BlizzCon 2013 – Diablo III: Reaper of Souls Preview Panel Transcript

Haroutunian: Thanks, Tim. So when we first started building our exterior zones in Reaper of Souls, we knew we wanted to make some changes compared to how we did them in Acts I through IV.

Now the exteriors in those acts are barely fetched, they’re very static. The interiors are slightly randomized and we really wanted to change that up for Reaper of Souls. So to that end we made fully randomized exteriors and Pandemonium is one of those; and so, as you can see here, these are just basic renderings of the mini-maps of the entire level. You can see that the location of the start, and exit is completely different between the two. The shapes are very different.

We actually have the interiors of the zone also fully randomized, all of them. Not just little bits and pieces. We got these nice organic edges that are again fully randomized every time you play. We also completely randomized the direction and flow through the zone.

That means every time you play the zone whether its in story-mode or in Adventure-mode or even Nephalem Rifts, the zone is random every single time you play. And inside this random zone you guys are seeing are Realm Walkers.

We have a few other treats here, we have an abandoned garrisons, these are ancient fortresses that the angels built to ward off the demons. And inside, these are abandoned, so the monsters that have taken over are not necessarily what you’d expect. They’re not angels or demons; they’re completely other types of monsters.

We also have these battles frozen in time, when the angels controlled this place they set traps everywhere just to imprison the demon hordes, you know, to lessen the numbers that were coming through. But the player can now go in — smash the trap, and kill all the demons and get all the loot.

You also have deadly hazard, just spread out all throughout the zone. Like this is a very contentious battlefield for heaven and hell, so here the angels have laid traps all throughout to stop the demons. But now you’re the bad guy to Malthael, so you’re going to have to contend with all of these on the way. So we’ve seen, we’ve got the fully randomized zone. We’ve got a whole bunch of cool content on the side and let’s see how it all comes together. Let’s see the zone live in action with some actual gameplay.

(video plays)

Alright, I’m going to pass this back to Josh. He’s going to wrap this up.