We sat down with Leonard Boyarsky, Lead World Designer for the game, and his Art Director sidekick, Christian Lichtner, to have a bit of a chat about Diablo 3, what's changed and to get a little more familiar with the newest character class, the Monk.

First off, there was a rather large, garish elephant in the room we thought would be best addressed from the outset. Starting late afternoon on Day One, rumours had been flying thick and fast that the game would be ready for retail significantly earlier than we'd expected, with the idea of a Christmas release being bandied about, which was further fuelled by company CEO Mike Morhaime apparently mentioning such a thing to a reporter. Unfortunately, this all seems to be hearsay, with both developers looking more than a little surprised at the question.

"I don't believe that," Leonard stated. "He [Morhaime] must have been referring to something else, because we... we're seriously working on it, and we're dedicated to delivering the best game possible, but it will be done when it's done."

Christian chuckles, "Nice try."

(Honestly, having seen the game in action on the show floor, this isn't really that surprising. It's looking amazing, but nowhere near retail ready at this point. Sorry.)

"We really want to make sure that the games are up to our standards," Leonard continues. "And, y'know, it's ready when it's ready."



With that out the way, it's time to look at the newcomer to Diablo 3, as Leonard introduces us to the very interesting-looking Monk.

"The Monk is the Holy warrior of the game," he explains. "He is a member of a sect... a position in society where they report directly to the priest-kings. They're raised from an early age in secluded monasteries where they're taught to become pure expressions of their gods through the perfection of fighting techniques. So, to them, fighting is a way of praying, or giving thanks to god.

"Everything they do, for them, is sanctified. To prove how dedicated they are, they get a tattoo put on their back that is a symbolic representation of their one thousand and one gods - it takes their whole life to complete. Everything in their life is dedicated to their religion, their gods."

Of course though, this is Sanctuary, and things work a little differently than you or I might be used to.

"The church sometimes uses them for what other people might consider to be grey area stuff," Leonard says. "But these guys - for them, it's all straight ahead. They are, in their own minds, the holy warriors."

This is all sounding pretty awesome, even though we disappointingly won't get a chance to check out these 1,001 tattoos first-hand (although Leonard did look awfully thoughtful as he answered).

"We have what we call a 'naked state' of the character," he clarifies. "But that's in the very basic - it depends... if his naked state has one of his shoulders exposed, you probably will be able to. It's just... that's kind of just our way of saying, from a lore standpoint... we've changed much bigger things from a lore standpoint, let me tell you! So if they came up with something that looked really cool but they're like "argh, sorry, tattoos wouldn't fit", we'd erase that. But yeah, it's just a way of us showing that they're really serious about this. That's their life, y'know!"



So that's a bit about why they're in the game - and Christian backed this up by explaining just how the class has been implemented.

"They're another melee class," he divulges. "Much like the Barbarian, but unlike the Barbarian, he's faster - and a little bit more strategic in that regard. I think the Barbarian's being a little bit more of a tank, and the Monk is a little bit more of a fast-hitting martial-arts machine. He also has a combo skill set, so that's a big difference there."

We'd heard around the place that the primary inspiration for the Monk's style was drawn from somewhere you might not expect - 2D arcade fighting games.

"Yeah, fighting games like Street Fighter and stuff like that," Leonard explains - then laughs. "It's just so funny because my initial response was "No, it's not arcade, it's console!" But I guess, fighting games are very arcade... it's a very long time since I've been in an arcade!

"A lot of our team, most of our team are really into fighting games, we've had Street Fighter tournaments..."

"We play games a lot..." Christian butts in.

"We are definitely gamers, and that always finds its way into what we do," Leonard continues. "Also when we're play-testing, or if we're trying to get feedback, or we see any really good ideas out there - it always finds its way in there, somehow."

Christian takes over, explaining that "It's an interesting take on a melee character, as well as an interesting challenge. How do we get someone who has combo moves and that kind of fighting game style in a game where everything's based around a single, or - at most - a double-mouse click?"

Simple maths dictates that this means the Monk will use multiple-click attacks, with most combos based around three stages.

Leonard outlines how this will work; "So if you click three times in succession, some of them have three different things he does, some of them do two different things with more of a build-up, and you can mix and match. If you can switch skills really fast - this is where we get into the advanced playing skills - it's once again, the type of 'easy to learn, difficult to master' philosophy that we always try to bring to our game."



Speaking of being difficult to master, there are still rabid fans of the first two Diablo outings who play religiously to this day. We asked Christian whether he thought that Diablo 3 would have the same long-lasting appeal.

"That's really the goal!" he says excitedly. "I mean - everything we do is geared towards that. We recognise the appeal of the previous games - lots of randomisation - we're doing the same thing in Diablo 3, with random quests, we have random dungeons, random monster placement and boss fights, so really, the replayability factor - I think that's one of the large appeals that has given the game such a long life."

"Our basic philosophy as a company is that we want to make the best games possible," Leonard ponders. "I think the reason people continue to play the games for so long is because they are such polished games, and they're fun games. So we keep an eye towards what's going to be fun, what we think would be fun, what makes a great game - we can always hope for that, but if it'll happen? That's up to the fans. It would be fantastic if all we hear about is that we make a fantastic game that people enjoy."

It's not just about getting the fans (or the newcomers) sucked in, either, it's all about winning everybody over.

