Interview with creator of Diablo

General Discussions
#1

Hi,
I’m watching a fascinating interview on IGN with David Brevik the creator of Diablo. It’s really long at 90 minutes but what an interesting story. He’s a very humble and funny guy!

Some interesting themes are the power of team work with the story about how David initially hated many of the best parts of Diablo such as the real time game play and the cinematic ending with the stone plunged into the hero’s forehead. Also the play testing and second opinions between blizzard north and south which sounded like a great method to avoid ‘group think’ such as how they scrapped the point and click Warcraft adventures game because it wasn’t a Ferrari, it was only a General Motors, haha. The addition of networked internet play and directx in the last 6 months also sounded chaotic without specialists in the team.

#2

i also can recommend this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VscdPA6sUkc&t=18s

Post Mortem of Diablo, same speaker :slight_smile:

#3

That’s a good video, thanks. More descriptive about the technical aspects.

#4

A while ago I also watched this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FG10e0-JyjY it’s basically a top level view on the making of diablo 3.
It’s less technical but still interesting imo especially if you have watched the talk of David Brevik before.
Just thought that I might share it with you in case someone is interested :slight_smile:

#5

Oh haven’t seen that last one. These are cool highly recommend for anyone.

#6

I really enjoyed that one, thanks for posting!
So many funny things there. The click click click at 22 minutes made me laugh. I look back at when I played Diablo and feel pretty silly about how simplistic the combat was which captivated me for so long.
The quote about game designers being lost in a sea of minutae is interesting. He recommends using core game design pillars to prioritise.
I don’t agree with his aversion to math tests in item selection and skill point allocation, I think that’s fun.
His expose of the character creation was interesting.
Incredible to think that the team was 80 to 200 people. Wow.
Would be so much fun to work at blizzard or in any team of game designers.