Video Games PC Xbox 360 PS3 Wii PSP DS PS2 PlayStation 2 GameCube GBA PlayStation 3

GameSpot: At what stage does the art department come into the development process?

Phil Shenk: Pretty much at the beginning. There's not too much delineation between the departments. Everybody's sort of a designer.

Matt Householder: It's fairly nonhierarchical here in terms of the design process. We have a real democratic and fluid collaborative process.

Phil: Early on we define the character classes - their general strengths and weaknesses, their area of focus as far as their skills - and then we flush them out as we go along from there.

GS: How do you guys create a character? Does one of you say, "I think this would be a good character"? Do you discuss it? Are there meetings? Do you create, say, 20 characters and then decide the five best that are going to go into the game? How does it work?

Phil: Are we talking about characters or monsters?

GS: Character classes.

Matt: We had some initial ideas that, I think, were admitted by Eric Schaffer. Then we circulated those ideas among the core bunch who were decompressing from the Diablo I experience. And then we criticized them and thought about how they would look. Plus we wanted the character types to look like the original three in Diablo I - we thought them to be unique, that is not the same as the ones that were in Diablo I, but to make sure they were complementary to one another. There's no clear hierarchy in terms of which one is best. Kind of a rock, scissors, paper relationship among them, so those were all ideas and issues that were brought out early on.

We divided the class names and types - that was under flux for some time about what our fifth class would be (barbarian class). Initially, we argued a bit about whether we wanted to go with a generic female and a generic male, and then let people customize them with clothing and armor and weaponry, but we decided that the five types of characters should all look unique and play uniquely and differently. So we came up with the skill system to go along with that. Each player-character type has a unique set of skills. So all of these issues are kind of interrelated when you get to character design.