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

The first couple of Diablo games featured comparatively little lore and story to other RPGs, in that we didn’t know anything about the characters we were playing. In what ways can we expect the characters and their personal agendas to be fleshed out in D3?

Leonard Boyarsky: Each class has a different conversation style, they say different things to the NPC. They’ll be able to find lore that pertains to their classes. Like we said before, there might be different events or different things that they encounter that are different for the different classes. We really wanna give a lot of background, a lot of feel to these characters.

What we’re trying to do or what we’re doing is really… crafting the experience so it has different facets from different viewpoints as a starting point, and then from there the more we can kind of add on to the player experience to make the classes feel different including the lore, not only from the skill standpoint but from the lore and their history without taking away from the action aspects is part of our whole plan.


So that way players interested in the lore than the gameplay would have more than a reason to play all the different characters to get a total experience. 

Leonard Boyarsky: Yeah, I mean that’s the hope – that people would be interested to see what not only the skillsets but also the other view of these other characters is. There’s gonna be conversations and, like I said lore, and certain things that only certain things and certain classes can find and things like that.


Regarding the story setting and all the other stuff that populates Diablo III, do you draw any inspiration from any literary sources – you know, classic novels, Greek literature, etc.

Leonard Boyarsky: I don’t know what originally inspired the Diablo series ‘cause I’ve come on rather recently, but I draw inspiration from everything I read. I just try to have… I read a lot of non-fiction as well as fiction. Watch a ton of movies. I can’t specifically say anything, one-to-one, has specifically influenced us. But if you look at the Lord of the Rings and how they handled those, as well as the books themselves, I think one of the reasons, for me at least, that they were so successful is because they really fleshed out even down to engraving on the swords that you can never see in the movie. It’s like they really tried to make it this living world.

Leonard Boyarsky: So that’s really how we come at this – it’s like, where do these people come from? What are they doing? What’s their inspiration, you know. So if we’re looking at say the Monk, I might go in and start looking at Zen monasteries, old Zen stories, or history of that nature, plus we’re working in some of the Eastern Orthodox, Eastern European Orthodox kind of feel to it too, so we do research into that. It’s just all over the place. It’s really kind of a detail-by-detail basis.
 

Do you also draw inspiration from your previous games – for example Vampire or Fallout?

Leonard Boyarsky: One of the most interesting things for me is that Diablo has a very distinctive voice and you know it’s really something that we’re trying to stick to. We really want to get that feel of the horror – the underlying psychological horror. At its basis it’s an action game, so there’s only so much of that kind of feel you can kind of get. But I think Diablo 1 did it really well , and I think that it’s one of the things we really wanna hit.

Whereas, I think some of my past games I’ve been a bit more flippant in some of the dialogue writing. It’s just a different style, and we really wanna be true to that, and we really wanna make the dialogue as quality as possible, but we really wanna evoke the psychological horror feeling. You know, the whole Lovecraftian vibe of the universe. There’s all this stuff going on behind the scenes that’s just waiting to crush man.


Do you have all of these Lovecraftian elements – are they all written in? Do you create like this whole universe and set the story there or how is it exactly? What’s the relationship between horror and everything else?

Leonard Boyarsky: Well, it’s interesting because there’s different levels. There’s the level of the Sin War, or the eternal conflict between the angels and the demons and that’s not really a horror story – that’s more of an action story. But when you look at it from mankind’s viewpoint, it’s very much a horror story when the demons get involved, so there’s different levels.

And when I came onboard I was handed a bible – a thick lore bible that they had put together so there’s a lot of history that we’re using as a springboard to start with the story and inform everything that we do.


So I suppose that the focus of the game would be on humanity, rather than the angels and the demons and the other stuff that people throw around when they’re discussing the game?
 
Leonard Boyarsky: Well, it’s always – if you look at the Diablo games it’s always about the humans. How did the humans react to this? How is this affecting the humans? The humans are caught in the middle, what is that all about? What’s gonna happen to Sanctuary? What’s gonna happen to the human beings?

There’s some stuff that they talked in the Sin War, about how humanity came about. And you know, at the end of the Sin War… I don’t wanna throw in any spoilers there for people who haven’t read it yet but they talked about how the uneasy… I guess “truce” allowed the existence of Sanctuary to continue.

Mankind is in a very tenuous position in this universe, and the games have always taken that position or that viewpoint, and we’re gonna be continuing that in this game.