Diablo III: Reaper of Souls Interviews

A couple of new interviews with Diablo III lead character artist Paul Warzecha regarding the recently released Reaper of Souls expansion pack have made their way to the Internet, including this Q&A on AusGamers that turns out to be the more elaborate of the two:

AusGamers: That’s a good segway, because monsters is another component of the game, and they’re sort of the unsung heroes, because they’re just getting clicked to death all of the time. You’ve got bosses, and bosses are awesome, but out of your grunt-level guys that you grind through, who was your favourite to design this time around?

Paul: Oh man, honestly, there’s so many good monsters. I know anybody sitting in my shoes would probably be ‘˜oh, it’s great’, but seriously, they are. we took the things from D3 and amped up the monsters so much, that we actually had to make some tweaks. When you go into Nephalem rifts, you’re going to fight new monsters beside old monsters, and there was a distinct difference in that the new monsters felt more intelligent, they were doing more things that were slightly more interesting.

A lot of that came out of the fact that we actually broke out into a smaller monster strike-team this time, and we actually got somebody from every different discipline together in a room, to look at the monsters. And not look at them one at a time necessarily, but how they played together: does this character move faster than the last one? Does this hit heavier? Will this get ten hits in, in the time that that other one hits you once? All of those small tweaks that we made, make the characters play so much better. So to pin down one particular character, I’d be really hard pressed to do it.

And then we stop by Player Attack for an article-style interview:

It’s not just a matter of creating terrific monsters and animating the undead, however. Warzecha says the offices were full of nearly biological conversations when discussing Malthael, the brand new boss for Reaper of Souls.

A lot of characters in Reaper of Souls are really based around supporting the story, so you’ve got Malthael that comes down, and what are the creatures that he’s going to bring with him? He’s going to bring fallen angels, and he’s going to bring corrupted beings where souls have taken over bodies. What does that look like, when an angel falls and becomes something uniquely terrible?

Warzecha’s favourite character is Urzael, the first mini-boss in Reaper of Souls:

He was a character who is a lieutenant of Malthael, he’s just this big, brutish fallen angel. He was a cool character because there was a lot of talk about what it meant to be an angel, what is it when you are a corrupt angel… He was a character that came together so cool-ly and Victor Lee, our lead concept Artist, came up with such awesome images of this character that everybody, right out of the gate, looked at the thing and said “that is super-cool”.