Interview With Leonard Boyarsky
I like Diablo. Therefore when I heard Leonard Boyarsky was brought on to the Diablo 3 team as world designer, I became just a wee bit excited. He has been involved with Fallout (the original) and Troika Games (Temple of Elemental Evil, Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, and Arcanum), of whom I was a large fan.
Hellforge posted an interview with him concerning Diablo 3 and its lore. Topics discussed include quest creation and randomization, a lore book, design of characters and monsters and their scheme in it all, how the Sin War affects things, the lack of traveling to old locations, more focus on the characters, more focus on the horror elements, and inspirations.
That is to say, it covers a lot of ground. While most of the information is not terribly new, it is a rather solid interview where Boyarsky is not relegated to saying no comment any number of times. He even sheds some light on the overall theme behind which they are working:
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.
VorpalBunny
Posted to Video Games on 21 October 2009
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