Reaper of Souls: "making the most efficient way to play a fun one"

We caught up with Blizzard's Waytt Cheng to discuss the upcoming expansion for Diablo III - Reaper of Souls.

We talked a lot about Loot 2.0 (just launched in a new patch for the base game) and the many sweeping changes Blizzard have made to the Diablo III experience:

"Adventure Mode is a way of making the most efficient way to play also a fun one with lots of variety," said Cheng. "When a serious gamer approaches a game like Diablo III, often you want to maximise your loot per time, or maybe you're trying to earn XP as fast as possible, or gold as fast as possible. But if that means you're just going to go to one area of the game and kill the same monsters over and over, or maybe you go for one particular Act, a section, clear out all the monsters and then quit and restart the game and go in and do it again. I mean it's very effective, and it's fun to be effective, but it can also get very monotonous. So our job as designers we don't want to fight that instinct. We want to use to work for us. So we make the most efficient route towards maximising XP, gold and legendaries - the most efficient route should also be the most fun route. The one that takes you around the world and let's you see lots of different content, has you doing a variety of activities and that's what the Bounty system is designed to do, that's what Adventure Mode is about. Highly replayable system with lots of randomness to add variety."