Diablo III designer: Action and RPG genres are "bleeding together"

Diablo III's lead content designer Kevin Martens has said the division between RPG and other genres of gaming is starting to become irrelevant.

"The action and RPG genres are bleeding together a lot more than they used to," Martens told Atomic Gamer.

"You have games like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion that’s a good example of a great RPG that also has good action systems.

"Furthermore, a lot of action games are adding RPG elements as well, like BioShock. One of my favorite RPG games of the previous generation was Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas."

The Blizzard staffer said San Andreas' RPG content was "really compelling", despite the game's classificatiozn as "action".

"The two genres are sharing a lot more things together. RPGs are inherently compelling in their level-up systems and character customization ability, etc., so that stuff is coming into action play," he said.

Martens commented that the difficulty developing randomised dungeon crawlers is the reasons there are so few triple A releases.

"If we’re going to talk specifically about action-RPG, the genre mold of Diablo, I think it’s really a game that’s randomized like that, it has a bunch of different classes. Those games are just really hard to make.

"Diablo II was a king of that genre, and it’s still for sale everywhere over 10 years later," he added.

Diablo III has no release date as yet, but will appear on PC, with the possibility of a console port in the future.

Thanks, Evil Avatar.