by Hotstreak - 7 years ago     show comments

Former Game Director, Jay Wilson took some time yesterday to answer questions about the development of Diablo 3 on his Twitter account. He mentioned some features that were cut and he also talked about the art style.

• They went with a more colorful and vibrant art style with the absence of pentagrams and burning crosses to make the game world feel more unique. Source
• He likes the “dark and gritty” art style but also prefers to be able to tell whats going on and chose more colors for gameplay reasons. Source
• There was a dynamic weather system in place during development but it was scrapped for better quality art. Source
• Diablo 3’s engine is the same one that was being used for Blizzard North’s game back in 2003, even with some concepts and creature designs being carried over. Source
• His development team had a lot of creative freedom during development with no kind of pressure from upper management. Source
• They even considered using a different camera angle for D3 but they ultimately chose to use the classic isometric view. Source 1, Source 2, Source 3,
• A third person camera angle wasn’t a technical challenge but required a different approach to the game’s art. Source 
• Jay thinks it would fine for the next Diablo game to use a different camera perspective as it would help avoid stagnation. Source
• Rifts and Seasons were features they had planned to implement during the development of Vanilla. Source
• Diablo 3 was much more similar to Diablo 2 in it’s early stages of development. Source

Something that I thought was really interesting is how the engine apparently dates back all the way to 2003 which would make it much older than we originally thought. It’s also pretty cool that Rakinoth came directly from Blizzard North’s version and I think it’s safe to assume that Act 4 is heavily inspired by the way it was portrayed in that version as well.

So what do you think about these answers? Did you find any of them interesting? Let us know in the comments below!