Designing Diablo III

Well, one of the things that we talked a lot about when we started the project was... Look at the tone of Diablo II's summaries of their story. There's a lot of talk about destroying evil for all time, take out Diablo and then evil's dead forever. I felt like that was a terribly arrogant idea that only humans would have; only humans would think that you could destroy evil forever.

That was the first hook that we talked about. What we really wanted was the idea of a story where we do have some time away, it's about 20 years later, and things have actually gotten better because evil's been "destroyed". But the truth is that it's actually all just been a ruse, it's all part of the plan. It's really just making sure everyone's nice and complacent for the real war that's coming.

So that's really the tone, and that's one of the reasons why, towards the beginning of the game, the game looks nicer. But by the end of the game, it won't look nice at all.

Yeah, there have been, definitely. Not really the combat model, because the combat model is so core to the game, and we have a lot of rules that we put down for ourselves. One of them is: we can't add to the control scheme. If we add something, then take something else out.

So the potion belt's gone, we have the skill hotbar. It's got one extra button and we also have the extra button on the right mouse side, but we removed all the F keys. That was a big complexity that we pulled out of the control scheme and I felt like it paid for us to add a little bit back.

There have been other features, some of which we've cut. The original incarnation of artisans was different, not really appropriate for the game, and so we changed that pretty drastically. So we've had features from time to time that we were really excited about, but when we actually started putting them in the game, we said this is just adding a lot of complexity, it's not actually making the core game any better. And so we got rid of 'em.

Yes. I'm not going to say what any of that is... But I will say, in terms of the amount of things that we're showing, this is our biggest BlizzCon to date. We've got a lot of stuff now. We're cooking a game now.

Yeah... I know we had a lot of controversy about the art style stuff, but hidden within that was some really good specific issues that we did address.

I can't wait until the point where people are playing it and we can get more regular feedback, we can get really specific. That's the best part - when you have people playing it and you can really respond to their desires.

Oh, yeah.

No, no. It's something we believe really strongly at Blizzard: the game can always be better. So because the game can always be better, you want as much feedback as you can get. You start eating that up, because the more you can get, the more you can make the game better. That's what we're all about.

So we really try to separate our egos out from it, because it's about the game being better, and if the game's better, we look good. If we don't listen to that feedback then we're letting our own pride get in the way of the quality of the game. At Blizzard, nothing gets in the way of the quality of the game.