Kevin: I hope you had a chance to play?
Joystiq: Definitely. I just was in the press room actually, playing the Monk. Did you guys add stuff to the other classes that's playable here or are they similar to the last build?
Leo: No, there's new things for everyone to see.
Joystiq: Okay, great. Well, going back a little bit, are we going to see anything from Diablo II, like any of the towns like Lut Gholein or Kurast or anything? Are we going back to those areas?
Leo: Kurast was pretty much destroyed and some of the history is that it was abandoned and everybody there moved to this place called Caldeum, which is now the center of pretty much the world, especially on that continent, which is kind of down the street from where Kurast was. You do start off in Tristram, New Tristram as it's also called. So technically that was in Diablo II. And there's going to be some NPCs and some other stuff that we're not quite talking about. There should be some surprises for you.
Kevin: There's a lot of nods to D2.
Joystiq: And the same goes for the enemies, like Mephisto, Baal, etc. I'm assuming we're going to at least see them or hear from them at some point.
Kevin: I think we're saying nothing about that.
Leo: Yes. We'll say that we've got an interesting story cooked up that will satisfy fans of the first two games and they'll understand a lot more about the lore and how it fits together with what was going on with all that.
Joystiq: Will there going to be sort of, we were asking the Starcraft guys about this as well ... will there be any sort of, you know, like "Previously on Starcraft ..." Are you guys going to catch people up with a cinematic or anything?
Leo: Not with a cinematic. I think what we want to do is make it as seamlessly into the game as possible so that there is ways of us delivering...I don't know if you played at BlizzCon last year. For instance, you could find lore that King Leoric left or Lac Danon left. So what we want to do is kind of work it into the game like that, so that there is, maybe even for people who know the stories, a different way or maybe some different facets of it that they didn't know, as well as a good way or an integrated way to give it to people that don't know it.
Kevin: It's important that people who play maybe only Diablo II and not Lord of Destruction or neither of them that it's presented in a straight-forward enough fashion that they're going to not have missed out not having played those. On the other hand, they're still for sale. We do want to encourage everyone to play.
Joystiq: We've heard different things about the new class, like that it will be something completely new and nothing we've seen before. Is that true?
Leo: We're not really talking about it, but anything is possible. We're not going to rule it out. Like, "Hey, that was a great idea," we'd consider anything. But that's about all we're really saying.
Joystiq: But do you guys know what it is and you're just not saying or are you still working it out? Have you guys even decided internally what it's going to be?
Kevin: We're working solidly in one direction but these things can move really quickly or take dramatic changes in direction and different classes have. So it's hard to say. It's even hard to extrapolate from what I said how close or far away we are from deciding.
Joystiq: Have you guys abandoned classes along the way? Like on the other four, were you like, "OK, let's do this" and then, like you said, through the process: "OK, let's not use this class."
Kevin: Yeah, yeah, we do that all the time so, you know. There's always like dozens of ideas for everything and then even when you decide on a class there's maybe ten different ways you might do something like that as well and all of them are discussed. It takes a long time before we finally settle on something.
Leo: Yeah, each of our classes, I mean, even the ones we didn't ... like we knew from the beginning that we were going to do the Barbarian, but he's been several different types of Barbarians along the way. I think that's true of every one of our classes. They go through several changes of personality, if you will, in terms of the skill set.
Joystiq: The PVP in Diablo II was a bit limited and I know in the press notes for this one it says – I guess it's still kind of ongoing. You guys are thinking about taking out the ability to go hostile at any moment. Have you guys even started to really develop PVP yet? Or is it still just kind of figuring out the core experience?
Kevin: We're working on stuff. I don't think we're going to announce anything yet, but there's definitely going to be PVP. It's going to be better than Diablo II and it's going to have some cool twists.
Joystiq: About the control scheme. Diablo is known for being a click-fest. Your mouse is your best friend and the tab key and sometimes the number and alt keys. Are you guys changing the scheme at all to sort of incorporate the keyboard any more or will it be pretty much the same sort of controls?
