Diablo III Interview

[GameBanshee News]

1UP is the latest website to offer up an interview with Blizzard Entertainment's Rob Pardo about their newly announced Diablo sequel.

1UP: As a Diablo fan, I love the randomized dungeons. One thing that somewhat concerns me is the use of scripted events. Don't get me wrong, it's cool to have moments like bosses tearing through walls like the Kool-Aid man. But does that mean having scripted events negates having random dungeons? Can you touch on the randomness to be found in Diablo III?

RP: Sure, Diablo III is still going to have quite a bit of randomized content. The dungeons will still be very randomized, similar to what you've seen before. The exterior world, well, we're going to make it a little bit more static from an environment standpoint, but we will still be randomizing events and monsters across the terrain. We're really trying to find the right balance between the two. Because we want to build more of a world that you can kind of learn and fall in love with, than what we were able to do with Diablo II which was so randomized in the exterior world. So we're trying to that right kind of balance between Diablo I and Diablo II dungeons, but with maybe a bit more of a World of Warcraft exterior experience, to really learn these lands, learn towns, learn where NPCs are.

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1UP: Again, as a Diablo fan, I'll just say that I was a "Hammerdin" (hammer-focused Paladin) in Diablo II, and was a bit sad that you showed other classes instead. Can you talk about how the team arrived at showcasing the Barbarian and the Witch Doctor?

RP: Just lots of arguing and debating until we decided. The Barbarian was the easy one for us, because he's one of the few classes that's coming over into the new game, and we thought that'd be a great opportunity to really show people what's new about Diablo III through the lens of a class that people have already played. So you can really see what's different about the game through just watching the Barbarian. We also wanted to show something new, and we argued quite a bit about which class to focus on and show to the public. The Witch Doctor won out.

The "one of the few classes" comment seems to suggest that at least one more character class in Diablo III will be completely new.