There has been numerous reason given as to why Diablo III has chosen to do this. The first one being that they can increase the quality of these environments by not having to structure and design them in a way that lent itself to randomization. Another reason was that it gave it more of a real-world sense because we all know cities don't just move to random locations in the real world. Bashiok has given us a few more reasons for this decision:
Official Blizzard Quote:
The exterior landscape will for the most part be static, but with pockets of randomness (this doesn't include monster spawns which are still quite random). You'll always know where the towns and roads are, and know the edges of the map. We felt that exploring the exteriors to find landmarks and quest areas wasn't very compelling. It's also more productive for co-op to be able to say to a friend 'Let's meet at this shrubbery' and everyone knows how to quickly get there every time. Dungeons are more linear in the way that content is encountered, so they can be randomized quite a bit and you're not very likely to be just running around aimlessly. If you do hit a dead end you're at least assured you encountered plenty of battle (and thus loots) on the way.
Now, with all that said, the most important thing to remember is that not every area of the map is static, mostly just the borders. Within these borders are areas, ranging from small to very large, that will be randomized every time you play through the game. These areas are not just randomized monsters, as monsters will always be randomized in all areas of the maps. These random pockets can produce rare chests, dungeons and quests.
Official Blizzard Quote:
So while the exterior is largely static, within that defined landscape there are literal square holes (from small to huge) and within those empty square holes a great number of possible pieces can be dropped in. And they're chosen randomly. So you may play a few games and always see empty terrain in the same place, but on your next playthrough you'll instead have a broken down wagon appear and a quest giver that needs you to go kill a unique fallen shaman who stole his tools to fix it. And maybe the playthrough after that the square puzzle piece is a short dungeon to explore with a big chest or mini-boss at the end. Ideally it'll encourage exploration of the exterior zones over and over, hoping to find that a rewarding adventure has appeared.
As if this randomization was not enough, Diablo III will still have completely random dungeons like they did in Diablo II. Every time your character enters into the depths of Sanctuary, you will encounter different rooms and combinations of pathways. But to even add randomization to these randomized dungeons, some of the rooms will even have these pockets of randomized events that will offer even more variety in the countless amounts of playthroughs.
Official Blizzard Quote:
Dungeons on the other hand are completely randomized, same as Diablo II.* All of the halls and rooms and all the bits are shuffled around and it's all different every time. Some of the rooms themselves will offer unique quests if they're rolled up, and in some cases individual rooms themselves have those square chunks missing and within those randomly chosen rooms a number of random events can occur. It's a bit involved to explain, but very simple in practice (I believe some images of the square puzzle pieces were actually shown at a BlizzCon?). *Some small "dungeons" are completely hand crafted and won't include randomization of layout at all, but these are generally things like wine cellars or other underground areas of a few rooms or less.
Whether or not you agree with the static world in Diablo III, it is clear that every time you play Diablo III, it will not be the same occurrences you ran into the first one hundred times you played the game.
It occurred to me months ago that mostly-static environments would be helpful in multiplayer games for the purpose he mentioned in the second Blizzquote. Since we most likely won't have TP's to spam *where ever* we want to, it'll be easier for someone to take a waypoint and walk to x location as described by his/her friends. But then I forgot about it and never posted it, and then this came up.
Now the third quotation is very interesting. I can't seem to remember anything about randomized quests appearing randomly in randomized blank segments of already randomized dungeons. Like Scyber so aptly named the thread, that's like double-randomized (or, if the dungeon entrance was set to a blank overworld space, then it's triple randomized!) I think I like that.
The ending sentences of that same quotation make me think about something like Baulder's Gate, where a lot of little dungeons came right out of the towns, themselves (as specified, cellars, wells, etc.). I always enjoyed this because it made the outside world--filled with danger--mix with the frail inner one. It also gave cities a sense of realism and history.
Diablo II did this once with the sewers in Act II. Diablo I did it entirely, with all of the dungeons enterable from the town proper, the outlying cemetery or church land, or from deeper dungeons. All of the dungeons, besides when you finally entered the fissure, felt like they had been there all along, waiting for the right adventurer. That is what I loved the most about it.
Quests were just landmarks. I did everything in the game because I could. Some specific few had permanent rewards, which made it even better.
The randomized quests are completely pointless. And I wonder, why should I care about some idiot with his caravan that lost something completely meaningless, a guy that won't even be there the next time.
Random quests are shallow and boring.
At least it's easy loot. Going back to the caravan example, you may have fought the unique fallen shaman anyways. Why not get a little extra reward for it? It is true that random quests are usually not super fun like handcrafted ones, but I will enjoy the extra rewards for something I probably would have done anyways.
Same could happen to main quests....if they were not well thought out.
Some of diablo 1 quests were randomized as well and they were all very involving.
Randomized quests are definitely the way forward. I'm hoping there will be some class-specific ones as well.
Now it's my turn to disagree.
Random quests, if done right(tm) can make all the difference in the world. When you run around in the wilderness and find a caravan being attacked and you help the people there, the world feels more alive. Then you help them get back some of the stuff they lost as a follow-up quest. And of course after that the caravan leaves. You can't expect a caravan to be static after all
Remember how many people loved how you found Zhar the mad (not the one we have in the forums) or the Halls of the Blind in the original Diablo. Or the Warlord of Blood, Chamber of Bone, Arcaine's Valor (in D1 that had a random quest for it). It was awesome! That's what i hope for in D3 too.
I wonder if each act will have its own selection of random quests, or whether there is just one big pool? I'm hoping it's the former.
Maybe with the beta, instead of any story quests, we will just see a lot of these instead.
Yeah, it is hard to say what they will do regarding beta. In one respect, they need to test the game and prevent people from thinking diablo 3 is a flop. But on the other hand, they don't want to give away the story.
I really hope you are correct. The randomization for quests needs to be epic. However, if they are lame, I suspect they will get feedback VERY quickly regarding the poor randomization of quests. It'd be something they'd patch I'm sure. Remember, there will almost certainly be expansions, where they will have time to improve the content available to players as well.
I'm excited beyond belief for Diablo 3. Blizzard, please don't let us down!
I definitely dig this news. As said before, random quests were awesome in D1. It was really something I missed in D2. The static pool of quests soon got a little boring (especially since a solid percentage of the quests didn't actually even give you any reward!!! WTF?) As long as the pool of quests is huge, it will add to the replayability immensely. In D1 you could see all the quests after ca 4 playthroughs, which obviously won't be the case here.