, there's a lot of replayability, so maybe you ignore the story the first time through, but on the fifth time through you see something that finally piques your interest.
