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.
But really, there will be much more randomization in D3 than there was in D2. It just all occurs in a set environment. but whatever.
I think you're giving too much credibility to a person that obviously isn't who he says he is, Gheed. We explained why he's full of it in another thread.
It's also not a 12 year project but about 5 year project (for now). How much it cost so far is also not told, so you're just speculating.
And by the looks of the dungeons so far (with the exception of the first gameplay video that was specifically engineered to just show the game) they look nothing like "glued together rectangles". That's how Diablo II dungeons and outdoors environments looked.
Now for the most part Scyber got things covered i think.
I haven't played through the whole game in a few years, to be honest, but I remember the act 2 tombs and act 3 sewer to have a nice feel to them, as did the cave crossover in the middle of act 1. Generally, IIRC, each act had one good dungeon layout, one OK one and one crappy one. Those good ones did not feel like glued-together boxes. But obviously we won't know until we play it, and they may tune things up siginficantly in the beta and actually have a pretty high quality average.
I just wish they were more ambitious. But maybe today's bliz is more about buying back stock and marketing than pushing the limits on the IPs and genres they have been rehashing for the past ten years.
Only thing i didn't mind for outdoor levels was the Jungle in act 3 cause jungles are supposed to be pretty chaotic anyway.
As for Diablo 3, until the beta comes and i get spoiled to death (and love it) i'll stick with the few stuff i've seen from the demos (even though, honestly, they could be engineered specifically to display the game again) and with hope that it can't be worse than Diablo II. Mostly cause lighting can make all the difference in the world and the team seems to have a clear goal at how each region will have stuff that don't seem out of place and take their time to work towards it.
Sorry for stirring you Gheed but you kinda asked for it... or is Gheed the troll trolling us?! Till next time.
I did read it. I find the main debunking angle is "but the NDA would prohibit talking about it..." That theory doesn't take into account the fact that testing is a low-skill, low-pay, low-entry-barrier job, and the people that do it may not be the most mature or intellectually advanced people. I just hope everyone is still around for the 2012 release date and the plot reveal that matches just about all of his material. Crow isn't a tasty dish, but it is a meal.