Kevin: We're trying to keep it fairly mouse-centric. If you watch some of the videos and things, you'll notice it keeps changing as well. Every aspect of the inventory we're working on all the time. You know the bag. We keep working on how we sort the inventory and what it looks like as well. Where the potions go, etc. We're trying to streamline it from . It's not some massive hot key-spread necessarily, but who knows what direction will go with that as well.
I like what we have on the demo now but I liked it before we made the recent changes as well. It keeps getting a little bit better but it's fairly slow. It's kind of hard to say, but we were really cognizant of the feedback so we're going to listen carefully and watch a lot of people play it on the floor here today and see what they like and dislike.
Joystiq: The LAN was never that big of a part of the old Diablo but you could play Diablo on LAN, couldn't you?
Leo: Yes.
Joystiq: And I'm guessing that won't be the case anymore with the new Battle.Net?
Leo: That's right.
Joystiq: Diablo has never officially supported modding although they haven't really banned it. Is there any thought towards modding going into this or even map editing? Have you guys thought about including a map editor?
Leo: We talked about it early on and we considered it but the way we put together our maps and the fact that it's random ... it's very artistic-centric. And, on top of that, the fact that it's so random it's like, would people just change the random number generator? You know what I mean? [laughs]
Joystiq: I suppose not, if It's already random.
Leo: We don't hand-build our dungeons anyways, but the way we build our maps kind of makes that prohibitive. But we're always looking at what the end users might want so we did look at including a map editor and we just said that it's never been a big part of Diablo. So we didn't feel it was necessary.
Kevin: We're certainly not opposed to modding it.
Leo: Yeah, we're not going to put in things that, "Oh my God, you can never mod this!" If somebody comes along and makes this great editor and makes this great mod...
Kevin: At this point, we're knee-deep in just making the game. That's sort of at the periphery of our discussions at this point.
Joystiq: So regarding the new loot drop system. If I'm understanding this correctly, if you're playing in a party, when you see drops, you see the items on the ground, that's what you can pick up. The other characters in your party won't see that. But you can pick it up and drop it again for someone else.
Leo: Yes.
Kevin: That's right.
Joystiq: Does it actually have to enter your inventory or can you just immediately pick it up, you know, when you have your inventory open, you have the option of kind of, "Alright, I'm just going to drag it over here."
Leo: I believe, as it stands right now in the demo, you pick it up into your inventory and then drop it. But we'll figure out the easiest way for people to do that is if they want to share. We'll try to make that as fast as possible.
Joystiq: In the character selection screen, the female Monk is not available. Is that just because she's not finished yet, the female? There will be a female monk?
Leo: That's right.
Kevin: All of our classes will have gender choices.
Joystiq: In the demo that's playable here, have you guys hidden anything, any Easter Eggs?
Kevin: There's some Easter Eggs.
Leo: Yeah, there's something hidden in there. It's just fun stuff. It's nothing that the people are going to be like, "Oh my God, I found this thing. I found the fifth class!" Nothing like that. It's just fun little jokes here and there.
Joystiq: The Monk has a very limited weapon set. In the demo, nearly every weapon the Monk picked up had a big red X on it because he can't use it. Is that how he will be in the final game?
Leo: Not quite as limited as it is now but yeah.
Joystiq: Right now the staff he comes with is the only thing I've been able to use.
Leo: He's got fist weapons too, like fist knives, pretty cool-looking stuff.
Kevin: But it's just not all done yet. So we wanted to make sure what we did have on the demo is of the same quality as the other classes. We had to limit that.
Leo: And the difference between him and the other characters is that his stuff will probably take a lot longer to percolate into the game because his skills are very much based on his weapon choices, kind of like how the Assassin in D2 was very much defined by her weaponry. That's kind of how he is. When he has a staff, he has a lot of skills available to him. If you've picked them and bought them I guess, they're very sweeping. Whereas if he has fist weapons, his skills are based on quick hits and stuff.
So that's kind of the way we're going with him. So as you can imagine, it's not as easy as just putting a sword in a character's hand that disappears when he does all his skills and stuff. With the caveat, of course, that if we decide that's not the way we're going to go, we're going to give him 20 weapons, you know. [laughs]
Joystiq: With the whole martial arts influence on the monk, has it been tempting to throw in like a Bruce Lee cry when he goes nuts in there?
