The interview of Bill Roper,  was broadcast on Giga TV in Europe.  The first relavent thing is that, the interviewer says Diablo II will be out May 13th.  Roper corrects her by saying it won´t be out that soon, "Not quite that soon, but maybe by Halloween.  October."

The interviewer: "You have a playable demo version?"

Roper: "Yes, we brought a special demo version just for your audience today."

The interviewer next asks for the differences in the game, to which Roper replies: "...it's about seven times larger, many more characters to play as, many more monsters to fight, you go all across the world, much stronger internet play, better multi-player, a ton of differences, we're really trying to make the game just so much bigger and better for our fans."

Roper says that, "as an executive producer, it is a lot of work, but I do get to play quite a bit."

Bill describes his work, including throwing out ideas and voice work.  To prove his mettle he says "Stop poking me!" in a perfect Orc voice (from WarCraft).

This is followed by a commercial, and when the show returns Roper is demonstrating the game.  He is in Act I´s wilderness area and is apparently using the Amazon.  He does a short lowdown on all the characters, the graphics, and such, but there is no real new information.  He states: "Definitely made to be played in the dark so you can experience all the scariness."

Roper states that there over 50 different types of monsters in the game now, and there will be  hundreds of magical items  He also talks about improvemnt to multiplayer, by this I take it to mean in the area of cheating/hacking.  He also talks of clan support, you can select your clan names and colors to be shown in the game.

This is followed by a skip to Act II, where the interviewer asks about the quests.  Roper states that the quests will be more intrinsic to the game, as to provide a better role-playing experience.

Roper: "We're doing a lot to make it much better on Battle.net, one of the things we've been working on is eliminating the cheating that I think... Lots of anti-hacking things we can't comment on yet to not tip off the hackers. One of the biggest things we are doing is going to a client-server model so that Battle.net itself is involved in every game, so it can help to authenticate what's actually happening in the game."

Roper states that the Diablo II team consists of 17 game artists, 10 programmers, 3 or 4 producers, and 16 more artists working on the twenty minutes of FMV sequences.

After another commercial break they go back to Act I to face Andariel, the final boss for that Act.  Apparently Roper is using the Sorceress as well.

Roper: "She has a little poison spray there, so I'm going to try to cast some fire here and see if I can't... and the little monsters in here, I'll call down a Meteor..."

Roper states that there are about 24 or 25 quests in Diablo II and that every area has 5 or 6 major quests.  Every quest is available in Single Player mode as well as Multiplayer.

Next he talks about Diablo II´s day and night cycle.  Apparently things change with the cycle, some creatures get stronger or weaker, others only appear during a certain time of day.

They field several questions from the audience, one being about the max level in Diablo II.  Roper states that it will be possible to exceed level 50 in Diablo II.  We know that this will also take a good deal of work.

Roper: "We've had successful tournaments and awards for Starcraft and Brood War over Bnet, and we're running the same exact sort of thing for Diablo II. We will rank players to see who the best Paladin and best Necromancer is, and then we'll have competitions between them."  You´ll probably see this happening in Diablo II´s Dueling Arena.  This head-to-head matches sound interesting, it´s most likely how they will incorporate Ladder play.

Roper makes mention of Unique items, which there are hundreds of in Diablo II.  He also states that there are rare items as well, much more scarce than uniques.

When asked about the beta, Roper responded it that it will be very much like the StarCraft beta: "we will randomly choose 1000 people from that list to add to be beta testers for us. Now when we get closer to that you'll see it on our website."  No known date for when a beta might happen is given.

This is where the Diablo II coverage ends, for the most part.  Roper and the interviewer start playing other games and talking about them.  This interview had a few shining points in it, it was worth the read and an analysis of its contents.  We have screenshots from the interview that can be viewed here and here.

 

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