Changes

==Gruesome Imagery==

::'''Wilson: '''<blue>Yes. We do get a couple of things that are questionable, but usually, it’s not so much gore-related … it’s that you can have gore that implies things that we as a Western society aren’t really comfortable with. Any kind of nudity, you can’t really have, especially when you couple it with violence. Those types of things don’t work well. You have to be really careful with things like torture. Those things are difficult. But to honest, in the development of the game, we tend not to think about it. We tend to build what we need to build and then wait for somebody to say, “That’s a step too far.” There are a few ways we edit ourselves, but usually not with gore, like sheer amounts of gore. It’s like, “You want to behead the guy? Go ahead, yes. You want to slice the guy apart? Go ahead.”<br><br>

One example of one of the biggest ways we edited ourselves is … we have this cool system where we can hit a dude so hard that his skeleton flies out. It was awesome, really cool-looking. And we added several skills that did that; every time you hit somebody, their skeletons fly out. But I have to say, it got a little boring after a while! It became a little excessive. It took away the coolness of it. And so there, we felt like our overuse of it actually de-emphasized it, and we didn’t like that. We were like, “No, if we want to push the skeleton out of somebody, we want it to be a big deal.” I want to really like see it, and I want it to be a special event. And that’s probably the main way we’ve toned ourselves down, is to go back and say, let’s not go so overboard, that there’s nothing cool about the violence.</blue>

==Establishing that "Diablo I" Mood==

::<blue>A lot of what I've done in my past games - even though they've had a lot more dialogue and hardcore RPG stuff than we're going to have in this game - the thing I'm always trying to do is to create a mood for the player first and foremost, and that's going to hopefully colour the player's experience from the minute he steps into the game; the way people talk or the environment he's running through… Diablo 1 had this really haunted, horror mood, Diablo 2 lost a little bit of that, and we really looked at the difference of those two things, so that's the kind of thing that we're trying to get the players to experience.</blue>

==Content Restrictions and Mature Rating==

::'''''<blue><b><font color="#FFFFFF">Wired.com:''' </b> Are you thinking it’s possible to turn off the blood completely? Or simply change the blood color?</font>::'''<b>Jay Wilson:''' </b> Yeah, we’re going to have to be able to turn off blood, change the color and things like that, because you can’t have red blood in some regions, regions that we would very much like to sell the game in. So we definitely build everything, that every bit of gore, in a deposited manner so that at a future date, we can go through and change it all or turn it off. In terms of what kind options we give, we actually give within a particular version. We’ve haven’t nailed it down, but if you turn down the gore, you can actually change it to not have red blood. That seems to be really the sticking point for a lot of people because a lot of times we use blood as feedback. And so if we take that out, that actually hurts the gameplay. But we can change the note of that feedback so that it’s something that people are more okay with.

::'''''<font color="#FFFFFF"><b>Wired.com: '''</b> You’ll obviously have to edit content for regions like Germany and Australia, but what about China? Is that a more difficult case?</font>::'''<b>Jay Wilson:''' </b> Definitely for regions like Germany and Australia, we will have to change blood if we’re going to sell there. And that’s fine. Those are the standards for those regions, and we don’t really have a problem with catering to what they need and what they want. But China’s going to be hard for us. Because a lot of the restrictions there are really… we may not be able to do them. It may not be possible. With our relationship with NetEase, we recently got new information about what China really wants, and it’s a lengthy list. It’s really hard for us to cater to. We’ll try. There’s no reason we wouldn’t want to go there, but there is a certain point where we’d have to redo so much of the game that it’s not viable anymore.</blue>

 ==Pentagrams and Crosses Removed== [[Pentagrams]], [[cross]]es, and other traditional Diablo-style holy symbols are not present in Diablo III, and have also been [[retcon]]ned out of ''World of Warcraft'' in recent expansions. This is an intentional design choice by the developers; in addition to helping them avoid potential controversy, they feel that removing symbols from existing real world religions will help them make their games more original and self-contained.  This change has created a lot of controversy, with fans objecting to the change on aesthetic, symbolic, and "gutless corporate weasel" grounds. [[Bashiok]] addressed this issue at length in October, 2010.[http://diablo.incgamers.com/blog/comments/diablo-iii-should-have-pentagrams/] <blue><font color="#FFFFFF">When WoW came out they pretty much removed any visual religious references. They removed the cross from chaples, the alter of storms no longer had a pentagram etc. Diablo 3 <b>NEEDS</b> these demonic visualizations to add to the immersion of the game, I really hope a blue can comment on this.</font> <b>Bashiok: </b>A lot of what we do now and have been doing for the past... 8 or so years, around the Warcraft III and initial World of Warcraft development era, is putting a lot of effort into crafting unique worlds. Meaning that we put more effort into every aspect of the game world itself. Who is this secret organization? What is their history? What’s their look? Do they have a specific accent? Do they have a symbol or mark that can identify them? In the previous games I think there was a sense of “Oh it’s a demon, Diablo, devil, Satan, satanism… pentagram!” and while certainly there are those influences, what we’re creating now and have been creating for quite some time is evolving the game world and making something more complete. A complete world where every aspect is fully realized, maybe even if it doesn’t show up in the game. I think that same sort of world-crafting can be seen between Warcraft II and Warcraft III. A big shift in focus to fleshing out a unique fantasy world and story.</blue> See the [[Pentagrams]] article for more on this issue, including a critical reaction from Max Schaefer, one of the creators of Diablo and an art director for Diablo I and Diablo II.   ==Fan Feedback==