Diablo III Previews

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Written by BuckGB on September 3rd, 2009

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What we saw at BlizzCon wasn't quite so lovely. The Sundered Pass was a wind-blown path snaking between jutting black rock. Our party fought its way between the tilting stone spires, slashing bugs, cutting down Dune Threshers -- bigger, fiercer critters that crawl on their bellies. Rotting corpses of creatures alien and unknown curled in corners. Alcoves hid treasures and ambushes in nearly equal share. But always there was death -- delivered by the hands of Barbarian, Monk and Witch Doctor.

All of these moments are accentuated by the game's art style. One that isn't stylized or cartoony, as some critics would claim. True, Diablo III doesn't look like a game from the '90s any more -- it looks like the box art of a game from the '90s. Recall the aesthetic: the future gore of DOOM, the disarming orange and yellow of Planescape: Torment and the gothic lettering of Diablo. These were a culmination of male teen fantasy -- an amalgamation of the mature comic book, Nine Inch Nails angst and cyberpunk style, like the now-clichéd leather trench coats donned by Neo in "The Matrix." And so, while you won't see the Monk wearing William Gibson-inspired mirrorshades, the aesthetic soul of the '90s is preserved in Diablo III, for better or for worse. I'm going to say for better.

There are still many things we don't know about Diablo III: how the rune skill customisation system will work (it wasn't in the build of the game at BlizzCon, as the designers are still iterating on this terrifyingly flexible feature); how randomised events will spice up the more carefully-crafted "overworld"; what form player-versus-player combat will take; and what the Battle.net online feature set will be (although, after the example set by StarCraft II, expectations are very high indeed). But the game is defined by its classes, and all four were available to play over a very extensive demo at BlizzCon. So I hogged a terminal for as long as I dared to delve into each one, and discussed them in detail with lead world designer Leonard Boyarsky and lead designer Jay Wilson.

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It's clear that even at its most basic, Diablo III has far more to think about, far more mechanical sophistication than its predecessors. "Is it more considered? Yes, that is our goal," says Wilson. "To make a game that... well, we don't want chess. We want an action game. But we do want an action game that does occasionally make you think, challenge you, make you approach a situation in a different way... Creating a combat model that has a bit more depth is I think one of the keys to moving the series forward."

The difference won't be so apparent at Normal difficulty, he says, but on higher settings Diablo III will become more cerebral, rather than just more unforgiving. "One of the things that happened in Diablo II was that they didn't have a lot of options to make the game hard, because they had a player with endless health, that can get away from any situation. The only real option against a player like that, as a designer, is to kill them. That's a terrible device to use against your player. You want them to actually feel the game be hard before they die."

For those of you who loved the earlier games in the series, you won't be disappointed visually - there's eye-candy galore here, if you can see past all of the bright, sparkly colours... (seriously, there are people still complaining about the lack of doom and darkness). Reflecting the fact it's been nearly ten years since the release of Diablo II, we're pleased to confirm that D3 will support a range of resolutions to match your rig - the demo machines at the event were running very happily at the maximum res demanded by a 24" LCD. The UI has also been significantly tweaked, taking some cues from World of WarCraft in terms of placing shortcuts to skills next to the relevant potions, and splitting the (largely un-implemented) skill-tree into categories. Before you throw your hands up in horror, it actually worked pretty well and made the whole thing very intuitive.

While the developers are currently working on removing the town portal from the game completely (too many people using it to escape nasty situations), they have implemented a checkpoint system, where each checkpoint is then a resurrection area. Obviously these weren't in their final positions on the map, but from what we saw, they're generally only a couple of minutes apart and pretty easy to get to.

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