Creating corpses: Making bodies matter in Diablo 3

One of the very first things I said after we’d officially decided to bring the Necromancer back for Diablo III was: “If we’re going to make the Necromancer, he has to explode corpses, and he has to revive things.” We all agreed that not having the Necromancer do stuff with corpses was just a nonstarter. But then the problem became: “How does the Necromancer get the corpses?” This was the tricky part; we spent a lot of time trying to figure out how corpses would actually work if he did have them — which, again, he absolutely needed to.

For all their connections to one another, Diablo II and Diablo III are very different games. Diablo II was built from the ground up to have the Necromancer character and the corpses that he used for so many of his abilities. Whatever you killed would keel over and lay on the ground dead. Then you’d use a skill to explode its corpse or revive it.