Diablo 3 - Leonard Boyarsky Interview @ Gamasutra

Perhaps it sounds a bit cliché, but it's often said that adversity and strife build character. In past interviews, you've said that the writing was on the wall at Interplay and it was a major reason that you moved on to co-found Troika, which was undoubtedly quite the experience. What is Blizzard providing you?
LB: A very creative atmosphere. You know, they've let us pretty much guide the development of the project. It very much has the kind of game development culture that we tried to create at Troika, and feels like old Interplay did, when Interplay was doing really well. It feels like the teams have control of their destiny, and they were making games because we think these are the games we want to play, we think these are the games our fans want to play. So, it's really a creative culture, and it's really just a great environment to work in.
What are some specific challenges of building and designing a world that's versatile enough for one person and bots to play, and for a chaotic party that's sniffing around for stuff to break and exploit?
LB: Well, as far as multiplayer goes, we tried at the beginning -- approaching this from the story angle -- we were really trying to make sure that the story came across, even in multiplayer.
We've come to the conclusion that when you're playing multiplayer, the story of the game is more about the story you're playing with your friends as opposed to the actual quest line. Now, if you're playing with a bunch of people who are really interested in getting the story of the game and the quest lines, that's a different thing, but Diablo can be very frantic and fast-paced, so a lot of times, you're in there and you're just playing it... You know, it's all about the fun of just playing with your friends.
So, the story and the story delivery is really focused on the single-player aspect. And the multiplayer, you can still get that, but we've tried to leave it open so you can have a great multiplayer experience, as opposed to forcing the story on people or forcing these things that are like, oh, you have to jump through these hoops to get the gameplay experience because of the nature of the game in itself.

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