Diablo III Kore

Sol Invictus @ Hellforge had a chance to speak with Leonard Boyarsky a couple of weeks ago. For those not in the know, Leonard Boyarsky is the Lead World Designer of Diablo III, and he’s credited for being one of the masterminds of the Fallout world and guiding the art direction on the original Fallout game. They managed to speak at length on the subject of Diablo III’s lore and the development of its setting.

The following interview has been transcribed from audio.

How do you come up with ideas for the creation of quests in Diablo III. Do you start with simple quest concepts and build around them with storyline elements or…?

Leonard Boyarsky: It goes both ways. What we do, the way we start off, is that we first create the storyline of the game and then we kind of iterate on that a lot as well as once we start building the game and putting quests in we refine those. Our artists, our level designers, everybody might have ideas about quests that would be more like simple adventure concepts or simple quest concepts that you’re talking about. And then we’ll put lore into them. Sometimes, we just have lore and we say to the level guys or some the gameplay guys, “Hey, how best do you think we can show this?” So it really goes both ways, any which way.

There’s been times when we really wanted to hit certain points and it wasn’t really working because you know, it was too complex for the way the game is working or the way the story is rolling out so you know it’s really just an iterative process like the other stuff we do.

So I guess you guys end up cutting out certain things that don’t work out?

Leonard Boyarsky: Yeah, but we also found a lot of stuff that’s struck a chord with people. The lore book that we’ve been putting in has been really popular. People like the ability to hear background stuff while they run around killing things as opposed to having to stop to read. So, we’re pretty surprised by that because people generally split into two different kinds of classes: the people who care about the lore and the people who could care less, but we’re finding that with the lore books that people have really responded to them. I’m assuming that’s because the audio portion of it where they don’t have to stop and sit and read it doesn’t cut into the action, basically.

Like, we put in some background of Leoric, his journal and Lachdanan who are characters that you’ve heard about and didn’t really meet in their human forms in the first Diablo, so you get to hear their voices and their stories from their point of view. It’s just that I think people are really kind of interested in that especially if they’ve played the games all the way from the first one.

Like in the first game, all the quests were randomized. Is it the same way in Diablo III where you won’t run into every single character or quest?

Leonard Boyarsky: We’re doing – there’s a main storyline that is, parts of it might be randomized depending on the area, depending on what the quests are, depending on what the actual objective is. But apart from the main quest, most of our other content is randomized, so from game to game it will be completely different. I can’t give you any kind of percentage because we’re still playing with those numbers, but that’s really the way we built this game is so that we can have a lot of randomized content, including story elements and including quests.

Do you plan to add additional content after the game is done, since it’s all randomized it might be easy to inject new stuff into it?

Leonard Boyarsky: It really all depends. In the past, we’ve done expansion packs, you know if you look at Starcraft, they’re doing expansions. I’m sure we’ll look at doing stuff like that. It really just has to do with what works for the game. You know, we’ll look at that stuff when it comes to it.

With regards to the lore stuff that you mentioned earlier: is it like a book that you carry around that has all the journal entries and all the stuff you encounter. Is there gonna be anything like that in DIII?

Leonard Boyarsky: Yeah, that’s what we’re working on the interface of that right now. We’ve gone through a lot of iterations on it but it’s basically that – a lore log that you can access and hear the different stories that you’ve picked up along the way. At least that’s our current iteration at least. We’ve gone through a lot. I’d have to bring in our interface guy to bring in how many.

Could you walk me through the development process of designing, for example, a single character or a single monster. How does it come together?

Leonard Boyarsky: A lot of the especially monster design really stems from what is needed from a gameplay perspective. So different guys from our team from different disciplines like art, design, effects… will get together and will call a strike team and will really kind of brainstorm what would be cool to fit this niche in the game that we know we need. In the broadest sense we’ll know we’ll need let’s say a ranged monster, we’ll know we’ll need a monster that casts buffs on other monsters, and how can we bring something original to that. How can we make that an interesting character, or interesting monster. And then, a lot of the times the artists will give a personality or a kind of feel to those monsters and then we’ll come in and work with them on the lore.

