Diablo III Interview

GameSpy managed to corner Diablo III lead designer Jay Wilson at the Leipzig Games Convention and quiz him about the upcoming Battle.net changes, PvP, randomly generated content, and more.

GameSpy: Although we’ve seen some interesting stuff overseas and in the free-to-play sector, action RPGs have stagnated since Diablo II came and went. How do you feel about launching Diablo III in this day and age?

Jay Wilson: I think the RPG market in general is very interesting. I think we can look at an isolated genre, like the Diablo genre, and say, “Oh, it’s not a very good genre.” There haven’t been a lot of successful games that have come out, and the ones that have haven’t even approached Diablo II’s success. But I think that’s kind of true in almost any subgenre of RPGs.

I think that if you look at the BioWare games, which are great, [you’ll find] that there are not that many games that are like them. They’re almost like their own genre in and of themselves. I think it’s because RPGs are generally very challenging to make, and each one for different reasons. The hardest thing involved in making a game like Diablo is that you have to rely very heavily on replayability, randomness, and scope of content. On the surface, it looks like a very simple game to make, but name another game out there that has over 100 monsters — individual, unique types of monsters — that isn’t an MMO. There’s not a lot, and it’s because that’s not easy to do. It’s a lot of content to create.

Or games that have randomly-generated environments with randomly-generated encounters. Not easy things to do, but those things are key. It’s what keeps Diablo interesting over time. And it’s one of the reasons that, I think, you haven’t seen many games succeed in that genre.