Diablo II postmortem by one of the creators

Great read, it's interesting that they built such a big game and trimmed so much:

"Diablo II took more than 40 people and over three years, essentially because we made two or three games and pared them down to the best one."

They dogfooded:

"We strive to hire people who love games, and we make games that we want to play. ... As a team, we don't have to wonder what our audience wants, because we are our audience."

While I never got into the original Diablo, I spent too much time in Diablo 2 LOD. As the article talks about, there is so much variety in builds for each character class. The game was made to be addictive so that "There's always a quest that is almost finished, a waypoint almost reached, an experience level almost achieved, and a dungeon nearly cleared out."