Diablo III Forum Tidbits

[GameBanshee News]

Diablo community manager "Bashiok" discusses DirectX 10 support, what the character level cap might be, and item weights in his latest responses on the official Diablo III forums.

On DirectX 10 support:

We haven't announced any final support for DirectX versions/system requirements. I'll say that right now we're not using any DirectX10 features, but we potentially could.

On a character level cap:

The first and last thing said on it was in an interview with Jay at WWI when we first announced, and paraphrasing that: we will probably keep it about the same, level 99, but it always seemed like an arbitrary number to stop at so we may up it to 100.

On item weights:

A weight system is simply a different approach to inventory restrictions, and it's actually fairly similar to a grid based system except that weight systems are generally augmented by a character stat instead of being item based upgrades.

The main issue with these systems as they relate to Diablo III is they add an additional value to items. That secondary value works to complicate and thus slow down the inventory management of a player, drawing their attention away from the action, which is of course the main focus for us with Diablo III.

I've played a few RPGs with weight systems, and they're among my favorite games of all time, but it's a case of choosing which systems works best for each game.

[Siberys]

The first and last thing said on it was in an interview with Jay at WWI when we first announced, and paraphrasing that: we will probably keep it about the same, level 99, but it always seemed like an arbitrary number to stop at so we may up it to 100.

I dunno, I always saw 99 as the definitive cap for mortals and 100 being demigod.

But then again, I'm playing Diablo 2 with Zy-El where the maximum level is 10,000.