Couple of days ago, Hellforge sat down with the Lead World Designer of Diablo III Leonard Boyarsky, who is also known as one of the developers from the first Fallout!
The interview itself is pretty long, but it's a good read!
There is some interesting stuff in here considering the lore and its immersion into the game itself:
Hellforge said:
With regards to the lore stuff that you mentioned earlier: is it like a book that you carry around that has all the journal entries and all the stuff you encounter. Is there gonna be anything like that in DIII?
Leonard Boyarsky: Yeah, that’s what we’re working on the interface of that right now. We’ve gone through a lot of iterations on it but it’s basically that – a lore log that you can access and hear the different stories that you’ve picked up along the way. At least that’s our current iteration at least. We’ve gone through a lot. I’d have to bring in our interface guy to bring in how many.
Then he continues to tell a little about his previous projects, and what is he bringing in from those, and a little about the mood of Diablo III:
Hellforge said:
Do you also draw inspiration from your previous games – for example Vampire or Fallout?
Leonard Boyarsky: One of the most interesting things for me is that Diablo has a very distinctive voice and you know it’s really something that we’re trying to stick to. We really want to get that feel of the horror – the underlying psychological horror. At its basis it’s an action game, so there’s only so much of that kind of feel you can kind of get. But I think Diablo 1 did it really well , and I think that it’s one of the things we really wanna hit.
Whereas, I think some of my past games I’ve been a bit more flippant in some of the dialogue writing. It’s just a different style, and we really wanna be true to that, and we really wanna make the dialogue as quality as possible, but we really wanna evoke the psychological horror feeling. You know, the whole Lovecraftian vibe of the universe. There’s all this stuff going on behind the scenes that’s just waiting to crush man.
The last question was my favorite:
Hellforge said:
Last question. Could Diablo III be presented as a horror game in any single way?
Leonard Boyarsky: I think so. The thing is, when you have an action game it’s really difficult to maintain that kind of feel. I think Diablo 1 did it really well. The first game did it really well. And that’s what we’re going for. But you know, it’s fast paced, you’re killing...
It’s not like… I look at the difference between the first Alien movie and the second Alien movie. When you’re killing fifty monsters at a time it feels less horrific than when you’ve got a haunted house and you’re avoiding one monster.
So the action elements of the game work against the horror elements a little bit, but we’re really trying a lot to get that kind of Gothic Horror feel as much as possible. Cause that’s what we feel that the Diablo universe, at least as far as like I said the human experience, has revolved around.
So, what do you guys think? Is Blizzard going to be successful in creating the dark mood from Diablo I?
What do you think of these lore books Mr. Boyarsky told us about?
On a side note, Blizzard finally released Diablo based
Fan Artwork! I myself am not very pleased with the flood of World of WarCraft artwork, although I know they have a bigger fan base! Enjoy!
