Diablo III: Reaper of Souls - Interview @ Strategy Informer

Strategy Informer had the chance to interview Lead Producer Alex Mayberry to ask a few questions about the recently released Expansion Diablo III: Reaper of Souls.

Strategy Informer: This series has seen expansions before in Diablo 1 and 2. Have you taken any inspirations from those previous ones?

Alex Mayberry: We always look at Diablo 1 and 2. They're obviously the precursors to Diablo 3 so they're probably our first reference. But at the same time we don't just want to recreate what was done before, and we also wanna push the game in new directions so we have to play a balancing game between maintaining the legacy of Diablo 3 and at the same time broadening the universe and going in new directions. We try to keep a good eye on where we're going and where we've been. We also listen to the community. The community often reminds us of features of Diablo 1 and 2 that they like best. The lore, the community is amazingly caught up on the lore and story, so they're a great benefit to developing these expansions.

Strategy Informer: Diablo is a very PC-centered series. But Diablo 3 is coming to consoles, how would you say console development has affected future developments of Diablo?

Alex Mayberry: It doesn't really affect what we do on PC. The PC has always been the leading product. With that being said even before Diablo 3, even in the Diablo 1 and 2 days it's always been a game where you'd think “man this would look great on a console”. Even as a player I used to play anything that was even remotely Diablo like Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance or Champions of Norrath, because I wanted that console experience. So it's really great for us to be able to put Diablo on the console, especially because even though it's the same content, they're on different platforms. Our goal has always been that Diablo on the console should feel like a console game, not like a PC game that got put on the console. Once you pick up that controller and start moving that character around, you realize it's the same game, but it feels very different. So that's kind of where we have to keep things in mind. The console experience, while pulling from the same content, they can't be clones of each other. We just have to be mindful of when we're developing games on the PC, of how that's going to translate to console or what problems that's gonna cause or what challenges that's gonna create for the console group. But it doesn't really negatively affect development of the PC game in any way.

Strategy Informer: What can we expect from Diablo in the future?

Alex Mayberry: At the end of a game there's always some features that didn't quite make it or weren't quite ready. So we're already planning out our first content patch for after Reaper of Souls ships. Nothing I can announce at this point. I will tell people to watch Josh Mosqueira's twitter (https://twitter.com/joshmosq), he likes to foreshadow things. Beyond that though we're developing our plans for over the coming year. What else we're gonna do after that first content patch. One of the things we're gonna do is wait a little bit because we want to get Reaper of Souls out, then we want to actually let the community sit with it for a while and we want to gage their reaction and find out what people like about it, what don't they like, what new things would they like to see, or see changed. That means we can plan out the long term future of Diablo 3, we can make sure we are staying in touch with the community and evolving the game in a direction players want.