And with range classes, there is a bunch of tactics too. For example the Witch Doctor, he is sometimes very effective against stationary ranged targets, because a lot of his long ranged attacks are slow like the firebomb, which isn't effective against melee-target, cause they are moving too fast, but ranged targets are fairly static and so he could bombard this guys. But he can still deal with this advancing group of melees. So we are really trying to create a lot of interesting tactics across all the different classes and monster types.

4Players: Will the horadric cube returns?

Jay Wilson: We have not decided, whether or not. We will make some type of crafting system, perhaps with the horadric cube or not. Most players used the horadric cube just as a bigger inventory slot and this was an annoying kind of use. But you will see the

Female Witch Doctor surrounded by enemies.

horadrim making an appearance in the story.

4Players: In the WWI-presentation I saw gems dropping. What about runes?

Jay Wilson: Runes and Gems are in the game, yes. We're not talking about the specifics right now, but I can say, runes are not item-based anymore and they have nothing to do with items anymore. And I'm not a fan of "rune words" and we are really moving away from those.

4Players: What are the challenges and restrictions with randomly generated content?

Jay Wilson: I think the biggest problem with randomly generated content is, that it's very difficult to do exteriors and we actually avoided it in our exteriors, we don't use random layouts (only layout or fundament). [...] When you look at Diablo 2, I really think that random layouts wouldn't add much to the exteriors, we could just make them big squares areas. But there are some elements like randomizing the exits, causing you to explore. But there other ways to get the same effect, for example you could block the exit. It requires you to find something in the actual exterior to move forward, that will generated the same effect of exploration. So we need a big square to randomly place something in there and we've a variety of different options (called adventure-system), like terrain-sets,

Female Barbarian vs. Wood Wraiths

we you can put scripted events on those, scripted monster encounters or more challenging monster fights. We generate more adventures for a zone that a player can see in one playthrough and the idea behind is that a player should see something new during the next playthrough. But all the dungeons are completely random, all the layouts for those and all the encounters are completely randomly distributes across the zone. So the rare monsters and the champions (mini-bosses) are placed randomly, all the items are generated randomly and all the items properties too.

4Players: What about PvP (Player vs. Player) in Diablo 3?

Jay Wilson: We recognized the duelling was very popular in Diablo 2. Just flip a switch and let players attack each other, wasn't enough for us. We love competitive play but we prefer to formulise it in some ways. So we don't realising any information about the pvp-system now, but we are working on specific Player-vs.-Player modes.