What we wanna do for a lot of the stuff is decide whether it’s from the lore side of the demons – whether it’s naturally occurring, and then we’ll try to come up with backgrounds for those different things. And sometimes, we’ll have the idea for, well, you’re in this area so this is the kind of… from a lore standpoint this is the kind of monsters or the kind of animals that you’d encounter, but we really don’t put any kind of requirements in terms of the gameplay of them. We could say, “Oh, you’re gonna run into a goatman here, or whatever” and then they will be able to run with that, because it’s pretty wide open, you know you can do a lot of different stuff with the characters.

As far as the classes – they’re kind of like the same way, but there’s a lot more lore input as we’re going along with those because we really want to build up the world and look at different areas of the world so we look at where these different characters would come from, what their background is, and we’ll really try to balance their personalities and their personal histories with what they’re doing from a gameplay standpoint as well.

Like what they’re actually – why they’re there, or why they’re fighting that monster, or why they’re actually in the game?

Leonard Boyarsky: Exactly. Yeah.

Speaking of background lore and all that, to what extent will the books from Richard Knaak’s Sin War Trilogy be a part Diablo III’s storyline/setting. I mean, are you guys taking anything from it at all?

Leonard Boyarsky: Well, nothing specific. It happened 3,000 years before the events of the Diablo games, but it is… it was our attempt to really kind of get out there – you know, with some of the history of the world and kind of codify the lore to a certain degree. It’s been awhile since I read them. I’ve actually read all of them, and I helped during the process of them.

Chris Metzen worked really close with him really closely to make sure that his vision for what the Sin War was all about was really put forward there so the history is – maybe some of the particulars might not be exactly the way they end up being presented, but as far as the overall details and the overall thrust of the story, that’s lore… our core lore, I guess. And we’re – I don’t know if we’ll refer to them specifically, but that’s definitely like background into what we’re doing if that makes any sense.

It does, I guess. It’s material. You might have to retcon some stuff, but it’s there for the fans. Are you going to release anything that’s like an encyclopedia – like I see on the website, there’s all these encyclopedic entries. Is there anything like that planned to be released in book form, maybe?

Leonard Boyarsky: We’ve talked about a bunch of different things like that. Nothing’s written down yet, and nothing’s planned for release, but I think stuff like that would be really, really cool to do. Some real cool art and histories of the Diablo world. Something like that, you know. But we don’t have any current – we’ve talked about a lot of that stuff, but we don’t have any current plans written down yet.

With regards to the NPCs again. I’m going back there. Will there be any specific quests or missions related to the player classes?

Leonard Boyarsky: Right now we’re still working out the main flow of the gameplay for the co-op, for your group. But, the way we like to look at it is each character, each class really sees the story from their own perspective. There’s gonna be lore, there’s gonna be things that you encounter in the world that will really affect the characters differently. As far as quests or specific missions, we’re exploring that and we’d really like to include that stuff but that’s kind of up in the air in terms of how that will play out specifically.


Besides a return to Tristram and its Cathedral. Can players expect to revisit locations in the previous games?

Leonard Boyarsky: Locations? No. We had actually talked about revisiting some of them and we went through a lot different iterations, as we do on everything, but it just seems like we wanted to go to new places and expose more of the world, because people have seen those places and we wanted to kind of really just expand what people experience of the world.

With regards to the new dungeons, are we gonna see the same kind of dungeons over and over again. In D2 or D1 or any other action RPG, you go into a dungeon, and kill a boss monster. Are there gonna be any new types of dungeons, like puzzles… like how World of Warcraft has many different types of dungeons.

Leonard Boyarsky: Our approach to bosses is that we’re trying to change up the gameplay. We’re trying to look at different ways of fighting, or designing bosses as opposed to just jacking up their health and damage they do. We really wanna kinda make it interesting – there’s gonna probably be other stuff that we work into the dungeons, and other events in the game that maybe kinda turn or change up the gameplay a little bit just to keep it interesting.

Any chance for something like an endless dungeon?

Leonard Boyarsky: I don’t know about endless, but we have some interesting ideas that I don’t really wanna discuss too much about. But there are different things that hopefully will keep people from doing the same runs over and over.

Yeah that was a huge problem in D2 where people did Bloody runs or Baal runs over and over.

