AusGamers: Five days away from the launch of the game, and based on your background and role at Blizzard, I guess what I want to get into is the Crusader. Can we talk about the conception of that character? How long was it from discussion to whiteboard to 3D model? How long did all of that take?

Paul Warzecha: Sure. When we started that character, some of the earliest concept images that we did for Diablo 3 as a whole included some images of a crusader-type character. So there was some inkling that one day we might go down that road anyways. So we had some really old concepts kicking around... in fact, in the collector’s edition you can see some of the really early images of ideas from that.



So there was always a desire to do that, and once we shipped D3, we were looking at all of the different heroes, and the Crusader just seemed to fill a hole that desperately needed to be filled. There was room for that tanky… like you said in… I read that article that you had with Larra and Kevin (interview here), and they talked about that whole idea of the war machine made human and that shield-as-a-weapon type character; having the tanky, melee, mid-ranged type character. All of those things were things that we wanted and we also knew that we were going to take a trip back to that kind of gothic, medieval world, and so a knight-type class worked. But we didn’t want to go in with that knight in shining armor, which is where the knight in battle-scarred armor came from; that whole concept.

Once we were good to go on this idea -- once everyone had bought in -- it was actually one of those classes… normally we try to concept these things through pretty thoroughly, so that you know exactly what all of the tiers are going to look like up the ranks, but we kind of knew it had a basis in the paladin. We also had a concept; there was a single image that Victor Lee drew, of the crusader walking forward with his badass shield and flail, and everyone is like ‘yep, I’m on board!’.

AusGamers: Is that the one with the flames in the background?

Paul: Yep, that’s it. So as soon as we saw that, we were like yep, that’s the one we’re going to make. We let Paul David -- who’s a senior character artist on the D3 team -- really own the original creation of that character, and model and texture it up. Then we were like, ok, this is heading in the right direction, and the rest is history.



AusGamers: Was it conscious decision that Malthael is a really lithe and slim character? It’s good and evil and kind of works, but there’s a real juxtaposition between the crusader and the ultimate bad guy in this.

Paul: I think there’s definitely a little bit of that, especially when you contrast him with the characters of hope and fate in Tyrial and Imperius. As far as separating them out, if you look at the image, at the box of Diablo, it’s a big fat skull staring you in the face. The thing is, the decision as to how we designed him was definitely very tailored to give you that deathy vibe, and you’re right, the lithe, kind of almost skeletal look, is very purposeful.

AusGamers: One of the things that Kevin said to me was: we talked about the paladin class versus the crusader and the similarities there, and drawing on the history, and he finished out the conversation by basically saying ‘look at all these empty spots on this map; we haven’t really talked about anything yet’.

It’s interesting that there is so much lore, but you guys are still pushing new components of lore, so you’re almost doubling up on your own kind of projection of stuff, as opposed to just fleshing out all of the stuff that already exists. Do you think about that at all? How do the fans drive that sort of thing as well? There must be tonnes of fan-fiction out there as well.

Paul: I’m actually a bit proponent of leaving something to the imagination. If I think about the art that I’m in to; if I think about images like Frank Frazetta’s Death Dealer, you have this character that you can’t see his face, you can’t see many of the details -- the horse’s feet go right into the ground. There’s more left unsaid than is said, and it’s all the baggage that you bring to that. I think, and what I hope we’ve done with Reaper of Souls, is we’re giving some of those new pieces of information, and hopefully the baggage you bring to that is going to give you that sense of darkness and dread, and all of those things that I think people in the early stages of D3 were kind of clamoring for -- they wanted that sense of dread, and I think we’ve delivered in Reaper.



AusGamers: For the people that still haven’t gotten into it that might be reading this: there’s a really great, levelled sense of humour riddled throughout D3. But this time, as you said, you’ve gone for the sense of dread. It’s Death himself, it’s darker, it’s gothic, you’re walking through the streets and there are just corpses everywhere. How much of that sense of humour has remained?

Paul: There are small hints of it. In fact, when we were originally working on D3, there was a lot of back and forth about The Fallen. The Fallen characters were kind of funny, they’re kind of silly: you hit them and they run away, and it was a question of ‘how silly is too silly?’.

So moving forward into Reaper, there’s still little hints of humour: the mystic bring some hints of humour in some of her dialogue. I think one of the silliest things -- and I’ll leave this for you to test out -- is: go ahead and die against a Westmarch hound, and I think you’ll enjoy the results.

