Diablo III Forum Activity

Diablo community manager "Bashiok" discusses the new Echoes of War soundtrack and environmental damage in his latest responses on the official Diablo III forums.

On the Echoes of War soundtrack:
Well, the overture for Diablo III is available on iTunes. As overtures so often do, it takes bits from the prominent tone-setting compositions already written and puts them all together. So in that regard the basic outline and tone of composition for the game is in place, but no I think it would be impossible to compose and record everything completely before the game is much closer to being done.

I do recommend checking out the overture if you have the ability.
I can't decide how far along they are in anything. They are sending mixed signals all over the place. Before blizzcon, they were "far along" .. then during/after blizzcon they are "not far along". They release barbarian and witch doctor first, but the wizard was actually the first class they made. But the demo at blizzcon didn't have the male version of the wizard, but had both sexes of the WD and Barb.

My head asplode!
I don't think any one said before BlizzCon that we were "far along", it's kind of a nebulous statement any way. I think some people's perceptions of the game were that we were far along, and that likely shaped some of our desire to make it fairly clear that it's still early on.

Where did you get the impression that the Wizard was the first class we designed/created? That isn't the case.

On environmental damage:
Right now if you knock down a wall on top of, or drop a chandelier on the head of someone in your party, it does damage/"daze" them. There's some potential issues with it, right now it's sort of just there because of the way those object interact with player characters as a whole. It's possible that due to exploitative or griefing potential they just can't continue to work that way. We'll see.

Enemies will destroy some/most destructible objects if they're in their way. Whether that may include actual damage dealing destructibles or not is probably more of a design decision on a case by case basis. We sort of want to reserve that for the player too I think, being able to damage enemies with the destructbles, but specific creatures that use the environment to their advantage are always cool.