Queen Asylla

Queen Asylla was the wife of the Mad King Leoric. She was beheaded by the Archbishop Lazarus under the watchful eye of Leoric himself.

The Diablo III development team likely added her into the game as a full-fledged NPC to not only propel the player forward through the narrative, but to also provide more context into the world of Sanctuary and to enrich the character of Leoric himself, and the (often convoluted) relationship he had with Lazarus and the subjects of his kingdom.

Queen Asylla is a good example of the team's focus on delivering a much more realized narrative for players, and also reinforces their design philosophy of "play, don't tell" which is a riff off of the old golden rule of writing, which is "show, don't tell".

Contents

Lore

Queen Asylla is new to the Diablo franchise. Any scenes with her in the game are based upon the events preceding those of Diablo I, namely the fall of the mad king, the influence of Diablo himself, and the actions of Archbishop Lazarus. Even within the Diablo I manual, which was rich with writing and lore, she isn't mentioned.

Asylla appears in spectral form as a quest-giver NPC brandishing her own head, giving the player her blessing to free the souls of six of her subjects who died under the dark reign of Diablo within the Tristram Cathedral. Shortly before the player leaves the torture chambers, they may stumble upon a scene featuring Leoric standing by as Asylla is strapped into a guillotine and beheaded by Lazarus.

The Road to the Mad King

Queen Asylla at the entrance of the torture chambers.

Upon entering the torture chambers, the player will see the spectral queen waiting for them with a quest to give. She gives a short speech upon interaction:

Finally, someone to help my people. Guilty of nothing, save being loyal to me, they were cursed to be held in these cells beyond their natural lives. My blessing will allow you to free them from their long torment.

This quest is one of an unknown amount, all chained together tasking the player to ultimately defeat the Skeleton King. The portion that Asylla gives the players tasks them with releasing six tormented souls within the torture chambers in order to summon the Warden and take his key. The warden cannot be summoned until Queen Asylla's quest is completed.

Flux spoke of the Queen and her quest in a hands-on report from BlizzCon 2010:

The player appeared in a narrow hallway, immediately before the spectral form of Queen Asylla. Talk to the hand, Baby!

Well, listen to the hand, since she talked from her head. Her body remained immobile and floating, like a post, but as you walked past her she turned, always holding the head towards you, while she gave her little quest speech.

The quest was simple; you had to move through the fairly huge dungeon and find the six prisoners, then click them to set them free. The only difficulty for this was the size of the dungeon. It was quite large, but easy to move around since the passages were wide, straight, and regular.

The whole dungeon was shaped like a square, with clusters of jail cells in each corner, and paths along the perimeter, with two crossing straight through the center. That’s where the final battle of the demo took place, where the Warden appeared. Prior to fighting the Warden (who spawned once you reached the center of the dungeon, after freeing all six ghosts) players had to find the ghosts, which required you to run through pretty much the whole dungeon. I did that level 8 or 10 times, though I only had time to finish it 4 or 5 of those, and there was no predictability to the location of the ghosts. Sometimes you’d get 2 or 3 in the lower right corner, where you started off the level; other times there were none nearby, and the others were scattered through all the rest of the huge level. IOW, the random ghost location program was working very well.

The spirits were easy to spot, since they showed up on the mini-map. You see one to the right, and a larger view can be seen here. Actually getting to them once you’d spotted them wasn’t always easy; the cell blocks were miniature mazes, with bars you could see and shoot through on all sides (this area was very easy for the Demon Hunter and Wizard), but with only one doorway per cell. So you’d spot the green circle (or two right beside each other; I guess that way the ghosts of Asylla’s servants had each other to complain to through all eternity) but still have to spend some time running around to the other side of the cell block, then winding through two or three cells to reach the ghostly servant.