Leonard Boyarsky: Yeah, we have ideas about how we want to handle those things, specifically it’s something we’ve talked about at length and we have a solution that we think is gonna work really good and keep people from having to continually do the same runs over and over.



The first couple of Diablo games featured comparatively little lore and story to other RPGs, in that we didn’t know anything about the characters we were playing. In what ways can we expect the characters and their personal agendas to be fleshed out in D3?

Leonard Boyarsky: Each class has a different conversation style, they say different things to the NPC. They’ll be able to find lore that pertains to their classes. Like we said before, there might be different events or different things that they encounter that are different for the different classes. We really wanna give a lot of background, a lot of feel to these characters.

What we’re trying to do or what we’re doing is really… crafting the experience so it has different facets from different viewpoints as a starting point, and then from there the more we can kind of add on to the player experience to make the classes feel different including the lore, not only from the skill standpoint but from the lore and their history without taking away from the action aspects is part of our whole plan.


So that way players interested in the lore than the gameplay would have more than a reason to play all the different characters to get a total experience. 

Leonard Boyarsky: Yeah, I mean that’s the hope – that people would be interested to see what not only the skillsets but also the other view of these other characters is. There’s gonna be conversations and, like I said lore, and certain things that only certain things and certain classes can find and things like that.


Regarding the story setting and all the other stuff that populates Diablo III, do you draw any inspiration from any literary sources – you know, classic novels, Greek literature, etc.

Leonard Boyarsky: I don’t know what originally inspired the Diablo series ‘cause I’ve come on rather recently, but I draw inspiration from everything I read. I just try to have… I read a lot of non-fiction as well as fiction. Watch a ton of movies. I can’t specifically say anything, one-to-one, has specifically influenced us. But if you look at the Lord of the Rings and how they handled those, as well as the books themselves, I think one of the reasons, for me at least, that they were so successful is because they really fleshed out even down to engraving on the swords that you can never see in the movie. It’s like they really tried to make it this living world.

Leonard Boyarsky: So that’s really how we come at this – it’s like, where do these people come from? What are they doing? What’s their inspiration, you know. So if we’re looking at say the Monk, I might go in and start looking at Zen monasteries, old Zen stories, or history of that nature, plus we’re working in some of the Eastern Orthodox, Eastern European Orthodox kind of feel to it too, so we do research into that. It’s just all over the place. It’s really kind of a detail-by-detail basis.
 

Do you also draw inspiration from your previous games – for example Vampire or Fallout?

Leonard Boyarsky: One of the most interesting things for me is that Diablo has a very distinctive voice and you know it’s really something that we’re trying to stick to. We really want to get that feel of the horror – the underlying psychological horror. At its basis it’s an action game, so there’s only so much of that kind of feel you can kind of get. But I think Diablo 1 did it really well , and I think that it’s one of the things we really wanna hit.

Whereas, I think some of my past games I’ve been a bit more flippant in some of the dialogue writing. It’s just a different style, and we really wanna be true to that, and we really wanna make the dialogue as quality as possible, but we really wanna evoke the psychological horror feeling. You know, the whole Lovecraftian vibe of the universe. There’s all this stuff going on behind the scenes that’s just waiting to crush man.


Do you have all of these Lovecraftian elements – are they all written in? Do you create like this whole universe and set the story there or how is it exactly? What’s the relationship between horror and everything else?

Leonard Boyarsky: Well, it’s interesting because there’s different levels. There’s the level of the Sin War, or the eternal conflict between the angels and the demons and that’s not really a horror story – that’s more of an action story. But when you look at it from mankind’s viewpoint, it’s very much a horror story when the demons get involved, so there’s different levels.

And when I came onboard I was handed a bible – a thick lore bible that they had put together so there’s a lot of history that we’re using as a springboard to start with the story and inform everything that we do.


So I suppose that the focus of the game would be on humanity, rather than the angels and the demons and the other stuff that people throw around when they’re discussing the game?
 
Leonard Boyarsky: Well, it’s always – if you look at the Diablo games it’s always about the humans. How did the humans react to this? How is this affecting the humans? The humans are caught in the middle, what is that all about? What’s gonna happen to Sanctuary? What’s gonna happen to the human beings?

