Jay Wilson, Lead Designer of Diablo III sat alongside J. Allen Brack, Lead Producer of World of Warcraft for the BlizzCon 2009 World of Warcraft/Diablo III Press Q&A Session. We fought our way past the horde and got a number of interesting questions on Diablo III answered, which we've documented in detail below. Just as a disclaimer, we mixed some paraphrasing and background information in with direct quotes from Wilson.

What are you planning on doing for mods in Diablo III?

We've been dying to get this answered for some time now. Despite all the great campaign editing tools we see coming for StarCraft II and the user-made content for World of Warcraft, it seems it's still not practical for Diablo III.

Jay Wilson:
We considered the idea of doing mods, and the decision we came to was that the project was already so ambitious and so much more content was authored, was random, and therefore has a very difficult authoring pipeline such that doing a user-mod-level kind of map editor would exponentially increase the amount of work we had to do. So we decided it was better to be smart than ambitious.

Pretty much all the mod work that was done in Diablo II was done without any kind of Blizzard support for the exact same reason content was built, because of the randomness, just doesn't lend itself to creating the end-user mod tools.

It's not that we don't value modability, obviously as a company we very much do with StarCraft 2 and World of Warcraft. It's a value for the company, but for us it was really a choice of randomness or end-user mods. And we decided that randomness was more core to the Diablo franchise.

Can you change the cap on skills? How will low-tier skills be useful later in the game?

Most skills start out with a level cap of 5, but that is not actually the maximum cap. It's just a way of making first-time players diversify. In fact, the development team is currently talking about including an item in the game that would raise this level cap, but it's not in the game quite yet.

Previously, the development team considered a system where the cap was raised on different difficulty levels.

As for keeping low-level skills useful, Jay Wilson reiterated about skill runes:

The development team decided to primarily invest in the runes system for making skills useful long-term. You can place a rune on a skill (in the slots that exist on the skill trees pane below each ability) to enhance it, and these provide the boost to make their effects viable later in the game and in harder difficulty levels.

Skill runes can also be moved about freely and aren't permanently set on one skill like the socket runes from Diablo II.

Some examples of these runes that we've heard about in the past are multiple shot runes, which would split the Wizard's simple Magic Missile bolts into multiple missiles without splitting the damage, essentially dealing double of what was previously possible. Another intriguing example with the Wizard enhances what is normally a passively defensive skill into an offensive one generating a whirling wind of ice around her, dealing damage to enemies.

In the BlizzCon Demo, the Witch Doctor could no longer enhance his Zombie Dog with extra damage by casting Locust Swarm on it. The dev team's decided to again, in this case, focus on runes because the previous method was unclear to play-testers.

Additionally, and this is a big change from the two previous games of course, the development team currently plans to allow skill point redistribution. This wasn't enabled in the BlizzCon demo but this is the team's official stance.

Have you considered having a system for replays in Diablo III like StarCraft II?

Jay said that replays were an "interesting" concept but indicated that it wasn't in the picture just yet.

In Diablo II we saw the fate of the heroes from Diablo. Are we going to see heroes from D2 in D3?

At least one of the playable characters from Diablo II (excluding the Barbarian since he's still the same one from the D2 story line) will make it into the D3 story line. We will definitely see one, hopefully more, but maybe not all of them.

Have you had a chance to walk around the [BlizzCon event] floor and have you seen anything you want to change? (From fan feedback.)

Wilson's spent hours watching people play D3 internally at Blizzard "for weeks and weeks and weeks." He hasn't seen anything in particular yet to change.

However, he went on to talk about an example when the player's in a co-op party of four players and they encounter a number of monsters. All the amazing visual effects in Diablo III that make the game more exciting and entertaining become "a soup of effects" and it becomes a problem for visibility. At a certain point it breaks the gameplay, so they're looking to fix this issue.

What's the development cycle like for D3? Do you plan to borrow people from the StarCraft II team when D3 ships?

The teams share a little bit of resources, but the Diablo III team will probably not borrow more than one or two people for full-time work in addition to the strike teams they use for smaller durations of work.

Strike teams are a solution Blizzard's turned to for a long time. When a product is ready to go, these teams play the game and give formalized feedback. The development team often spends after-hours time doing the same. But the strike teams are not quite the same as the other development teams giving up "dedicated resources."

