hile were at the German Games Convention in Leipzig a little while ago, we had a chance to meet up with Blizzard. The company has been behind some of gaming's biggest franchises, and it's currently working on sequels for three of them. Here, we talk with Jay Wilson, lead designer of the highly anticipated Diablo III.

Game Informer: How did you manage to keep it under wraps so well? Blizzard has always done a great job at being secretive.

Jay Wilson: What’s funny is that I get that question in two forms: One is, “How did you keep it under wraps so well?” and the other one is, “Everyone knew what you guys were making…” I think, for the most part, it’s that as a company I’ve never worked somewhere more security conscious than Blizzard. It almost reaches the point of paranoia—but it gets infectious. You really start looking around in every corner for somebody to sneak some information. When we see how the announcements go when we’re able to keep a project so secret and we announce it so big, it’s so satisfying. I think nobody wants to ruin it. We really see a bare minimum of leaks on projects as a whole for, I think, those reasons.

GI: Obviously, Diablo II was huge. When you’re working on the next installment, how do you prioritize what you keep, what you scrap, what you revisit?

Wilson: Well, the big thing is identifying what are the core goals of the Diablo series. What were the things that made it successful. Generally, those things are very high level—when you start to get specific, you’re generally doing something wrong. Things like the approachability of the game, and then you ask yourself why. Why was it approachable? Well, it was an isometric camera, it offered very unique gameplay that nobody else offers that was very easy to get into. It had an easy control scheme, things like that. That starts playing into the decisions that we make—if we add something to the control scheme, we have to take something else out, because you can’t ruin the approachability factor. Co-operative play. Replayability through randomness. The item game.

All of these things—there are about seven things we identified that are really, really important. And a lot of those, for us, don’t matter that much at all. They’re much more malleable. That was one of the things that we, us working on the project, had those core competencies that we can always look back and say, whenever we wanted to make a decision, was it part of one of these? And if it wasn’t, throw it out. If it is, then you have to ask, “Is there another way that we can accomplish the same goal then?” That’s always the key. I thing it’s also always approaching the game from the standpoint of, “Does that really make the game better? I know it was there before, and I know the last games did it, but did it really make the game better or does it not?” And sometimes you just have to try it out.

GI: You mentioned the seven core competencies. Is Diablo’s environment one of those? I’m sure you’re sick of people bellyaching about rainbows by now, but it seems that when people saw the first wave of screens a lot of eyes were drawn to those. People seem to have forgotten that previous games weren’t isolated in dark, depressing dungeons, too.

Wilson: Setting was one of those, it was one of the seven. It’s that the setting is unlike any other fantasy setting out there. I think some people just don’t like colors. They love the current trend of brown/gray photorealism in games. I feel—and our art team feels—that the consoles have that area covered and we’d like to make a game that is more distinctly Blizzard. The overall approach to the setting, we definitely see it as something that’s very unique in the fantasy world. It’s something that we really wanted to hold true to. The people who really love that setting and are fearful that we’re not going to be a mature game, we’re not going to be a game that has a dark tone to it—as opposed to dark lighting—I think once they play the game I don’t think they’re going to have any doubt. The choice that we made for the art style was driven by gameplay as opposed to anything else.

As you mentioned, people have a selective memory when it comes to Diablo II. That color treatment didn’t translate very well to 3D, and the general lean toward more vibrancy was to get some of the art concepts that they used from a gameplay standpoint, in terms of unit identification and making sure the world was always changing, so that it didn’t become monotonous. That was one of the things that we were really focused on. We had to be able to capture that same kind of feel as Diablo II. When our art style was more dark and gray and gritty and monotone, which it was for a long time, it didn’t feel like Diablo II, and it didn’t feel like the original Diablo. It felt very monotonous and not very interesting.