You are actually more like Diablo 2 than Diablo 3, certainly with most of the game functions. You have played the Diablo 3 beta which is very slow to start and it’s really like being on training wheels at the start, In TL1 and TL2 it’s not difficult to pick up but you kind of expect players to know what they are doing.

Blizzard is really incredibly good at making game accessible to people that have never played them before and I think they are definitely doing that with Diablo 3. Out approach with TL2 is just getting and play quickly. One of the things I loved about Diablo 2 is I start my character, sprint outside of town and immediately y start laying into stuff, and that idea is something we wanted to keep. Because ideally we want you to play the game again.

We don’t want to scare people away, ideally you get in the game and there are monsters within a few steps and your beating on them and they’re exploding and hopefully that’s satisfying enough. We really want you get you to that immediate satisfaction. Killing stuff quickly and getting a lot of shiny things.

A couple of the ways you are more like Diablo 2 is you still have stat points and you still have skill points as opposed to auto-stats in Diablo 3. So what is the benefit in your opinion of having stats points?

There’s always the problem that roles will dead-end themselves with stat point investment. But I think for it to be rewarding there has to be a chance for it to be not as rewarding, sometime things should occasionally go wrong. And one of the reasons I think that worked so well in Diablo 2 in that it’s such a fast game. You get through the game relatively quickly so if you make a mistake you can try again.

We want people to make alternate characters that have a unique flavour and are thought of as unique characters and there was a set of decisions that resulted in a character. I like to have an identity for a character and it’s not something we want to steer away from.

We have attempted in this stat system to make dead-ends less perilous. We have tried to give each of these stats more utility for every class and every character you want to make and hopefully we have succeeded with that. We do like to give you choices.

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How much in-game testing have you guys done?
We test all the time and the testers are constantly paying through all of the game, which at this point, is assembled end to end which means a lot of hard work through all the acts and balance and tuning. But right now we are going through the game step by step. The kind of testing I am talking about is more dev testing, we are sitting down, playing with the numbers, playing in the zone and seeing how things feel.