Diablo III Interview

AusGamers had the chance to sit down with Blizzard's Leonard Boyarsky and Christian Lichtner for a lengthy conversation about Diablo III.
Speaking of being difficult to master, there are still rabid fans of the first two Diablo outings who play religiously to this day. We asked Christian whether he thought that Diablo 3 would have the same long-lasting appeal.

"That's really the goal!" he says excitedly. "I mean - everything we do is geared towards that. We recognise the appeal of the previous games - lots of randomisation - we're doing the same thing in Diablo 3, with random quests, we have random dungeons, random monster placement and boss fights, so really, the replayability factor - I think that's one of the large appeals that has given the game such a long life."

"Our basic philosophy as a company is that we want to make the best games possible," Leonard ponders. "I think the reason people continue to play the games for so long is because they are such polished games, and they're fun games. So we keep an eye towards what's going to be fun, what we think would be fun, what makes a great game - we can always hope for that, but if it'll happen? That's up to the fans. It would be fantastic if all we hear about is that we make a fantastic game that people enjoy."

It's not just about getting the fans (or the newcomers) sucked in, either, it's all about winning everybody over.

"We do have an eye towards the endgame play," Leonard explains. "We do have an eye towards replayability - we have the random quests - once you've played Diablo or Diablo 2 through once or twice, you've gotten all the content pretty much, in terms of quests. With our game, you'll have to play it a little bit more - to get that, we're going to have more layers to it so you can dig deeper. We are really addressing the endgame stuff so there's more interesting stuff to do."
Having Leo tied to this project is a real boon. Hopefully he helps inject more depth than what was present in the first two installments.