"We do have an eye towards the endgame play," Leonard explains. "We do have an eye towards replayability - we have the random quests - once you've played Diablo or Diablo 2 through once or twice, you've gotten all the content pretty much, in terms of quests. With our game, you'll have to play it a little bit more - to get that, we're going to have more layers to it so you can dig deeper. We are really addressing the endgame stuff so there's more interesting stuff to do."

On the other hand, if you played a bit of Diablo or Diablo II and thought it was okay but the randomly generated worlds all looked a bit the same, we're told there've been some impressive updates in that area.

"We're definitely working around that," Christian explains from an art perspective. "From our point of view, we're really hitting a nice balance between it being tile-sets and you not quite knowing that it is. That’s a hard balance to strike! Previous BlizzCon, the dungeons you played, they were randomly generated. And if you played through those, it really didn't seem like they were. That still holds true of our dungeons now. Even with the random placements of the new art exteriors, that's not quite as random, because it's not fully randomised, but you still get the idea of "Wow, there's something new here - that wasn't here before!"



In a panel the day before, we'd seen how various elements of the game had received complete visual overhauls since the last time we saw them, which is Christian's area of expertise: "In a lot of ways, the art style improves through iterations. Like most of the things, we went through and sorted out what's working/what's not working. It's always about gameplay. Does it read well? Does it actually help what you're trying to accomplish? From an art point of view, it's always about being accessible. Does it read well in terms of the first time a player goes in there, do they get the lay of the land really well? Does it read well enough where you click on something and you're like "Okay, I just hit something" - or not? These are little gameplay issues that very much overlap with art.

"Some of our art/style goals I think are very much to take what we had last year and just take the next step in the evolution. Trying to take that whole thing and still trying to make it dark and moody, so fans of the previous games still get that - but at the same time, we're not looking to make it colourless, or really, really dark because that would make it hard to see. You wouldn't see what you were attacking or how you were attacking it, stuff like that is really big in terms of art style."

Leonard also addresses the recurring point of contention - this new game is (apparently) just so darn colourful!

"People forget this happened with Diablo 2 as well," he reminds us. "You have Diablo which is very dark, it all takes place at night. When the first screenshots for Diablo 2 came out, the fans were all "Oh! You have abandoned us!", when you see Lut Gholein, it's like "Oh my god, they're in daylight, it's the desert! This isn't Diablo!"

Last year's BlizzCon included a specific move by the Witch Doctor that involved calling a totem, summoning a million billion tiny spiders to attack your enemies. It was very cool, but also very confusing and distracting to watch. This year, that's been changed drastically, so we're a little closer to seeing Carrion Spiders making it into the final game.

We asked Leonard the simple question: Why?

"That choice was made because we thought we had a great idea - and it was a great idea - but it just didn't work as well as it could," he responds. "We changed it to much bigger spiders, changed the theme from a totem to a corpse, because we're really pushing the corpse theme with the Witch Doctor."

First-hand, I'd say the change is a definite improvement (although I did like the millions and billions version). Right now, it's looking very cool. And very creepy. Both of which are good things.



Another very good thing is the attention that's been given to loot drops. Now, anyone who's played Diablo before will know that you and your friends go up in a huge battle, and when you finally defeat the boss... some new kid comes along and pinches all the loot that was meant as your reward. Blizzard has gone out of their way to prevent this from happening in Diablo 3.

"We have loot drops per player," Leonard explains with a pleasing smile. "So, I get my loot drop; you get your loot drop. If I want to give you something after I pick it up, I could drop it. We're working on different ways of trading to make it easier than it was in the past, to share items - but that way, you can't come up and steal my stuff - there's no way for you to steal it."

"A lot of it's about cooperative play, so that sort of goes against it, right?" Christian adds. "If I'm trying to gank what you've got - or vice versa - we're not really the best of friends."

Leonard backs him up, agreeing that it actually impacts on the game more deeply, too: "It's like 'well, I'm not going to play a Wizard, who's hanging back, when there's a Barbarian's in there killing everything... because then the Barbarian's going to be closest to the treasure. So you're going to get angry at the people you're playing with, but it also might keep you from having the best experience during it, because you're not going to get well-balanced groups..."

It's also worth noting that the new rules will avoid accidentally picking up your teammate's prize, too. Handy, if you're clumsy.

As we were running out of time, we figured we'd cut to the chase and find out what Leonard and Christian are most looking forward to, personally.

"I'm looking forward to - as long as it takes - when it finally comes out - having people play it and experience the game we're making," Leonard starts. "Really, that's what's so great about BlizzCon - it's being able to put it in front of people to get the feedback. It's really exciting for us to show people what we're working on..."

"And really being able to show all of it, too," Christian adds. "Oftentimes we're showing these snapshots and there're things we're working on that we can't really talk about yet..."

"... and people ask us lore questions and we're like "Oh, I can't really comment on that," Leonard says with a laugh. "But I'd love to go on and on... "

Fortunately for us though, they did take a few moments to talk to us (even if they couldn't go "on and on" as much as they may have liked), and shed a bit more light on what's in store with Diablo 3.

As mentioned, there's been no release date discussed at this point - Blizzard have said they'll release two games next year and most bets are on those being the new World of WarCraft expansion, Cataclysm, as well as the first in the StarCraft 2 trilogy, Wings of Liberty. While stranger things have happened, it's looking increasingly like we'll be waiting until 2011 to re-visit Sanctuary.