Our friends Steve Spohn and Mark Bartlet over at AbleGamers.com had the opportunity to speak with Blizzard's Jay Wilson, Lead Designer and Leonard Boyarsky, Lead World Designer about the highly anticpated, upcoming title Diablo III. In the first installment of this two part interview much is unvieled about Diablo III including information about Tristram, classes and hardware requirements -- sorry folks, your Commodore 64 will not run Diablo III. Check it out.....

Steve, AbleGamers: With the characters that were announced in the invitational being the barbarian and the witch doctor... the expansion of Diablo II at seven characters. Was there any reason that two of the characters, well actually three, were left out, and can you comment on which five will be in the game?

Jay, Blizzard: We're not trying to match the number of characters that Diablo II and the expansion had, in some way as we look at that as, "that's no fair! That's two game for the content that you asking us to match, as supposed to one." We're really trying to think what we would feel would be the right number of starting archetypes for the player and in the long run we will have five classes for Diablo III. I'm sure we will expand that with expansions down the road, but were really trying to focus on making those classes each kind of a unique and good experience for Diablo III. For example, the barbarian, we brought him back because he was a class that we really thought we could improve, but other classes... the other classes that were done really well and Diablo II, we looked at it and said "well, all I would really do is repeat that class." We don't think we could make such a significant improvement that it provides new gameplay or new experience. So in those cases, we haven't focused on really have heavily and bringing them back. That being said, once we get the original game out, and we start looking at expansions, we might think about different ideas like bringing back old characters that were really popular. But in the initial game are really focused on bringing new experiences to everyone.

Click here to view the full interview at AbleGamers.com and stay tuned for the second installment on Monday, September 22nd.