Leo: No, we're trying to kind of combine an Eastern European Monk with the Asian feel. We don't want to go one way or another. It's been a difficult balancing process, and my artists looked pretty perplexed when I first approached them and said, "No, he's got to be kind of more European" and they're like, "What do you mean?" [laughs] So it was a little bit of a balancing act but I think we're getting that feel. We're really trying to do something that has its own little niche. It feels a little bit like he's got some of that Asian influence, you know, in some kind of a weird combination, so we probably wouldn't want to throw that in there. But who knows? It could be that down the road we think that's a great idea.
Kevin: It is martial arts fantasy fulfillment but with a twist. We wanted to do something creative with him. We like what we did.
Joystiq: The only negative reaction we've heard so far is that the Monk introduction cinematic was choppy in a few places, it looked a little rough. You know, usually Blizzard's cinematics are so gorgeous and everything looks like it's out of a CGI movie. Was that put together in-game? How did you guys create that?
Leo: Yeah, that's an in-game done by our AV team. We have two different ways of doing them. A lot of times when they announce patches for World of Warcraft, you'll notice that they'll do in-game ones as opposed to full-on cinematic ones. That's what that one was. Same with our Wizard one last time. They were developing that as we were developing a lot of his skills. I think they did a really good job with the limited tools that we allowed them to have at the time. [laughs] But I thought it was really cool, myself. But I know what you're saying.
Joystiq: Yeah, there was a few times where you were like, "Oh, it's a little choppy" or some of the characters in the background looked all the same, you know. They're facing the same way, moving the same way.
Kevin: They didn't get the assets very early; they didn't have more time.
Leo: We'll take full responsibility for that. [laughs].
Joystiq: Without knowing how much of the game still needs to be developed, what's been the most sort of challenging facet?
Kevin: You know I've been really happy to get the amount of quests and adventures in that we got for this demo. There's a ton of them and they're random and their placement is random and some of them have multiple endings and everything. Seeing that all come together in an area this big – it's much bigger than anyone can finish in 15 minutes of game play. You know, that was a lot of hard work and I'm happy that we got there. Now I'm really anxious to see people's feedback on this. So that's my personal one.
Leo: Yeah, it's just right now I think probably, because me and Kevin worked a lot on that stuff for the demo, it's probably where we're most focused right now. If you asked Jay or any of the guys, they'll probably talk more about the systems stuff because that's probably what they're focused on.
Kevin: Another thing I think to mention is co-op. Co-op is getting much more fun all the time. I've never had this much fun testing a game that's still in development as I've had with this demo.
Joystiq: So the Monk's backstory. Will our Monk in the game encounter other Monks? Will there be a lot of lore given about where they've been, what they do?
Leo: Yeah, I don't know if you'll be encountering other Monks unless they're playing other player characters. That still remains to be seen with story details and all that. But yeah, with all of our characters we want a very rich backstory and we want the world to somewhat react to who you are, where you've been and what you've done. So yeah, I mean that's our goal with this game, is to very much make your character a distinct personality with his own kind of story or her own story so you feel like this is a person in the world.
Kevin: Yeah, the Monk is not a generic tough-guy. He comes from an interesting place. This type of person is known throughout the world and is somewhat notorious, both respected and feared for their martial prowess and there's sort of the mystique about him. So I think there will be reactions to him that will be different than if you play a Barbarian or Wizard type.
Joystiq: And then the last thing. If there was no limit for a Diablo 3 collector's edition, what would you guys like to put in there?
Kevin: Somehow working in a Murloc. Somehow.[laughter]
Joystiq: Well yeah, you've got to have the crossover reciprocation.
Leo: Some really cool Diablo action figures, I guess, because I would love to get those. I'm sure I will anyways but, you know, I'm sure the fans would love that. I don't know, you know.
Kevin: Did you see the new Barbarian statue?
Joystiq: Yeah, it's pretty awesome.
Leo: One of those, an art book...
Kevin: Like in the box.
Joystiq: Just so you can have the biggest box on the shelf. Well, thank you guys for your time.
Leo: Thanks a lot.
Kevin: Thanks, go play it some more!