Industry veteran Bill Roper is now CEO of Hellgate: London developer Flagship Studios, but prior to this he hung his hat at Blizzard, where he had a major hand in the Diablo RPG series.
Although Blizzard has yet to announce Diablo 3, you just know it's coming - but what would Roper do with the sequel if he were in charge of it?
This is precisely the question we posed him during a recent interview, the full transcript of which we'll be publishing shortly.
Over to Bill...
"It would be that challenge of giving the Diablo players the things that they'd expect... I think with Diablo, for example, the camera angle is a big part of it. I think with the Diablo series there is a level of expectation about only using the mouse to move.
"I think people that are hardcore Diablo fanatics... people that, if you are making Diablo 3, you are making that game very, very specifically for. There are some things that they are going to want.
To be honest, the way that Blizzard is approaching StarCraft II is really smart. They're saying, 'OK, what do the millions of StarCraft fans very specifically want from a StarCraft experience? Great, well that's what we're going to give them. Yes we're going to do updates, yes we're going to create the units, yes there's new technologies'. [But] you look at StarCraft II, and right away you feel comfortable.
"You'd want that same kind of thing from Diablo 3. At the same time, you want to come up with a lot of fun, new and cool ideas that really stretch the world and stretch the characters and stretch the gameplay so it's not just the exact same thing over and over again.
"I think that would be the big challenge, to say, 'Here's our core three, four or five elements that must absolutely positively be in there. We've got to do these things. Past that, what can we do that when people are playing it they'll go, Wow, I really didn't expect that."
Keep eyes peeled for our entire Bill Roper interview hitting shortly.
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