The next in our Blizzard video interviews (which we've also transcribed for you) comes in the form of a chat with Diablo III lead designer, Jay Wilson.

Inside this revealing piece there's plenty of discussion around the game's fanboy controversy, the state of cooperative play, release dates (or a lackthereof) and the departure of former art director, Brian Morrisroe.

It's an epic piece of reading, but if you're anticipating this game, well and truly worth it. Hit this link for the transcript, and this one for the full video.

Awwww... can't believe you didn't ask about the issue of Australian lag to bnet or the fact they're not including LAN. Theres too many questions that have already been asked in other interviews :(

Yes, sorry :( That was actually on my list of questions to ask, but I had asked both the StarCraft and WoW guys and gotten what I thought were fairly non-committal answers, so I bumped it down the priority list.

My gut feel on this issue is that they take it really, really seriously, but at the moment they feel like that there's just not enough people complaining about it to justify any serious infrastructure changes. I suspect they think (or more likely, know - I'm sure they have pretty detailed statistics and reports on this stuff) there's enough people that are happily playing/enjoying their games with the current setup.

I don't think it will change until Australia (or at least our region) is big enough to justify a new localised community, which I suspect is aways off.

You're probably right. I guess we can only hope.

we do have a large localised community. war online oceanic servers are quite large, and populated. i would dare say that the size of our demorgaphic isnt the issue at all.

Open Battle.Net at the moment is peer-peer for game data, so as long as you match make with locals its not too bad. Realms is arse though for latency - I went back and gave it a run after the DIII announcement and its still pretty woeful from AU.

If they make a fast-paced hack 'n slash like DIII Realms-only with no LAN play its going to turn it into a single player game for me pretty much (unless someone manages to hack it apart and implement unauthorised LAN / local).

"So for them, they thing that's what everybody prefers." Think?

They absolutely need LAN. I attend a college with a really restrictive firewall. So if I will be unable to play with my roommate. Heck, if the game data is stored on their servers, I won't be able to play at all. I also know that there are a lot of other colleges and places that have firewalls with no available NAT translation and would prevent this game from being played.