Diablo 3 was going to be an MMORPG

08 Apr 2011 at 01:07:55 by Paul Younger

Speaking with Diablo: IncGamers today, Max Scahefer of Runic Games discussed their up coming action RPG Torchlight and also his work on the Diablo Franchise.

The Diablo fanbase would have loved to have seen a Diablo MMORPG being developed I'm sure, and according to Max Schaefer, it was on the cards.

Max: We wanted to make it a bigger game. We were going the MMO route. We wanted to support many more players in the game. When I left the company in 2003 the project was still very early on; far from the point where we could have revealed anything about it publicly, since so much would still have changed. There’s lots and lots that goes in inside game companies that never hits the light of day, since projects change so much in their early iterations. We may have changed our own path radically had we kept going on it.

But at the time our thinking was to go more MMO on it. We wanted to foster big in-game communities. Not just session-based with four or eight people. We wanted more than just 4 or 8 people per game. We wanted a big overworld and a giant shared community.

IncGamers You’d have hosted lots of players in the same instance? Or like a perpetual world? 

Max: A really big instance. Basically a perpetual world.

The full interview with Max will be available next week on IncGamers where he also talks about the early version of Diablo 3, the Diablo/Blizzard North snubs from Blizzard’s 20th anniversary special, the making of Torchlight 2, and much more.

The interview will also be available in the first ever Diablo IncGamers podcast which will be broadcast next week.

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