Detailing Diablo III: The Jay Wilson Interview

Blizzard is over the art style complaints, and we catch up with game director and lead designer Jay Wilson to find out where things are at right before BlizzCon.
9/5/2008 7:43 PM | 1 Comments | Page 3 of 4

Crispy Gamer: With a more simplified UI, it seems to lend itself well to the possibility of coming over to consoles. Would you like to see this game brought over to the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3?

Wilson: We don't have any specific plans for a console port right now. We don't see ourselves as a PC developer, which probably sounds humorous considering we've made almost exclusively PC games. The only console ventures have been ports. I think that's mostly because of inertia and the types of games that we make. RTSes don't work really well on consoles, barring as of recent a few exceptions that I will give credit to for being able to break that barrier. World of Warcraft is not a game that would easily be translated into a console app. I don't see how you possibly could because of the UI.

I would say that out of all of the games that we've made, Diablo is probably the easiest to put on the console; I think it could be translated. There are a couple challenges in the controls that would have to be overcome. I do think it's possible to overcome them, but right now, it's more a problem of inertia -- we're focused on our PC and Mac development, and don't have the capacity to focus on console.

Crispy Gamer: Are the dungeons still going to be randomly generated?

Wilson: Yes, we have a ton of random generation in the game. All the dungeons' layouts are randomly generated. The exteriors are not. We have a new system of adventures that allows us to cut sections out of the terrain to put random -- whatever -- in there. We can put random terrain, we can put in scripted events -- we wanted to add a lot more scripted events into the game.

Crispy Gamer: That's got to be pretty challenging for you as a designer…

Wilson: Yeah. It's probably one of the biggest challenges we've made. But you got to take it on because it's Diablo! There's like seven things that we've identified -- replayability through randomness was one of them. Absolutely everything that we can do to improve the randomness. But we looked at the exteriors in Diablo II and realized, the fact that the layouts were random actually didn't improve the game that much. If anything, it hurt the look of the game, because organic environments don't lend themselves to being randomly generated.

You end up generating an outdoor environment like you'd generate a dungeon. So you create a room-like outdoor environment that also has no permanence to it. The world feels very transient. We decided to change that but add in things like the adventure system. On top of all that, all of the monster encounters are randomly generated. The rares and champions -- which are the mini-bosses -- are randomly generated. The items, and attributes on the items, are randomly generated. Essentially we're trying to match the amount of randomness you see in Diablo II.

Crispy Gamer: Diablo is more fun to play with friends, or in a party. You can solo it, but it's so much more fun to play with friends. With the social communities like Xbox Live or Steam, having a community list within the UI is almost a needed staple now. What are your plans for Battle.Net?