Incidentally, Jay Wilson was on the strike team for World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade.

On the female version of the Monk: How will she look?

Jay Wilson:
We've had a few people who've said -- including on the team -- "You know, how can you do a female monk?" and the answer is: It's our universe and we'll do whatever we like! There's been other games that have approached having a female monk.

We definitely want to look at the look we established for the Monk and try and translate it. I think we're leaning away from [the bald head] at this point ... but along with the other classes, we're going to take a note from the male and try to do something influential but also that makes her stand out on her own.

And she'll look sexy. And hot!

Will they be named nuns? [Laughter]

Jay Wilson: No. [Laughter]

How are the Acts working in Diablo III and is this new Borderlands desert area part of Act 2? Will we visit multiple towns per Act?

The desert area is definitely Act 2.

Jay Wilson:
Our structure of the game isn't quite the same [as D2] - We're not talking about that exactly yet. But what I will say is that the Acts are more of a story division for us and a geographic division for us. So what we're showing now is the second Act.

In contrast to D2, where each Act gave players a base in one particular town (The Rogue Encampment, Lut Gholein, Kurast Docks, The Pandemonium Fortress, Harrogath) and the areas around it, in Diablo III the acts are being used more as story divisions.

There will be multiple towns in each Act but they might not all serve the same purpose. One might be a primary town, another might be a "go-to location" and another might be an "element of intrigue." Alcarnus, from the BlizzCon demo, belongs to the last of these; there aren't any NPCs except for the temporary ones one rescues as part of a quest. It's not a town you necessarily visit more than once.

How are cinematics being done since you have five character classes? Will these be pre-rendered as they have been in the past, or game engine cutscenes?

The cinematics of Diablo III are focused around the character you play, however you won't see the characters in the videos; their presence will be implied. Thus, the cinematics team won't be producing individual movies for each playable class.

Jay Wilson:
We're using cinematics to about the same level as Diablo II did.

It's a difficult story to tell with cinematics because we basically have a main character who can't be in the cinematics. We've really focused on the ancillary characters - Their focus is always to be kind of implying the player's presence right outside the room on the other side of that door.

We don't have a big focus on in-game cinematics. We try to tell our story through action, through questing, and through events. We do have a lot more scripted events, but we separate those from in-game cinematics in the fact that we don't pull control away from the player.

Those cutscenes will not take control away from the player and will not be in the style of the character announcement cutscenes we've seen for the Wizard and Monk. The player can choose whether to pay attention to what's going on or to ignore them completely, though in the case of more major plot events, they will be difficult to miss.

How is trading going to work in D3?

They haven't decided what the trade system will be, exactly.

Jay Wilson:
I can tell you that going into a [Battle.net] chat channel and spamming it is not how it will work. [Laughter in the crowd.] I can also say that creating trade games that get lost in this endless list of other games is also not going to work.

We're going to have some kind of trading system - It could be an auction house; it could be a way to trade items over Battle.net more easily. We don't know exactly what that's going to be. It's probably not something that's going to get decided until we do some serious work with Battle.net.

We consider Diablo III is a game all about trade. The best items are acquired in Diablo through trade whereas in WoW they're acquired through raid. So given that, it really moves us to facilitate a really great trading system.

As you can see, the focus of the development team at this point, at least, seems to be almost entirely on the single-player and story aspect of the game, not to mention constructing all the environments, monsters, and characters.

Is Diablo III going to be a linear game like Diablo II, going from A to B?

Non-linear is a really cool way to go, but with all the random content we have to create, it tends to have us create far more content than you would create for even a normal linear game. We added branching to that, duplicating your content over-and-over again.

As you've probably noticed, it's not exactly like we're moving fast to our ship date. [Laughs.]

So yeah, we're definitely are focusing on a bit more of a linear game.

One of the things we're trying to do, though is: If you look at Diablo II one of the things I thought they did well was at least give the feeling of non-linearity through choices of, "Am I going to go through this random dungeon?" and, "How am I going to explore this exterior environment?" so that kind of feel of non-linearity we do want to still capture.

A question came up regarding fan site exclusives.

Blizzard might have developer chats through its new Twitter initiative, as a away of helping out fan sites with their reporting.