DiabloFans

Kevin: I think it’s really interesting to think about the background of this Universe, and: what choices do angels and demons have? That’s a classic thing in Western mythology, that humans have a choice. You could argue that Lucifer, for example, and Diablo beside him, that neither of them have a choice, they have to do what they were built to do. Lucifer, in his case, he had to tempt humans etc, and Diablo is the Lord of Terror: what can he do but terrorise? What can he do but corrupt? Does he even have a choice? That’s interesting, and it’s a question we’ll explore in the future, by the way [laughs].

An interesting point to make, for anyone that is a lore-nerd out there, is that Malthael did make a choice to do something different, and he was no longer Wisdom; he became Death. Players obviously have a choice, but previous to this, humanity haven’t often had the power where their choices mattered, they were at the mercy of angels and demons. That’s no longer true; clearly proven by the hero of Diablo III.


Kevin: So PvP has been difficult for us. The reasons are actually pretty easy, it’s when people start asking “What about this, and what about this?” that things start getting complex. The reason why it’s difficult to do PvP, is that we made a vast PvE game. The core fantasy for us was “I want to kill lots of monsters in lots of awesome ways”. You can’t kill lots of players in those awesome ways, or lots of players will get ticked off because they have the exact same fantasy as you, and they want to kill you in vast ways, so essentially, the game is automatically changing.

That, plus the vast differentiation in power, and gear, and we didn’t try to balance the classes against each other, we tried to balance the classes against monsters. So your DPS versus all of the different kinds of monsters works well, but with DPS against each other, it becomes a super-rapid game of “Oh, you’re dead; oh, you’re dead; oh, you’re dead” and it’s just not fun.

We also don’t want people to play a different character: “That’s my hero; that’s the gear I found; I killed X monster and got X legendary” that’s the fantasy of Diablo. People say “well, why not make pre-made characters? Give me two different Barbs I can chose from, and that’s my PvP Barb”, but that’s not your PvP Barb, that’s some random one. If your gear doesn’t matter, and this game is about killing monsters and getting loot, what we’re actually making is a different game.

So we’re trying to find that balance, where we can find a PvP mode, a type of game where you can use your hero, that’s really important to us, or else we might as well make a new game.