Changes

The [[D3 Team]] wants to improve on how quests were handled in [[Diablo II]]. They want the major quests to be interesting, important, and plot-driven. Many of these quests will be character-specific; your character won't (always) just be an errand boy and the quest won't just be something minor; it will advance the [[story]].

[[Image:Follower_interaction.jpg|thumb|200px|[[Barbarian]] helping [[followers]] on the [[Escort Mission]] quest.]]

All known quests were researched in the Blizzcon 2008 and 2009 playable demos. Details of these quests may change in the final game.

Click the quest names below to read full articles on each quest with many more details and screenshots.

All these quests were located in [[Tristram]] or the dungeons below the ruined town. The base camp at Tristram was quite small and inhabited by only two [[NPCs]], neither of whom were merchants. It's expected that the full town of Tristram will be quite a bit larger. (Or this base camp might be where new characters begin the game, and they only reach the full Tristram after completing these introductory quests.)

All of these quests were located in the deserts of Act 2, somewhere in the mid-section of the act. Characters started out just beyond the walls of [[Caldeum]], and could not return to the city. The designers revealed that this was a special fix just for the demo, since players would have seen a great deal of the game story in Caldeum, and the didn't want to reveal that much of it yet.

[[Leonard Boyarsky]] is the main story guy on the [[D3 Team]] and while he isn't the only person who makes up quests, he heads up that department in the development of Diablo 3. Leonard was asked how quests are designed in an October 2009 interview. [http://hellforge.gameriot.com/blogs/Hellforge/Diablo-III-The-Lore-of-the-World-An-Interview-with-Leonard-Boyarsky/page1]

While the main quests in each act will not be random, most of the smaller quests will be. Diablo 3 quests will not be totally random; there is writing and design involved in creating them; but most areas of the game will have more quests than can occur each game. There may be 6 quests that can possibly appear in one section, of which 3 or 4 will appear each game. In this way players will see different combinations of events each time they play through the game.

The Diablo 3 team has brought up quests as one way to solve the [[end game]] problems, where characters wind up just "running" the same bosses over and over again. The team hopes to allow/require more variety in gameplay by offering a variety of quests in the late game, giving players more viable activities to engage in. Julian Love addressed this question in an October 2009 interview. [http://www.diablo-source.com/index.php?cmd=article&sec=news&act=view&id=354]

[[Image:Q-the-skeleton-king1.jpg|right|thumb|Blizzcon 2008 display.]]

[[File:Quest-window2.jpg|left|thumb|Blizzcon 2009 display.]]

There are a variety of improvements to the quest aspect of the [[User Interface]] in Diablo 3. Besides the basic quest window, there's an audio player-style interface that pops up on the side of the screen when a character has an NPC speech to listen to. This gives players the ability to listen to longer NPC dialogues, or to "read" ancient tomes and other objects that relate the game [[story]] without having to stand still for the duration of the audio.

Like, we put in some background of Leoric, his journal and Lachdanan who are characters that you’ve heard about and didn’t really meet in their human forms in the first Diablo, so you get to hear their voices and their stories from their point of view. It’s just that I think people are really kind of interested in that especially if they’ve played the games all the way from the first one.

[[Image:Wizard_vs_King_Leoric.jpg|right|150px|thumb|The [[Wizard]] meets [[King Leoric]].]]

The [[D3 Team]] is trying to make Diablo III much more [[story]]-driven. They want the characters to be individuals and to be important figures in the world; not just interchangeable errand boys, as they usually were in Diablo II. [[Leonard Boyarsky]] talked about this in an interview in September, 2008.[http://www.gamebanshee.com/interviews/diabloiii2.php]

[[Image:Mon-thousand-summon2.jpg|thumb|right|250px|[[Thousand Pounder]] being summoned.]]

[[Jay Wilson]] talked about some of the scripted events seen in the BlizzCon demo in an interview in December, 2008.[http://www.1up.com/do/previewPage?pager.offset=2&cId=3172030&p=]

[[Image:NPCs in danger.jpg|right|thumb|200px|[[NPC]]s in need of rescuing from [[Zombie]]s.]]

Adventures are mini-quests, scripted events or semi-random occurrences that aren't necessarily tied to the overall plot. The terminology has evolved over time, and "Adventures" now seem to be called [[sub-scenes]][http://www.diablo-source.com/index.php?cmd=article&sec=news&act=view&id=354], but the concept is identical. Sub-scenes are small, self-contained events, more like randomly-encountered scenarios than full on quests. The [[D3 Team]] first described them in the [[WWI_2008:_D3_Design_Fundamentals_Panel|WWI 2008 Design Fundamentals Panel]].

::The biggest goal we have with these is that we want to change what the player is doing. Whenever you can basically take the core game and make the player play it in a slightly different way, it makes the game a lot more interesting and keeps it from being tedious. You go from "I'm killing monsters aimlessly" to "I'm now killing monsters to protect this thing." That's easily a more interesting scenario, because it's different than what you were doing, and that's our main goal with that.''

During the game reveal in mid-2008, the D3 Team talked about class-specific quests at the [[WWI_2008:_Denizens_of_Diablo_Panel|Denizens of Diablo panel]].

The [[D3 Team]] has said that D3 will be about the same size as D2, but that it will have many more quests. This total presumably includes the smaller adventures, as well as main plot-driving quests. Jay Wilson commented on this in an August 2008 interview. [http://www.diii.net/n/687810/jay-wilson-from-leipzig-6]

::'''Julian Love:''' Probably, but it's undetermined at this point. I think in the demo that we have here, there's just over 30 different things that can happen in all the spots. Whether that's too high or too low will be partly based on what feedback we're going to see from the people that actually got a chance to play it here, and based on what we feel like. We know how we feel about it right now but we want to compare that to what the players who have a chance to play feel, and then we're going to try to look at that again. So this is one big area, what a smaller area or one that's more linear has is also yet to be determined. But certainly way more things will happen in one playing area than happened in Diablo II.

[[Image:Injured_villager_talks_to_Wizard.jpg|right|thumb|150px|[[Wizard]] talks to [[Injured Villager]], who starts [[The Skeleton King]] quest.]]

[[NPC]] conversations in Diablo III are shown in the normal game screen. The camera merely zooms in a bit. The conversation is ended and the screen returns to normal if you click anywhere outside of the dialogue tree, or press the space bar or Esc key.