Diablo III: The Lore of the World - An Interview with Leonard Boyarsky

I had a chance to speak with Leonard Boyarsky a couple of weeks ago. For those not in the know, Leonard Boyarsky is the Lead World Designer of Diablo III, and he’s credited for being one of the masterminds of the Fallout world and guiding the art direction on the original Fallout game. We managed to speak at length on the subject of Diablo III’s lore and the development of its setting.

The following interview has been transcribed from audio. 


How do you come up with ideas for the creation of quests in Diablo III. Do you start with simple quest concepts and build around them with storyline elements or…?

Leonard Boyarsky: It goes both ways. What we do, the way we start off, is that we first create the storyline of the game and then we kind of iterate on that a lot as well as once we start building the game and putting quests in we refine those. Our artists, our level designers, everybody might have ideas about quests that would be more like simple adventure concepts or simple quest concepts that you’re talking about. And then we’ll put lore into them. Sometimes, we just have lore and we say to the level guys or some the gameplay guys, “Hey, how best do you think we can show this?” So it really goes both ways, any which way.

There’s been times when we really wanted to hit certain points and it wasn’t really working because you know, it was too complex for the way the game is working or the way the story is rolling out so you know it’s really just an iterative process like the other stuff we do.


So I guess you guys end up cutting out certain things that don’t work out?

Leonard Boyarsky: Yeah, but we also found a lot of stuff that’s struck a chord with people. The lore book that we’ve been putting in has been really popular. People like the ability to hear background stuff while they run around killing things as opposed to having to stop to read. So, we’re pretty surprised by that because people generally split into two different kinds of classes: the people who care about the lore and the people who could care less, but we’re finding that with the lore books that people have really responded to them. I’m assuming that’s because the audio portion of it where they don’t have to stop and sit and read it doesn’t cut into the action, basically.

Like, we put in some background of Leoric, his journal and Lachdanan who are characters that you’ve heard about and didn’t really meet in their human forms in the first Diablo, so you get to hear their voices and their stories from their point of view. It’s just that I think people are really kind of interested in that especially if they’ve played the games all the way from the first one.


Like in the first game, all the quests were randomized. Is it the same way in Diablo III where you won’t run into every single character or quest?

Leonard Boyarsky: We’re doing – there’s a main storyline that is, parts of it might be randomized depending on the area, depending on what the quests are, depending on what the actual objective is. But apart from the main quest, most of our other content is randomized, so from game to game it will be completely different. I can’t give you any kind of percentage because we’re still playing with those numbers, but that’s really the way we built this game is so that we can have a lot of randomized content, including story elements and including quests.


Do you plan to add additional content after the game is done, since it’s all randomized it might be easy to inject new stuff into it?

Leonard Boyarsky: It really all depends. In the past, we’ve done expansion packs, you know if you look at Starcraft, they’re doing expansions. I’m sure we’ll look at doing stuff like that. It really just has to do with what works for the game. You know, we’ll look at that stuff when it comes to it.


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.


Could you walk me through the development process of designing, for example, a single character or a single monster. How does it come together?

Leonard Boyarsky: A lot of the especially monster design really stems from what is needed from a gameplay perspective. So different guys from our team from different disciplines like art, design, effects… will get together and will call a strike team and will really kind of brainstorm what would be cool to fit this niche in the game that we know we need. In the broadest sense we’ll know we’ll need let’s say a ranged monster, we’ll know we’ll need a monster that casts buffs on other monsters, and how can we bring something original to that. How can we make that an interesting character, or interesting monster. And then, a lot of the times the artists will give a personality or a kind of feel to those monsters and then we’ll come in and work with them on the lore.

What we wanna do for a lot of the stuff is decide whether it’s from the lore side of the demons – whether it’s naturally occurring, and then we’ll try to come up with backgrounds for those different things. And sometimes, we’ll have the idea for, well, you’re in this area so this is the kind of… from a lore standpoint this is the kind of monsters or the kind of animals that you’d encounter, but we really don’t put any kind of requirements in terms of the gameplay of them. We could say, “Oh, you’re gonna run into a goatman here, or whatever” and then they will be able to run with that, because it’s pretty wide open, you know you can do a lot of different stuff with the characters.

As far as the classes – they’re kind of like the same way, but there’s a lot more lore input as we’re going along with those because we really want to build up the world and look at different areas of the world so we look at where these different characters would come from, what their background is, and we’ll really try to balance their personalities and their personal histories with what they’re doing from a gameplay standpoint as well.


Like what they’re actually – why they’re there, or why they’re fighting that monster, or why they’re actually in the game?

Leonard Boyarsky: Exactly. Yeah.