Another of the fansite interviews from two weeks ago has appeared online. This time it’s Hellforge interviewing Lead World Designer [WIKI]Leonard Boyarski[/WIKI]. The interview sticks mainly to lore and story and design elements, and has some interesting tidbits. Here are a couple of quotes; click to read the whole thing.
With regards to the lore stuff that you mentioned earlier: is it like a book that you carry around that has all the journal entries and all the stuff you encounter. Is there gonna be anything like that in DIII?
Leonard Boyarsky: Yeah, that?s what we?re working on the interface of that right now. We?ve gone through a lot of iterations on it but it?s basically that ? a lore log that you can access and hear the different stories that you?ve picked up along the way. At least that?s our current iteration at least. We?ve gone through a lot. I?d have to bring in our interface guy to bring in how many.Besides a return to Tristram and its Cathedral. Can players expect to revisit locations in the previous games?
Leonard Boyarsky: Locations? No. We had actually talked about revisiting some of them and we went through a lot different iterations, as we do on everything, but it just seems like we wanted to go to new places and expose more of the world, because people have seen those places and we wanted to kind of really just expand what people experience of the world.
Leonard’s pretty detailed with his answers, refraining from too many, “I can’t get into that yet.” type of replies, but he has to be honest and admit that a lot of the lore fan dreams aren’t going to happen. No detailed item stories in the item hover, no in-game monster encyclopedias, etc. This isn’t really a surprise, Diablo 3 is an action game, after all, as were its predecessors. It’s not a game where you sit around reading a detailed origin myth for your shield. (Much though some of us wish it were.)