One of “Diablo” fans’ favorite things about the franchise is the secret cow level from “Diablo II.”

If players gathered the right combination of items, they could open a portal to a level filled entirely with weapon-wielding, bipedal bovines, with a chance to get special loot.

So I asked lead “Diablo III” designer Jay Wilson the obvious question: Will there be a cow level?

This is what he said…


Wilson: [laughs] We don’t really know at this point. I really like the idea of secret stuff that ‘Diablo II’ put forward, but it’s not the kind of thing we would decide this early. But if we have something, I can assure people will be happy with it.

I will say the thing I liked about the cow level was that it wasn’t just fluff; there was stuff that you could do there that actually had purpose within the game. The thing I didn’t like about it was that it almost replaced part of the game. And so, if we looked to add something like that, we’d be a little smarter about it. We would want it to have a function within the game, but we wouldn’t want it to replace any core content, which is something that I think the cow level really did.

‘Diablo II’ had a lot of little oddities to it that made the experience not as usable. I certainly wouldn’t want things like, ‘Don’t kill the cow king because we’ve got to keep the level open!’ We would avoid scenarios like that. The secret of a cow level is a cool secret. The secret that you’re not supposed to kill the king because you’ll ruin the cow level forever — that’s a bad secret. So we would try to get rid of some of the bad ones.

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“Diablo” fans, do you want to see a new and improved cow level?