Blizzard finally announced the next iteration of Diablo in Paris at their World Wide Invitational. This is the third major announcement from Blizzard in the past year. First we learned about Starcraft II in Korea, then came the Blizzcon announcement of the Wrath of the Lich King and now, Diablo III. I've played Diablo II quite a bit since it's release in 2000 and I've been waiting eagerly for the sequel. Blizzard's Diablo III page has a little bit of info on the new game. The videos are great but there isn't much detail given on specifics such as classes, online play and talent mechanics. This is a Blizzard game though so it's to be expected.Details and video after the jump.
What we know...
We don't know a lot of specifics yet, but it's clear from the gameplay video that Diablo III will be true to the previous games' play style. There will be a 3/4 overhead view, just like the other games only now everything will be rendered in 3D. This means there are destructible environments and backgrounds now and you won't be able to use a simple chair as cover from crazy aoe damage. There have been some changes to the interface as well. You'll still be able to wear out your mouse from clicking though but now you can also assign skills to a hot bar just like World of Warcraft. This will allow for faster combos and chaining of skills.The graphics in the gameplay video look pretty good. They look enough like Diablo II to keep the fanboys happy and yet there is enough dynamic lighting and destructible elements that it doesn't look outdated. There is plenty of blood and gibs to make the slaughter of masses of enemies pretty pleasing. The technical improvements since Diablo II are evident in the skills we see the Witch Doctor using, the Barbarian class seems to have mostly the same abilities that it had in the last game.
What we don't know...
Online gameplay is going to be a big deal with Diablo III. People have been playing Diablo II online for nearly a decade and people are going to expect there to be fully integrated 'online only' and 'offline only' play options, they've been spoiled by Battle.net after all. Blizzard hasn't given much info on this yet, only saying that there will be single player and multiplayer elements in the game. In Diablo II a big disadvantage to the single player mode is that you were unable to take that character online and play with friends who had an online-only character. The open Battle.net service was full of hacked and modded characters that were no fun to play with. Hopefully there will be a way to merge online and single player in the sequel.Blizzard has said that the game is shipping with five classes. This seems like a pretty limited selection... Diablo II shipped with five classes as well, Barbarian, Amazon, Paladin, Sorceress and Necromancer. Two classes were added in the expansion, the Assassin and the Druid. The original five classes were plenty fun but the additional two, especially the Druid added quite a bit more to the game. We know that the Barbarian has made it into Diablo III but the others are unknown. The Witch Doctor is being billed as a new class but it is definitely a replacement for the Necromancer. The Witch Doctor has mass curses and summons pets and "zombie walls" as well as attacks that are poison and disease based. I would be surprised if we saw a Necromancer class in the vanilla version of Diablo III. I'm sure we will however see the Amazon. This was one of the most fun classes in Diablo II and it'd be crazy if they left it out of the sequel. Since there are male and female versions of each class it's likely that this will be rebranded as a unisex Ranger or Archer. There will have to be a Sorceress type class, it'd be highly unlikely that the whole game is going to be so melee heavy. Like the Amazon, you can expect this to be rebranded as a Mage or Wizard for the same reasons. Blizzard likes their Paladins so it's likely that this class will show up as well in the expansion, although I think I could live without it. The Druid class is what I'd much rather see in Diablo III. The Druid was a much more dynamic class and added quite a bit more fun to the game than the Paladin. In the interest of full disclosure I'll point out that my first character and the one that I leveled the most was a Paladin, I got two of them up to the mid 90s.
Talent points and specialization will be another interesting aspect of this game. Anyone who has played World of Warcraft will be familiar with the basics of the Diablo talent system. One thing WoW has that Diablo did not is the ability to respec, or reset your talents if you wanted to change your play style or if you made an error. In Diablo this wasn't an option, if you wanted to make a dual wield specialized barbarian instead of a throwing specialized one, you'd have to make a new character. It sounds harsh but it wasn't unheard of to have 15 or 20 characters in the 60s or 70s. Considering the development time that has gone into Diablo III, I think it'd be insane to leave a talent reset option out of this game.
I may actually be more excited about Diablo 3 than SC2. Probably because I think SC2 can't live up to the original but Diablo can easily be better than the originals.