AusGamers recently posted a new video interview with Blizzard Entertainment's Leonard Boyarsky and Jesse McCree about the company's upcoming first expansion for its action RPG, Diablo III. Reaper of Souls will challenge players to defeat Malthael, the fallen Archangel of Wisdom, who seeks to seize control of the Black Soulstone. The new expansion will also offer a new hero: The Crusader, a new level 70 experience cap, new spells and abilities for existing classes, greater emphasis on randomized environments, a reworked Paragon progression, as well as two new game modes: Loot Runs and Nephalem Trials.

AusGamers: Where did all of that stem from? Obviously some of that stuff is not really part of any Diablo legacy, so were you perhaps trialling that for a while to sate people because there is no PvP at the moment? Can you talk about the genesis?

Leonard Boyarsky: It really has nothing to do with the whole PvP situation. It’s just a matter of: no matter how much we can do with the story, once you’ve played through four or five times, you really don’t want to go through that all again, it really turns it all into loot runs and the things we’re doing now with Nephalem Trials and the bounty system -- we kind of just open the whole world to you.

It’s kind of the way that people have been playing Diablo forever, it’s just that before they would have to pick specific runs to do. You know, “this run is the most advantageous for the period of time I’m going to play and I’ll get the most loot”. That wasn’t necessarily quote: “the most fun way to play”, but it was just people really finding ways to maximise their time in the game. So we thought we should create, not a system, but a whole way to play that doesn't force you to keep doing the same thing over and over again to get that kind of result.

Jesse was talking about the Nephalem Rifts, and the Nephalem Rifts are fantastic, because you can go from a level of the cathedral, to a cave, to some totally different dungeon -- different lighting, different weather systems, different monsters -- so it’s always this randomly generated situation or experience that you’re going to have.

Jesse: And the way that we come up with a lot of that sort of stuff, is we play the game and we watch what our players are doing, and we try to adjust and find what’s really fun. Now that we have an expansion, it’s a great opportunity to add a whole bunch of new features, that we couldn’t just piecemeal in with patches and things like that.

AusGamers: Reaper Of Souls Interview

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