Diablo novel
There are several Diablo novels released, giving further depth to the Diablo universe. Up until WWI 2008, these novels had no connection at all with the actual games, but Diablo III seems to be the first of the games with information from the books actually put in the game.
Background
They are all official Blizzard Entertainment Novels of the Diablo universe and franchise. The first novel published was Diablo: Demonsbane as an ebook novella. Although its sales were counted merely in the hundreds, due to the eBook era barely starting back in 2000, from there forward, the Diablo novels boomed and became very successful.
Despite the events in the books not being mentioned in previous games, they are confirmed to be canon by Blizzard. The articles we list below are full of spoilers, so don't read further than the intro, if you want the full reading experience.
Diablo 3 Plot
How tightly the story developments in the various novels will tie into the plot of Diablo 3 is not yet known, but they are pat of the same storyline. The events in the recent series of books took place thousands of years before the "current" events of Diablo 3, so the connection isn't direct. It likely will be for future Diablo Novels, though.
Leonard Boyarsky spoke on this in an October 2009 interview. [1]
- Hellforge:Speaking of background lore and all that, to what extent will the books from Richard Knaak’s Sin War Trilogy be a part Diablo III’s storyline/setting. I mean, are you guys taking anything from it at all?
- Leonard Boyarsky: Well, nothing specific. It happened 3,000 years before the events of the Diablo games, but it is… it was our attempt to really kind of get out there – you know, with some of the history of the world and kind of codify the lore to a certain degree. It’s been awhile since I read them. I’ve actually read all of them, and I helped during the process of them.
- Chris Metzen worked closely with him to make sure that his vision for what the Sin War was all about was really put forward there so the history is – maybe some of the particulars might not be exactly the way they end up being presented, but as far as the overall details and the overall thrust of the story, that’s lore... our core lore, I guess. And we’re – I don’t know if we’ll refer to them specifically, but that’s definitely like background into what we’re doing if that makes any sense.