AusGamers: That’s a good segway, because monsters is another component of the game, and they’re sort of the unsung heroes, because they’re just getting clicked to death all of the time. You’ve got bosses, and bosses are awesome, but out of your grunt-level guys that you grind through, who was your favourite to design this time around?

Paul: Oh man, honestly, there’s so many good monsters. I know anybody sitting in my shoes would probably be ‘oh, it’s great’, but seriously, they are… we took the things from D3 and amped up the monsters so much, that we actually had to make some tweaks. When you go into Nephalem rifts, you’re going to fight new monsters beside old monsters, and there was a distinct difference in that the new monsters felt more intelligent, they were doing more things that were slightly more interesting.

A lot of that came out of the fact that we actually broke out into a smaller monster strike-team this time, and we actually got somebody from every different discipline together in a room, to look at the monsters. And not look at them one at a time necessarily, but how they played together: does this character move faster than the last one? Does this hit heavier? Will this get ten hits in, in the time that that other one hits you once? All of those small tweaks that we made, make the characters play so much better. So to pin down one particular character, I’d be really hard pressed to do it.



AusGamers: That’s an interesting point that you’ve raised, because there’s been incremental updates to D3 to get it inline with were Reaper is at, and Reaper is ostensibly this kind of vision for what D3 maybe should have been in the minds of a lot of punters out there -- I know you guys internally might not feel that way.

But if you go back and play vanilla D3, once you’ve plugged in Reaper, how much of that original experience is now altered beyond the surface stuff that we know about now -- the new loot system and stuff like that? I’m talking in terms of monster AI, and the little bits and pieces.

Paul: It’s hard to separate some of that now, because obviously D3 has been through -- I think at this point -- are we at nine patches? The last patch, the loot 2.0 patch, updated things so much, and changed your experience so much. All of the new things like the new paragon features in there have changed the game so much. Even myself, before I came out here [to Australia] I played the game every day at work, just because I need to be playing it and seeing what we’re doing, but I found myself going home and playing back through the patch again, and I was like wow. The game has changed so much, it’s just, for me, a much more enjoyable experience.

Not that… it was always good, but I feel like it went from good to great, and I think that once Reaper hits, it’s that much better. It’s hard for me to even go back and look at it now, just because I have expectations now from the stuff that I’ve been seeing and playing.

AusGamers: How many times have you finished the game? Diablo 3?

Paul: Dozens of times.

AusGamers: On console as well?

Paul: Not as much on console. I played through on console, but when it comes to actually playing… and actually this is a strange tidbit, but kind of interesting, is because I’m focused on the heroes, and the armours, and the monsters: when I played, I usually play the campaign. I’ve played through the campaign so many times, and every time we make some tweaks and we adjust and plus the things that are in there. But with the adventure mode stuff, we’ve got guys like Jesse, who will be like ‘hey, mind if I take this monster and use it in this way in the Nephalem Rifts?’, and I trust those guys implicitly; they take that stuff, and do what they need to do with it. But the funny thing is, I’ll come back a couple of weeks from now, and ‘oh my god, I had no idea you were going to use that in this way’.



So even being keenly involved in the monster strike-team stuff -- and I know how these monsters work and how they play together -- they come together in completely new ways in the adventure mode stuff, that I never would have expected. People will see things in ways that you never expected, and it’s just a very cool experience, because the randomness there is much more so than it’s ever been.

AusGamers: How common is that throughout the team, for guys that aren’t working directly on things like the Nephalem Rifts stuff, to come in and play it and just go ‘what are you guys doing? This is so different?’ Because that was the sense that I got when I spoke to Larra and Kevin, was that randomness was like the key component and the rest of the game doesn’t matter as much. So everything else around it was just salad dressing.

Paul: It’s funny, because when i talk to Larra and Kevin, they definitely have their heads wrapped around the adventure mode stuff, where randomness is king. In fact, as we made weapons, that’s something that we had a lot of focus on: randomness being a form of progression, in that every weapon that you get, you can only go so big before it just becomes different.

