More Diablo III Coverage

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Written by BuckGB on June 30th, 2008

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It's pretty difficult to spend any significant amount of time with something you find genuinely irritating. Blizzard presented their case to fans at their Worldwide Invitational 2008 in Paris, France of how they're going about creating appealing classes and enjoyable play styles. While they didn't go into detail on any of the classes beyond the already announced barbarian and witch doctor, they did provide plenty of insight into their design and iteration processes.

Leonard Boyarsky, the lead world designer on Diablo III, kicked things off by talking about the importance of fusing lore into the class, both in appearance and functionality. All classes will have their own voices, will be able to engage in conversations with NPCs, and elicit class specific reactions from those they encounter. These enhanced narrative features are something Blizzard hopes will help players immerse themselves in the game world.

Boyarsky pointed out that just because there will be more developed narrative elements doesn't mean the player will get bogged down with story. "We like to think of it as deeper and more fulfilling [story]," said Boyarsky. "We're not going to have a longer presentation, there's not going to be huge dialogue trees, we're just doing a more concise, better presentation, we believe."

First off: the game will run on XP as well as Vista, with DirectX 10 being recommended but not required. As if that wasn't bad enough for the green team, which is working hard to shift new DX10 cards, the Direct X 10 included will be of the 10.1 variety - supported by DAAMIT but not the boys in green. This means that the best graphical experience might just be on ATI hardware.

And as a real kicker, Blizzard has opted for Havok physics - acceleratable on both Nvidia and ATI graphics cards, but now owned by Intel - over Physx, the physics platform from Nvidia.

To add salt to the wound, Blizzard will be keeping up with its tradition of releasing games simultaneously on Mac OSX as well as PC - meaning not only do you not need Vista to play, you don't even need a PC.

'¢ More powerful heroes. (Diablo III) will support large-scale combat with characters who can deal with a lot monsters. Characters will not only have impressive new skills, but players will feel more powerful just by sounds and effects. It will feel (crazy and over the top,) he said.

'¢ Strong and unique archetypes. The dev teams want to create cool, distinct characters with class-specific tactics, hence the introduction of the new Witch Doctor class. He said that all the classes got a (fresh start.) There's also no final decision on the number of classes, and they will not necessarily bring back all the classes of (Diablo II.)

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