At this year's Game Convention, Diablo III's lead designer Jay Wilson spoke to journalists from IGN about the new potion system, inventory, and story details. Since the game was recently announced in Paris at Blizzard's Worldwide Invitational event, a segment of the franchise's fan base has been upset about the art style, claiming it didn't stay true to the darker nature of the previous two games. Wilson disagrees.

The details are as below:

"To be fair, it's a small minority that really don't like the art style," he said. "A majority of the feedback we've gotten has been overwhelmingly positive about the art style, I think when they see the final game they'll find it's probably a bit darker than they might think. What we've shown is the earliest parts of the game meant to be a little sunnier and brighter than the later because we're trying to set a juxtaposition and make everything feel worse as the game move on. In terms of the actual art style, we went through three full art revisions where we essentially hit the reset button on all the art and started over again and one of the main reasons was when we tried to go towards what our memory of Diablo II was we found that it created a drab, boring game that didn't play very well."

"One of the things I try to remind... people who talk about the art style and what Diablo II looked like, [is] they're being very selective in their memory. They're remembering small parts of Act I and small parts of Act III and conveniently forgetting all the green fields of Act I and all of Act II, which is actually one of the most popular Acts. The general kind of almost garish look of the monsters really made them stand out, and those things made the game play really well. They were actually criticized at the time. When Diablo II came out it was panned for being too bright and cheerful compared to the original Diablo. Of course the original Diablo drew like little red lines around the enemies so you could actually see them."

Blizzard wasn't making any sort of announcements for Diablo III. So far it's just the Barbarian and Witch Doctor classes that we know of, and we were told Blizzcon 2008 will be the place for another reveal. So we took the opportunity to ask Wilson about some of the design changes with Diablo III, particularly with the removal of potions and the slotted inventory system. Players of the first two games will remember how much combat revolved around having a sufficient supply of potions at the ready to refill health. Well, that's not how it's going to work in this game; there are no health potions to be purchased at vendors. Instead, groups of enemies will drop health orbs that instantly restore lost hit points and disappear if not collected within a set time. Wilson described why this decision was made.

"A lot of people, I think, would say that's a hallmark of the Diablo series, the potion system. We looked at it and said, 'No, that just makes the game worse,'" said Wilson. "It doesn't make it play like a better action game, it just kind of gives the player infinite health. It's actually a fairly poor recovery mechanic because it forces the designers to design monsters that have to deal with a player that has infinite health. The only thing you can do is have monsters that can overcome that health and essentially one-shot you. That's not a very interesting monster. It's actually a horrible monster. But that's the only option. The design shoehorned the designers into that kind of monster design. So we focused on a health system that actually forces the player to think tactically to recover health from monsters and to put them in some situations where they are low on health but have to walk into an enemy encounter anyway. That makes for a much more challenging encounter but it also makes for a situation where we can design the monsters to be a lot more interesting. We actually can lower damage on monsters. We want monsters to do less damage because we want them to wear you down over time and do things that are challenging in different ways."

More details on next page.

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