GI: Another big change between Diablo III and the previous titles is that you’re going to be beefing up random encounters. The term that I heard thrown around was “random scripted encounters.†Can you talk about what’s new for random encounters in Diablo III?
JW: There are some scripted encounters in Diablo II. A lot of the big Fallen camps in the first act are pre-done encounters. Some of the bosses and things like that. What we wanted to do was take the idea of scripted encounters -- we call them “adventures†-- we want all these events to occur that help define our world. If you’re fighting an evil cult, we want the cult going around the world raising demons and doing bad stuff to people. You want to encounter people in the world to make the world feel more real. But how do you do that within a random world? Our goal was to take the ideas of these encounters and make them random as well.
In dungeons it’s easy, because our dungeons are completely randomly generated, so we just create random scripted encounters. We set a whole bunch of locations in the dungeons where these encounters could show up, and sometimes they show up, and sometimes they don’t, and sometimes an area even has several encounters that could show up. The exteriors are a bit more static in their layout, but we can cut out big portions of the terrain and completely replace them, so when you go through the world, you might come across a giant goat man camp. The next time you come across it, it might be a cultist summoning ritual. The next time, it might be a field that has normal monster distribution. Our goal is that you’d have to go through the game several times in one area to see all the different events that can occur in that area. Those events will really enhance the game story and the feeling of the world and also will create some cool gameplay scenarios.
