Diablo III Interview, Part One

Diii.net had the opportunity to grill Diablo III lead designer Jay Wilson over the phone yesterday, and have since posted two of the fifty-six questions (and their answers). Prepare yourself of a month's worth of the following:
Diii.net: Everyone seems pretty happy with the function and form of the Barbarian's Fury resource, but nothing has been revealed about the non-mana resources that the Wizard and Monk will use. Can you give us some insight into what kind of play style their resources are meant to encourage?

Jay Wilson: Well for the Wizard we want to enforce the fact that she's a glass cannon. I don't think it's fun to ever run out of mana. I'm not really interested in an extended resource for her. For the WD we're okay with mana, since he's got some pretty good skills to recover mana that also double as attacks. And he's not defenseless when he's out of mana. He's got pets and ways to attack with them that aren't mana intensive. For him that makes mana fairly interesting.

For the wizard, when she's out of mana she just dies. And that's not fun. So if anything, we want to encourage how she plays. So she's the kind of character that blasts first and asks questions later. Very vulnerable. So we want to implement a system that makes her more blasty, but even more vulnerable. We want to make that a choice for the player. (Do I want to make myself more vulnerable in exchange for being more blasty.) And that's a cool gameplay pull there.

For the Monk um. I'm not ready to talk about him yet since he's just too early. We still haven't decided exactly what we want to do with him. We're still playing around with his resource system.