There’s some stuff that they talked in the Sin War, about how humanity came about. And you know, at the end of the Sin War… I don’t wanna throw in any spoilers there for people who haven’t read it yet but they talked about how the uneasy… I guess “truce” allowed the existence of Sanctuary to continue.

Mankind is in a very tenuous position in this universe, and the games have always taken that position or that viewpoint, and we’re gonna be continuing that in this game.



With regards to the world again – in most RPG games or fantasy settings, the world never really ages. You don’t go from the medieval age to the industrial age. Can we see anything like that in Diablo III? Since it’s been 20 years, can we see some sort of technological advancement of the setting or anything like that?

Leonard Boyarsky: No, not in the way you’re thinking of. It’s really a medieval horror game and that kinda adds to it. I think the mystique of the lore to a certain degree – there’s just something about the medieval, dark ages, superstitious setting that somehow adds to the creepiness of it.


What about the political setting? Does anything change from the previous games? Like you had the Zakarum stuff in the second game. Do we actually see the aftermath of what happened in D2?

Leonard Boyarsky: You’ll hear about some of it, and some of it’s gonna play out in this game. It’s not central to it. A lot of the stuff – a lot of things like that and a lot of story threads that have been going through all the games will probably be things that you’ll have to maybe deep a little bit deeper into the lore books to get into because we really like to tell the story on several levels.

There’s the action story, which is like where I need to go next and who I need to kill, all the way down to what is the reason for this government being the way it is. So if you read all of the lorebooks you come across in the book you’ll get the full story on that stuff.


So the player doesn’t really need to play D1 or D2 to actually get into the story in Diablo III, is that right?

Leonard Boyarsky: Yeah.


You mentioned how you’re adding a new lorebook. Besides the lorebook thing, are you planning to add anything else, like – the skill and item systems in D1 and D2 – they didn’t really have any descriptions, like some kind of underlying mechanic as to how they actually work?

Leonard Boyarsky: Probably not, because a lot of that has to do with… our tooltips are basically there – their main function is to explain to the player how they’re gonna work in terms of “If I buy this skill, how is it gonna work?” I would love to throw in all that kind of stuff that you’re talking about but that’s really not the point of the tooltips on that kind of stuff.

I think that we’ll probably get into more of that stuff when it comes to items, like quest items and things like that, and maybe items that you just find in the world.


Are there gonna be like descriptions on the items, like in Baldur’s Gate. Baldur’s Gate had all of the item description – like every item had a story behind it. Can we see something like that in D3 for maybe the uniques or something?

Leonard Boyarsky: Probably not as much as that. We haven’t written all the tooltips for those things, but like I said when it comes to armor or weapons or spells, the number one priority is really getting across very quickly to the player. What are the stats for this stuff? How does it work? What’s it gonna do for me as a player? I’d love to work that kind of stuff in there, I really don’t know what we’re gonna have available to us on that front.

I would love to (laughs), but I just don’t know that we’ll be able to.

Yeah, it’s more stuff to read – more fluff. Like all the Final Fantasy games, at least the recent ones – they had descriptions of every single thing and maybe not ever player likes to read them, but they’re kinda cool to have. So I’m kinda hoping that Diablo III has something to that extent.

Leonard Boyarsky: Yeah, we’ll see what we can do. Maybe we can do some kind of supplement to the game or something.


That also brings up the monster encyclopedia. Is there gonna be anything like that in the game?

Leonard Boyarsky: We’ve not really decided on anything like that. We’ve talked about different things along those lines but there’s been no decisions made.


Last question. Could Diablo III be presented as a horror game in any single way?

Leonard Boyarsky: I think so. The thing is, when you have an action game it’s really difficult to maintain that kind of feel. I think Diablo 1 did it really well. The first game did it really well. And that’s what we’re going for. But you know, it’s fast paced, you’re killing...

It’s not like… I look at the difference between the first Alien movie and the second Alien movie. When you’re killing fifty monsters at a time it feels less horrific than when you’ve got a haunted house and you’re avoiding one monster.

So the action elements of the game work against the horror elements a little bit, but we’re really trying a lot to get that kind of Gothic Horror feel as much as possible. Cause that’s what we feel that the Diablo universe, at least as far as like I said the human experience, has revolved around.

Source:

by Sol Invictus @ Hellforge