Diablo III Interview

The folks at inDiablo.de have uploaded a video featuring their own interview with Diablo III lead designer Jay Wilson during the Leipzig Games Conference. A snip from the transcript:

In a previous interview you mentioned that you are planning that items could be interchanged between two characters via streamline. With the trade window we know from Diablo 2, will this be an alternative trade method or will it even replace the trade window?

Jay Wilson: Right now, we use a “trade window” kind of interface, like in Diablo 2, as a secure trade interface. We might explore some other way to make things easier for the player to trade. I think, when looking at Diablo 2, in just the general way – kind of stepping one step back from the question – and saying “How did players trade with one another in diablo 2?”, that it was not the most convenient of methods. There was no kind of easy way to find other players and to trade with them, you had to create specific games for things like that and we definitely would like to solve this problem and make it more convenient. But we have not decided exactly on how we want to to this, yet.

…

When a character dies, will it lose gold and experience like in Diablo 2?

Jay Wilson: We have not actually decided on the final death mechanic. I can guarantee that you will not lose experience. We are not urging to big penalties for death. But we want enough of a penalty to be there, so that death has meaning! Like to lose a little bit time, some kind of decrement… We do not currently have a durability, but some kind of … a gold cost is actually not so bad. And having the player to waste some time, that is certainly an element. Generally we kind of rely on the effect that players do not want to die. You know, you just do not want to. So there is no real reason to add a further “ding” to them for something happening that was already unfavorable to them. But we have not got our final mechanics on that, yet.