July 1st, 2008 / / by Sol Invictus
Bethesda Softworks’ Ashley Cheng, the Producer of Fallout 3 stated his disappointment of Diablo 3’s announcement on his blog in a post entitled “When the ship runs out of ocean.” These are his exact comments, after the jump: Continue reading this entry »
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July 1st, 2008 / / by Sp3tSnAz
Kotaku has a new interview up with Lead Designer behind Diablo 3, Jay Wilson. The interview talks of the Lore, the Plot and Battle Net.
Kotaku: So, Jay, what can you tell us about the storyline of Diablo III?
Jay Wilson: In the previous two games, Diablo and his two brothers, Mephisto and Baal, were the three Prime Evils of a world called Sanctuary. Where we start off in Diablo III, it’s twenty years later (after Diablo II: Lord of Destruction) and the brothers are gone, they’ve been vanquished. Essentially everyone was kind of geared for Hell to actually invade. At the end of Lord of Destruction, the Worldstone was destroyed, it left a giant crater and everyone was expecting the hordes to come pouring out of it and nothing happened. So, Deckard Cain is one of our main characters from the first two games, he’s spent the last two decades trying to find out where the last two Evils are, what they’re doing and why the invasion didn’t happen. A lot of the rest of the story focuses on Tyrael, the Angel of Justice, and what’s happened to him since that event as he was actually the angel who destroyed the world.
Kotaku: With the popularity of WoW and other online games, Battle.net seems to have nearly disappeared into the background. Do you think Diablo III will breathe new life into the service?
Jay Wilson: I can’t really talk about Battle.net but I will say, Battle.net will not be a background. I’ll be huge, the next version will be absolutely Blizzard’s focus. Everyone is going to be thrilled when they see the kind of stuff we have planned! It feeds into our overall focus of providing a really great service for our players.
Enjoy 
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Allow me to begin this article by telling you a little bit about myself. I’m in every sense of the word a hardcore gamer. I practically grew up on games, and my oldest memory is of me playing SMB3 on my NES. Some of my favourite game companies are Apogee, Bitmap Brothers, Blizzard, Gas Powered Games, id Software, Valve, and even Ensemble Studios.
And then there’s Bethesda Softworks.
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July 1st, 2008 / / by Sol Invictus
GameSpy has published a new interview with Diablo 3’s Lead World Designer, Leonard Boyarsky. Boyarsky says:
“I wasn’t a hardcore Diablo fan before joining Blizzard,” Boyarsky says as we begin talking. “I played them, of course, and I really liked them, but I usually like a lot more story depth in my games.” According to Boyarsky, what drew him to the project was what he sees as the franchise’s untapped potential for storytelling. “A lot of people are afraid that we’re going to slow the gameplay down by enriching the story parts of the game. We’re not doing that at all.” The idea is to use some simple cinematic techniques such as dialogue rather than monologue to convey quest information and crafting richer backstories for the main characters that will be reflected in their artwork and the way they view the central action of the story.
The rest of the article can be read here.
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Justin Villasenor over at Destructoid dissected the recent Blizzard-Activision merge deal, praising both sides for the positive outcome, albeit with a small worry with regards to Sierra:
Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime has also confirmed that we “shouldn’t notice any difference” in how the developer operates post-merger. It’s nice to know that Blizzard will retain its freedom, but what about Vivendi’s other studios that don’t share its “crown jewel” status? I’m specifically referring to Sierra Entertainment, who will have to pitch every game – even those currently in development — to Activision executives that will decided whether or not to drop them.
Read the rest of the article here. I for one am looking forward to Call of Diablo 5.
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June 30th, 2008 / / by Sol Invictus
GamesRadar has a new article on their website featuring Diablo 3 and the six reasons it gives us all a ‘geek-gasm’. I’d prefer to call it a nerd-gasm, but I didn’t write the article. A snippet:
#1 - Diablo is an RPG with much bigger balls than the norm
As beset as we are by the wishywashy conventions of Japanese RPGs these days, it’s easy to forget that there’s another, often much more satisfying way to do things. RPGs don’t have to be about mopey androgynous bores pontificating over their woes and engaging in protracted, balletic combat via a distancing menu-driven interface. It’s just as much fun to get knee deep in the guts and livers and start destroying anything that gets too close until you’re surrounded by naught but a fine red mist. And this, friends, is where Diablo comes in.
And aside from the hack-slash-kill-profit focus of the Diablo gameplay, the setting is far less polite than you’d expect from any JARP. No quietly tense political machinations between bland, faceless kingdoms or slow-burning threats from generi-empires here. Diablo is about the titular big bastard demon tearing the world to pieces simply because he is a big bastard demon. Men, women and children alike have already been murdered en masse, many by the hero of the first game after he became possessed by Diablo in the sequel, and things only show signs of getting grimmer and more violent from this point on.
We can’t agree more.
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June 30th, 2008 / / by Sol Invictus
GameSpot’s Most Popular games list is reporting that Diablo 3’s release date is set at December 31 2008.
This detail contradicts Rob Pardo’s statement that the game would only be released in a year to a year and a half from now. Granted, Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3 have both been in development for a similar length of time (4~ years) so the possibility still exists, however unlikely.
Have your say on this topic within our forums.
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June 29th, 2008 / / by Sol Invictus
Rob Pardo’s developer panel on Starcraft 2 revealed several new details on the game with much to say about the Zerg’s new creep-related abilities, the new purpose of the Protoss Mothership and its de-emphasis as a “Superweapon” and their de-emphasis on Heroic characters within the game.
Joystiq has written up an extremely detailed report on the panel, which can be read here.
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June 29th, 2008 / / by Sol Invictus
For those of you who couldn’t watch Blizzard’s Worldwide Invitational live earlier today, you may have missed Blizzard’s World Lore and Environmental Art panel featuring the Lead World Designer, Leon Boyarsky and Art Director, Brian Morrisroe.
If you’re interested in discovering the design philosophy behind the interesting locales within Diablo 3’s world of Sanctuary, you’ll definitely want to check this out.
In case you’re wondering, Leon Boyarsky was the Art Director for Fallout, Arcanum and Vampire: Bloodlines. Good stuff!
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June 29th, 2008 / / by Sp3tSnAz
Joystiq has a new interview up with lead designer of Diablo 3, Jay Wilson. The interview deals with many different topics, however there isn’t too much we don’t know already.
From a lore perspective, when is the game set? [Ed: Warning, spoilers below if you haven't played through Diablo 2: Lord of Destruction!]
It’s about 20 years after Lord of Destruction. Essentially since then, if you’re familiar with the lore, Tyreal destroyed the worldstone and the general consensus was that this was going to be the big Hell invasion because the worldstone’s keeping everything back. And essentially that invasion never happened and one of the many questions is … why? And we aren’t going to answer that today, but that’s what the story addresses. What’s happened to Tyreal since then? What’s happened to Deckard Cain?
We bring back a lot of characters, not just from Diablo 2 but Diablo 1 as well. We’re also bringing back some characters in kind of unconventional ways. For example, the barbarian we showed today is actually meant to be the same barbarian from Diablo 2. So we’re planning on doing a lot of cool stuff to make a richer storyline.
Enjoy
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