The original interview available here. I have removed much of the original interview from Diablofans courtesy to Sol Invictus. The full version is available at the link above. Two questions really caught my attention however.
Question 5
I'm really linking the sound of this. It's wonderful to have these things in games, where you can look up facts and figures that are more often than not quite useless from a gameplay perspective. But at the same time it adds more to the game; I know I always spend lots of time pouring over monster stats and lore etc. whenever I play Final Fantasy, Devil May Cry or any other game that has a function like this. And now we'll all be able to do the same in Diablo III. At least when it comes to lore.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.
This could also be pushed however far Blizzard wanted. It could include monster stats like Diablo 1 did, and theoretically strategies and builds, although that'll probably never happen.
Question 14
This sounds very promising. Any guesses as to what he might mean when he says they have a solution to prevent endless Baal runs?Yeah that was a huge problem in D2 where people did Bloody runs or Baal runs over and over.
Leonard Boyarsky: Yeah, we have ideas about how we want to handle those things, specifically it's something we've talked about at length and we have a solution that we think is gonna work really good and keep people from having to continually do the same runs over and over.
I'm thinking some form of randomized arena, or perhaps the last levels of the game change setting, monsters and bosses each time you start a new game or something like that? What do you think?
I just want blizzard don't focus on that too long.
It's not vague, it's a studied subject....
Story is a part of the gameplay but once you know story, the reason to replay is gameplay essence. (fun still there whatever the time you already played)
Same here.
http://www.rpgamer.com/games/ad_d/bg2/screens/bg2ss2.jpg
Having some cool back story about the unique items you find in D3 could make them feel more unique, more awesome, more collectible.
2) I'm very curious what they will be doing to extend the late-game experience. One possible solution is to have an arbitrary number of difficulty levels. Instead of just having, normal nightmare and hell, they could just come up with a function for scaling the monster difficulty / XP / drop rates and just have it scale. Note that it doesn't have to scale linearly, so the difference between being on difficulty level 10 vs difficulty level 3 does not necessarily mean you are getting the most god-awesome drops from every boss, but it COULD mean that at least the monsters were F*ing hard to kill, and gave more experience, thereby making it a continual challenge. Or, they could have a set number of difficulty levels, but specifically design it so that a level 99 character still has an extremely hard time throughout ALL of the acts in the last difficulty level, so that they don't just have to focus on the last act.
Great thought! I love a challenge. I kinda would like to see a few bosses that are a lil harder to solo. Single players kiss my ***!