BlizzCon is likely to be the gaming world’s next chance to see some more on the highly anticipated Diablo III, but to tide you over just a little, we had a quick chat with Leonard Boyarsky, the game’s lead world designer, on the importance of lore in the game and the decision to give the character classes voices, among other things.
What do you do as the lead world designer, and what have you worked on in the past in that respect?
Leonard Boyarsky: As lead world designer I’m responsible for the lore of the game, the history, the story. I work with a quest designer named Michael Chu, who’s had a lot of experience in the RPG industry. We make sure that through the quests the story’s being conveyed to the player. We also work very closely with the art department to make sure - y’know, they’ll come to us and say to us ’what’s going on with this civilisation or that civilisation, what’s the history?’ Because there’s a lot of ruins and building up on cities that have been around for a long time. So, building a world – the way we’re building this world – from the ground up and with a lot of history, really informs the art. And it’s a back and forth thing too, the artists will sometimes come up with really cool concepts and we’ll work that back into the lore. So that’s basically what we do there.
I started out as just an artist, and after that I was the art director on Fallout, where I was more the creative director, and really fleshed out that world in terms of the feeling of the world, the mood of the world, and then I progressed on that project to designer, and then, before leaving to start my own company, we designed Fallout 2. And then I started my own company with a couple of guys called Troika, and we made Arcanum and Vampire. I did way too many jobs on those games, from world design to animation, to texturing, to drawing, to concepting, to producing, but my love has always been the world creation part of it… and you’ve really got to choose. If you want to do it well you’ve got to pick your specialty, but it’s really great because I get to work with art directors like Brian [Morrisroe]… he’s really fantastic, and he wants to hear [what other people have to say]. Sometimes artists really just want to go in their own direction, but at Blizzard they’re really into the back and forth. Everybody has good ideas, so it’s been a really great experience.
How much has the lore changed and evolved over the development process?
Leonard Boyarsky: Well, there are certain things that are set in stone because they’ve been in the previous games, but – I guess this is on the good side – I think there’s a lot of potential that hasn’t been tapped. Looking at it from that level, we haven’t been boxed in as much as we could have, because we didn’t dig as deep in the past as we could have. That’s given us a lot of wiggle room. It changes – it’s a very fluid thing and it took a little while to get used to, because no one wants to throw out stuff that they’ve worked on, but the philosophy is that the best idea wins, it doesn’t matter if it comes from the top or it comes from the bottom, or it comes from wherever, so… it’s a process… but it works really well.
How much do you have to consider making sure that the world works and it’s coherent for the hardcore versus the average player? Are they even going to care about this? How do you factor that in to how you build the world, and introduce the player to the world?
Leonard Boyarsky: I think that’s what’s really great about – I feel like such a cheerleader – working at Blizzard, because they could have easily put out another Diablo game and very lightly skimmed the surface of these kind of things, and it would have sold very well, but Chris Metzen – he’s the creative director of the whole company - is a very big champion of the lore and the story and that stuff, and that is what the really hardcore players care about. [While] a lot of other people don’t – and it can’t be allowed to impede on the fun of the game… but if we take it into account when we’re developing the game, I think it comes across in the feel and the mood.
And when we get deeper into it, it’s kind of an opt-in kind of thing. We’re not shoving things in the players’ way that they have to decipher or go into these huge dialogues or read 15 different lore books or research the novels outside the game to understand this stuff, but it’s there for the more hardcore people if they want to search it out inside the game. One of the things we’re using the Adventures for is to hopefully intrigue people about this world. Y’know, if we have this knowledge about all this stuff that goes on, we can create intriguing little mysteries for people playing the game, and plus, this is a game that people play a lot. If you look at the Diablo series, people play these games for years and years, there’s a lot of replayability, so maybe you ignore the story the first time through, but on the fifth time through you see something that finally piques your interest…
Leonard Boyarsky: What we’re thinking is that there are certain things you can see or have happen, that - if I run across a scripted event or I see two people fighting or a conversation that I can overhear as I’m running by that gives me a piece of information that I can use later, but I don’t need it. The hardcore action guys, they are first and foremost number crunchers, they’re loot crunchers, they want the best gaming experience in terms of, like, how to maximise those areas, so if we can drop clues into the story as to how they can maximise their loot and maximise their armour, that would intrigue, I think, the hardcore action player to maybe look more into that. Obviously that wouldn’t be the only way, and the minute the game comes out all that stuff is going to be available on the website anyway. There’s going to be some people who just want to play it as an action game and that’s fine. Our goal isn’t to impede that at all, it’s just – we want it there for the people that really want it.
Leonard Boyarsky: We went back and forth a lot on that. First we wanted to do it, then we didn’t want to do it, then we wanted to do it. The reason we decided we wanted to do it was because it really enables us to have your player drive the action more.
How much choice do you have as a player to shape your character’s persona? Dialogue trees or anything like that?
Leonard Boyarsky: There won’t be any dialogue trees per se, but we’re working on ways of your player affecting things. That’s all I’ll really say about that right now. We do want your player to feel like he’s driving the story, and we looked at it more like a character that you can watch develop and identify with, as if, a bit more like a book you’re reading or a movie you’re watching, you know, a character you can identify with and be fired up to be that character, be excited to be that character. And it remains to be seen whether people get behind that or not. It is a risk…
Leonard Boyarsky: I think so, and it falls on us to make these guys compelling and to make them characters that people want to find out about. The one thing is that when you have a character that doesn’t have a voice it always felt to me like you can’t really put anything on that character of any substance. I can’t have any history as a character – we kind of make the character a void so you can project all that into it, but the downside of that is that I can’t have your character know anything, so therefore the other characters have to explain a lot. If you have a conversation between two people who supposedly know something, the player can pick up through context a lot more information in a lot shorter a period of time. It actually helps to tell the story in a much more succinct fashion. You don’t have to listen to someone go on for five minutes about the history of the temple you’re going to raid or whatever. So it helps us in a lot of ways that I think will make the story in the game more compelling, and it also allows us to have the mystery of ’what is your character’s past?’, ’why did he come to this place?’ so that’s another mystery that you can delve into deeper, or not.
Prev: 
Next: 
