There are still areas that ”aren’t made yet”, with the studio still putting in new monsters and ”working on bosses”. It’s ”similar” in size to Diablo II.
”What we’re doing right now is going broad across the whole game,” said game director Jay Wilson. ”We’re trying to build up all the content to enough of a point where we can get into polishing.” There exists no official release date for Diablo III.
”We have good examples of what does it look like for monsters when we’re at ship level, what does it look like for classes, what does it look like for items, we have the answers to those questions, but there’s still some story and questing stuff that’s not hitting the quality level that we want, so those are the things we’re working on.”
”We’re still adding monsters, we’re still working on bosses, we have some that aren’t made yet, we’re working on every Act but we’ve got some areas that haven’t been built yet. We’re still building, but we’re building very fast. We’re not in discovery mode anymore.”
How big is this new breed of Diablo III compared to the second full game, which is still alive and kicking today with updates from Blizzard?
”Honestly it’s similar size to Diablo II. There are some differences here and there, exterior environments are a little more diverse, dungeons are about the same. Even the way the Acts increase in length and then scale down,” said Wilson.
”We intentionally did that again because we thought, some of that was done to ship Diablo II, but we thought it had a good feel to it to reduce the length of later acts so that you feel like you’re accelerating towards the finale.”
StarCraft II kept the base formula of the original game and everyone loves Blizzard for it, so will Diablo III be sticking with what’s tried and true as well?
”It’s a very linear quest line. We actually tried a much denser, more complex quest system and we found that players who played Diablo games just didn’t really want that. They wanted a more focused game,” explained the game director.
”They wanted to stay focused on killing monsters, they didn’t want a lot of weird side quests. We do side quests but we don’t put them in the quest log, they’re events that occur within a zone that you can go “Oh, this Hell portal need to be closed.”
”And then you can close it and it’ll go, “there’s three more portals in this zone.” And you can decide if you want to close those portals but it’s optional, you don’t have to.”
Diablo III will likely release sometime in 2012 given Blizzard’s fierce reputation for releasing something only when ‘it’s done’. Diablo III releases exclusively for PC.