So we push that sense of randomness in those things. But when you finish a piece, and you hand it off to the next guy, you never know what you’re going to get back, and that’s part of the excitement. Everybody is super-talented, it’s part of just the energy of like ‘hey, what’s this guy going to do this?’ when it comes back, in a way. Sometimes it’s like ‘hmm, it could be better if it was this way’, and you have the opportunity to go and tap that guy or gal on the shoulder and just say ‘hey, can we try this’, and more often than not, it comes back better than you could have expected.

AusGamers: It’s funny that you say it like, someone came and asked you if they could take a thing and do something with it, and you’re like ‘I trust that person’. There’s a sense of ownership there obviously, how deep does that go? And between other members of the team as well, in different areas?

Paul: It really depends on the individual thing that you’re working on, I think. Everybody has a certain amount of pride and ownership on the individual elements that they work on. But ultimately, and I’ve said this before, we have this orc on a wolf in the centre of our campus, and it’s go all of these different tenets, one of those being “gameplay first”. That whole concept of gameplay first, sometimes requires you to just kind of check your ego at the door, and say ‘you know what? Sure, I’m an artist, and I want things to look as awesome as possible, but in this case, that’s maybe not what serves the gameplay the best’.

That’s where we might make design decisions that may not be what you personally would have done if you were making one single character, but watching how the death maiden interacts with the spectrum skeletons when they’re with her, knowing the changes you need to make between those characters, it informs the individual changes that somebody might make on a character, if that makes sense.



AusGamers: You might not be primed enough to answer this question, but I guess the team as a whole would have a sense of it, because of how much issue there was when D3 dropped, but is it a dreadful moment right now? Five days out, and you’ve got that history of, was it Error 37? That big kind of gate that you came through and got munched up in?

Paul: I think, for a small handful on the team.. I don’t want to speculate, but I’m sure those guys are as nervous as can be. They done everything in their power, and Blizzard has done everything in its power to make sure that people are going to have the best experience out of the gate as possible. For the majority of the team, we’re all just sitting there with our hands [makes rubbing guesture] just so excited for the world to see the stuff that we’ve been working so hard at. We’re all pumped about it, so we can’t wait.

AusGamers: So what happens once the game is out? Run me through a typical post launch week, two weeks, month, at Blizzard, once it’s out in the wild.

Paul: The first thing we’ll do, is we’ll probably play the game with people for the first little bit, and just get some time in and have that same experience that everybody else is having. We’ll watch the forums and look for the feedback that’s coming in, and what we’ll likely do is compile some of that feedback and see if there are things that are addressable.

We’ve made the game as awesome as we can out of the gate, but a few months down the road, when it comes time that there may be some things that need adjusting -- because you can’t account for the fact that so many millions of people are playing this game; they’re going to break the game in ways you could have never imagined -- so it will be important to make sure that we respond to that stuff. So focusing on being able to respond to that stuff will be a key thing that we’re involved with over the next couple of months.

AusGamers: Philosophically, just to go into that idea with a persistent online game, or an online only type of game, is it arguable that the retail release date isn’t necessarily the real release date? That it’s actually a few months out. And this is more of a broad question, that you see games like DayZ at the moment, and Minecraft originally, that released in alpha, and you paid an access fee, and they were iterating as you played it, and eventually when it comes to retail, you either have it for free, or pay a smaller amount than everyone else, and it keeps being iterated upon.

It’s a big thing at Blizzard, because everything is patched all of the time, and the patches become big events, which is really rare in the games industry. A lot of people complain about day one patches and stuff like that. So is there a sense at Blizzard, or personally from you that nobody should actually be saying ‘we’ve finished the game’ by any measure?



Paul: No, you know, as an artist, I have that sense that everything that I work on could be better. You’ve got to rip it from my hands before I’m willing to give it up and say ‘ok, it’s done’. But there comes a point where it’s done. You cannot make it any better than by getting it into the hands of people to play it. At that point, you’ve done your best to make the best possible game and I think it’s safe to call it done.

Blizzard does have a history of patching things up, and making sure that they’re listening and responding to fan feedback. I expect that to be a trend into the future, but certainly in the case of Reaper of Souls, when it hits on March 25th, that’s Reaper of Souls; that is the culmination of all of the things that we’ve poured into D3, all of the new changes and tweaks and the new content -- and there’s a lot of new content that we’ve built in the last couple of years. They’ll be getting the definitive D3 experience when they get it on March 25th.

AusGamers: Ok awesome. Thanks Paul.

Paul: Thank you.

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