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GameSpot: Designing a game at Blizzard is done differently in that you guys use "strike teams." Can you describe what the strike team is, how it works, and how it affects the development of a game?

David Brevik: The strike team was originally set up during the making of Diablo as a way for the guys [at Blizzard in Southern California] to give us feedback. It's a team made up of about five or six people; there's no real set amount. The people on the strike team are representatives of different [responsibilities in the game's development]. There are design people, there are art people, there are programming people. They all get together and, as a committee, discuss ideas and stuff coming from different parts of the company. All of Blizzard looks at and works on every single game that we have.

GameSpot: What are some of the technologies you experimented with early on in Diablo II?

Brevik: 3D was definitely something we were thinking about. But, we just didn't like our experiments. Because of the perspective on Diablo, we just felt that it was slower and looked worse (in 3D). So, we decided that wasn't really the [right] decision for us. And, especially at Blizzard, we are not going to be romanticized by technology. If 3D meant it would add something to the gameplay, then that was going to be something we would do. But we weren't going to change the way that Diablo was played - we were going to keep the isometric perspective, and we were going to have a fixed camera.

GameSpot: Was there an intense debate within Blizzard about whether to go 3D or stick with 2D?

Brevik: Oh, yeah. [laughs] There are intense debates about anything, though. [laughs] But that's why the best ideas float to the top, because there are good, strong arguments on both sides. We really considered going 3D. We had the 3D version up and running. It just wasn't what we wanted. This was a year ago, and 3D cards were just coming out on the market. If we wanted [Diablo II] to come out this Christmas, which we were thinking last year, we would have to do software rendering and [3D], and we didn't want to have to take the time and expense to do something that we felt wouldn't be worth it. It wasn't going to affect the gameplay at all. If it had made a big difference [to gameplay], we would have gone with it.