Welcome to part II of AbleGamers interview with Jay Wilson, Lead Designer, and Leonard Boyarsky, Lead World Designer on the Diablo III development team. You can see part one of this interview right here . We hope that you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed typing this thing out.

This interview is a transposition of a live interview AbleGamers had with the folks at Blizzard. So it may be a little odd to read

Jay, Blizzard: Our official stance on mods is that we do not want mods that changes usability were trying to make a game that is essentially usable by default, we focused on gameplay and can be completely played with the mouse. Things like auto potion swigging, and things like that are not something we would condone, and certainly not within Battle.net when you play online.

Mark, AbleGamers: have you thought about the disabled gamer, people with color blindness, people with hearing issues, people with motor skill issues such as Steve, or AbleGamers cofounder, who has multiple sclerosis? Have you thought about how people with these types of issues might approach Diablo three? Is there a way to play without a mouse or something to that effect?

Jay, Blizzard: We have not gone so far as to look at, for example, playing without a mouse. I certainly would be... we would love to hear any ideas or thoughts on how we could do that. I would say on some fronts, yes I would say I have a lot of experience with working with color blindness, working with the hearing impaired. So we focused, for example, subtitling... and subtitling that covers not just players speech or NPC speech, but also covers things that happened in the environment, a sound element that are necessary for the player to know, we subtitled those things as well. "A loud noise goes off," and the player needs to know that for gameplay reasons, that would be subtitled as well. That's good for a variety of reasons. Colorblindness, we do the best we can. We actually have a couple of guys on the team better color blind. I think the percentages are colorblind is something like 25 or 30% of the population has some kind of colorblindness. We try whenever we can not make gameplay, rely solely on color. Certainly we do put color in the game and we do... from a standpoint... we put in from a playability standpoint, but I think they're mild enough that I don't think someone who is colorblind would have a terrible time playing the game at all.

Things beyond that, say, someone who has motor skill issues. That's one that I think we would have to explore ideas for, we're certainly open to it. The one thing I will say about the Diablo III, in our focus on design, is that we think of all of our games is kind of the easiest to play, and I don't mean that from the standpoint of the games not challenging. But really, the design of it is particularly friendly to pretty much anyone. I think is one of the reasons why Diablo has such a broad audience is that it's good for people... I would guess with people with limited motor skills, it's certainly good for casual players, and things like, right all well and will and will be a that would focus all play being done just on the mouse.

Some of the things we've done with the actual design of the game is to change the way we look at monster design and class design. And this is more... to make the design better, but actually think it'll have good benefit to a broad range of users, In Diablo II, a lot of the focus was on potion mechanics, were you chugged potions and that would keep you in the fight. And you have potions that can help outrun those enemies to get you out of the fight we try to get rid of those things, because when you have those elements like that allow the player to have infinite health and infinite escape capacity and the only way you can really truly challenge that player is to kill him. The problem is that an advanced player knows how to come back from something like that. A casual player does not, a casual player dies and they don't want to play the game a more. Especially if it did go recover a body from cataclysmic monster that happens to be standing over the top of it. And so when you look at these big looks a kind of things like our health system or combat works with the speed of how everything moves and not letting them out run everything and give the player other ways to deal with the threats. It allows you to get rid of that spiky nasty difficulty, because we now have options that make the game challenging without making the gameplay ridiculously fast, which is essentially what happens with Diablo II in a lot of cases. That's not to say that if your level 100 and in some of the hardest content that there won't be some stuff that relies on split-second timing. But that such advanced content that we feel that's really targeting advanced players.

Steve, AbleGamers: so there will be a health potions and a light in Diablo three?

Jay, Blizzard: We do have health potions, but they are not a major part of our recovering system, the major recovery system as health globes, which are items that drop off of enemies. Right now, you generally see them, about one out of four to one out of three enemies will drop one of these. When you pick them up they recovered a certain percentage of health for you. Health potions are there, but they're more like an emergency backup type things. When we talk about things like controlling speeds and controlling potion mechanics, those are the kinds of things that make the game harder, but they let us turn around and do things like, "hey, you now have health globes, you can pick up and you have a potion backup" so you have multiple things you can do. And you have this cool skill that lets you freeze all your enemies in place to give you some time to get away. It's not that we wanted to one make the game harder. It's that we want to allow the player to do cool things to deal with threats other then just drinking more potions.

Steve, AbleGamers: That's great because that goes back to my question about automatic health potions. Along the same line, another popular modification to the game, it was something that did not automate the game at all, but announced when something dropped for those of us that can't hold down the ALT key to look for loot. Are there any plans to subtitle any of that?

Jay, Blizzard: We actually have a system in the game already, that allows you to customize some of the elements of how items call out when they're dropped. If you look at the gameplay demo we showed we actually... some of that was evident. When items drop from the monster its tag appears for a few seconds before it fades away. And then if you move off the screen and move back on the screen goes item tags will refresh, so are basically trying to... when we say we want people to play with the mouse were real serious, right down to we don't want them to have used the ALT key to see what's on the ground. We talk about other systems to so if you have a particular things you want to suggest either now or later some of us would be happy to consider that, because it's one of those things... it might be a feature that is great for disabled gamers. But when you make the game more usable for anyone, you make it more usable for everyone. So it could be a great feature for everyone

Steve, AbleGamers: We don't want to make the game too easy for anyone, we are mainly concerned with playability, so to hear that the mouse is going to be the main interface is great. My only other question on the mouse line is, some of the technology that is coming out now has the ability to load the mouse and click the mouse through a driver. Is that something that Blizzard will be able to work with other companies to get support in such as the Tracker IR?

