Posts Tagged ‘Leon Boyarsky’
Diablo 3 interview - random areas, co-op and the rest
July 1st, 2008 / / by Sp3tSnAz
The Guardian has an interview conducted by one of its game writers, Greg Howson, talking to Leon Boyarsky, the Lead World Designer of Diablo 3. It’s a short interview but full of interesting information like the Adventure Quests, as well as comparisons to other games in the genre including Hellgate: London, Mythos and Titan Quest.
So how do you fit the random settings, which Diablo is well known for, in with the more structured game you appear to be planning?
This is where the “adventures” come in. Even in the previous games, where there was a lot of random elements, there were still specific characters in specific towns. But to keep as much of a random feel as possible we have these things called adventures. These are quests or scripted events or anything that can fit into slots in the world. These will be randomly placed and may appear in your game or may not. They could be little scenarios, or self contained events. We can chain them together and say if this spawns in this game then this will also happen. But your friend may not even see any of them in his game. But we’re not afraid to put the work into that as we think people will play this game twenty times in a row because that is what the randomness is there for. So if you don’t see it on your first go you may see it on your fifth. And that makes people want to play even more. And now we have new classes, with class specific quests and different NPC reactions to each class. This just adds to the variety and there is lots that can be mixed and matched. The adventures are like the flavour on top of the fixed action.
What do you think of the clones that have sprung up since Diablo 2 such as Mythos, Titan Quest, Hellgate etc?
We play a lot of games, we’re all gamers. I know people on the team have played those games. We look at all games and think “we like that” or “we don’t like that”. But then all developers do that. Yes, I’m being politically correct here!
Enjoy 
Deep in Hell with Leonard Boyarsky
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.
Diablo 3 World Lore & Environment Art Panel
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!
