User blog:Danrr/Interview with Leonard Boyarsky at Hellforge

Leonard Boyarsky, Lead World Designer of Diablo III, gave an interview to Hellforge mainly about lore and how it is revealed in the game, but also about quests and game design.

''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.

The interview is quite lengthy, read the rest of it here.