[Blizzard did not have an official statement on this at the time, they asked us to just say that they are working on looking into things such as this and would get back to us as the game gets closer to release. In short, the gentleman we were interviewing were not working on 3^rd party vendors]

Steve, AbleGamers: Will such things as Rune Words and other items that you were talking about earlier. Is that something that will be returning in Diablo three?

Jay, Blizzard: Right now, we don't have all of our... what I would call, more advanced items completely worked out, we need to have Runes in the game. A lot of people saw them dropping in the gameplay demo, but they're not actually used as items in a more, I can't, unfortunately, really talk anymore about this. So essentially, we will have some pretty cool item systems that were not ready to reveal them right now

Steve, AbleGamers: Ahh

Leonard, Blizzard: you almost got something out of us...

Steve, AbleGamers: I tried...

Mark I wanted asked again questions, are you guys going to be using the Battle.net platform? And is it going to be as unfriendly...

Leonard, Blizzard: Yes we are, and it will be much more awesome than it was before, but we can't talk about it yet. We are doing a complete and total overhaul of the Battle.net. The first version I think, you'll see in StarCraft 2 , but were doing it for Diablo III as well and it's pretty awesome.

Mark, AbleGamers: is the online play still going to be free?

Jay, Blizzard: We have not decided on a financial model yet. We are kicking around exactly what were going to do there. Every region is a little different, so it's a little hard for us to say, "oh, well. We're not going to do a subscription-based game." For example in Korea, most of their games are paid to play, including their traditional boxed products. So it's hard for us to decide right now and say something would be universal for all regions until we've actually got a full model. We do intend for Diablo III to be primarily a boxed product though. We don't see it as a primary subscriber base game. But beyond that we can't say exactly what our plans are.

Steve, AbleGamers: Will Battle net be retroactive. Will the changes that affect the future games affect the previous games anyway?

Leonard, Blizzard: I can answer that I don't know.

Mark, AbleGamers: it's interesting that you speak about the subscription-based versus pay for play models. When I was at GDC, I watched a presentation by Rob Pardo on this subject. He seemed to come down on the subscription-based model as being more palatable to the American market, we can I have a buffet style thought process, and thought that a pay for play model would not work very well in the US market.

Leonard, Blizzard: yet to be honest Rob know way more about that than I do, he is kind of an expert on that front, because it's a lot more experience with other regions that I have. But then he is also the person I work with to put together our financial documents. So that makes sense, but I think what you should do, and this is our philosophy when we talk about our financial stuff is, you should really look at what kind of game you're trying to make and manage the financial model to the game and not try to figure out how to make a crap ton of money, and then structure around that. I think that a lot of the proms, you see in the game industry. Financial models that don't work. It's not because the model is bad. It's probably because it's not the right one for your game. So that's what we focus on what game do we want to make... and then how can we make sure that game makes enough money that it's one that we make a profit and it's also tolerable to our audience.

Steve, AbleGamers: is there a timeline that blizzard is looking at to get Diablo three to the masses

Jay, Blizzard: When it's done...

Steve, AbleGamers: Come-on, you have to give us something...

Leonard, Blizzard: When it's done... I will say that it's not that we don't want to get out there. Some people think we're just sitting here saying, "Whaaa we don't feel like getting out. Maybe next week, we just don't feel like it."

Jay, Blizzard: No, we really wanted to be done, especially as long as wind up working on it.

Mark, AbleGamers: what time is almost done, so that said, would you be willing to give us some kind of nugget that starting out there? You know, so we have some reason, for some people to come read this interview?

Jay, Blizzard: some kind of nugget...

Mark, AbleGamers: come on, give us a nugget:

Steve, AbleGamers: come on something epic

Jay, Blizzard: something effect, sorry I can't think of anything off the top of my head, and I wouldn't want to... that's a scary scary question than a one touch with a 10 foot pole.

Mark, AbleGamers: Steve before we wrap this up, you have any other questions

Steve, AbleGamers: Yes, I have one more, is there going to be a Cow level?

Jay, Blizzard: Is there to be a cow level? Oh god, I don't give you my WW I answer, which is, "it's a secret," we don't know yet to be honest with you. We haven't decided on something like that. The idea of secrets within the game is something that the team finds highly appealing; we're kicking around all a lot of ideas. But we can't confirm or deny the existence of a cow level at this time.

Leonard, Blizzard: I'm doing a modification to get away with it

Jay, Blizzard: I said it was secret

Leonard, Blizzard: See there is a nugget...

Mark, AbleGamers: Great, I think that this is all the time we have, I wanted to thank everyone for giving us the time to day to talk about D3, I think there are many AbleGamers looking forward to the game...

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