Blizzard denies "dumbing down" accusations for Diablo III

Diablo III's lead technical artist Julian Love has pushed back claims it had dumbed down the game to make it more open to outside players.

The claims come from the game's online beta ahead of today's release of the full game.

"I definitely don't see it as dumbing down," Love told Eurogamer in an interview ahead of last night's launch. "One of the disadvantages beta testers have is they only see the early portion of the game.

"That's the portion of the game that really does need to be simple and approachable in order to live up to our mantra of easy to learn and difficult to master.

"You only get that experience in the beta, and that's the place where we're really trying to get it to be as dead simple and approachable as we possibly can."

Love added: "it's not that we're dumbing the systems down, so much as we're changing the balance of when systems are introduced and how much information is thrown at the user.

"A lot of those things are just re-prioritised to flow into the proper portion of the game, where you've already gotten used to the early systems and early combat, and now you're ready for more. That's a big part of the process of just getting it to ramp up properly."

Diablo III is out now for PC. Watch our interview with Love and senior world designer Leonard Boyarsky here.