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GameSpot: Stieg, how are you involved in Diablo II's development?

Stieg Hedlund: With Diablo, I came in fairly late in the development process and principally worked on the play balancing and polishing of the game. I started early with Diablo II, however, and have been involved in every phase of production, starting before the completion of Diablo, cataloging potential improvements and new ideas, and then going on from there to create the initial concept proposal. This led to more detailed documentation, which eventually turned into spreadsheets of game-ready data.

I think people typically think of a designer as the idea guy who creates a plan, which everyone then works together to implement. Blizzard's system is a bit different. To begin with, Blizzard has a very fluid creative environment where every person involved in the development of Diablo II, be it in the creation of art assets, code, music, cinematics, or in my case, gameplay, can affect the final game. The RPG genre is so well known and universally well liked among the members of our team, that they are sure to have all kinds of terrific ideas for the game. It would be foolish for me to ignore these ideas in favor of my own, especially since there is such a lot of content needed for this game that in many cases one idea does not necessarily exclude another, but instead there is room for all. So my job is really to take all of these ideas and weed through them for the ones that can fit into the game directly and the other ones from which some elements might be appropriate but must be altered to be applicable to the game system that we are creating. So, in a sense, you can say that everyone has a hand in the design of the game - that is to say, everyone has creative input relating to their area of expertise. But someone has to be responsible for the big picture, the overall vision, and that's where I come in.

GameSpot: What stage of development are you in now with Diablo II?

Stieg Hedlund: Diablo II is in its final stages of development. We're testing extensively, balancing, and polishing the game, which is a fairly large task, since there's so much of it.

Next: What remains for the team and the designer