We caught up with Rob Pardo, Blizzard’s executive vice president of game design following the Diablo III announcement at their Worldwide Invitational 2008 event in Paris, France. During the course of the interview he expanded on some of Blizzard’s design philosophy as it relates to Diablo III, its development process, some of the game’s features, and managed to eat about one half of a slice of pepperoni pizza. Home site of Diablo3

Development on Diablo III began way back when Blizzard North was still around and currently the team working on it consists of around 50 people. Initially the game’s visual design was closer to the older games than what we saw in the gameplay demonstration. "We probably did three rev[ision]s on the visual direction until we got to this and now we’re really happy with it," said Pardo.

So much information to give you today related to the up coming release of Diablo 3.

The gameplay was also given several overhauls. "We were pretty heavily influenced by some of the games that were coming out like God of War, a very visceral game," said Pardo. "A totally different genre but you kind of saw games like that and we thought we really needed to update this game’s gameplay…it has to be much more of an action game."

With many before the reveal buzzing about a potential Diablo MMO announcement, we had to ask: was there ever any thought to moving Diablo away from its overhead action-RPG roots? "It totally crossed our mind but this is the game we ultimately wanted to make. Obviously I love MMOs, I think it’s a great genre, but that doesn’t mean that other genres aren’t great too. I actually see a huge opportunity in the action-RPG genre because nobody’s really doing a lot of games in that genres and I don’t understand why, personally."

Though there have been quite a few action-RPG releases since Diablo II, perhaps there weren’t as many as there should have been, or perhaps action-RPGs get labeled incorrectly. "What I think often happens with the genre, with the games that I’ve seen, is that they kind of get confused as to whether it’s an RPG that just happens to be real-time or is it just an action game," said Pardo. "I feel like that’s oftentimes you get these games that are not quite doing both. I feel like that’s the big opportunity for us. If you look at Diablo and Diablo II, they’re really action games. The story was light, the RPG were very light and I think one of the things we looked at with Diablo III was that doesn’t have to be the case."

Pardo cited what Blizzard did with real-time strategy design from StarCraft to Warcraft 3. "A lot of people in that time period were doing RTS missions where you just build up your base, slug it out against another base, do that 30 times and you’re done with the campaign. With War 3 we tried to come up with interesting scenarios and I think that’s the same thing with Diablo III. You guys may have been used to Diablo and Diablo II being really just kind of a point and click game…fun but not really immersive."