Diablo 3 - Boyarsky Interview @ IGN.AU

Leonard Boyarsky has been interviewed at IGN.AU about Diablo 3 and "the importance of lore and compelling character classes".  Let's start at the beginning:

IGN: What do you do as the lead world designer, and what have you worked on in the past in that respect?

Leonard Boyarsky: As lead world designer I'm responsible for the lore of the game, the history, the story. I work with a quest designer named Michael Chu, who's had a lot of experience in the RPG industry. We make sure that through the quests the story's being conveyed to the player. We also work very closely with the art department to make sure - y'know, they'll come to us and say to us 'what's going on with this civilisation or that civilisation, what's the history?' Because there's a lot of ruins and building up on cities that have been around for a long time. So, building a world – the way we're building this world – from the ground up and with a lot of history, really informs the art. And it's a back and forth thing too, the artists will sometimes come up with really cool concepts and we'll work that back into the lore. So that's basically what we do there.