Archive for the ‘preview’ Category
Diablo III takes place two decades after the events of Diablo II, when you (the hero) defeated the three Prime Evils — Diablo, Mephisto and Baal. An unexpected casualty of your confrontation with Baal included the Archangel Tyrael, who destroyed the corrupted Worldstone and was never seen again. Since then, the world went relatively quiet, and the massive invasion from Hell expected to come from the Worldstone’s destruction never came, causing the adventure against Prime Evils to fade from memory, with many believing it to be an exaggerated story. When Deckard Cain hears rumors of a new evil, he visits the ruins of Tristram, where a meteor falls to the earth and unleashes the forces of Hell once again.
Although there are currently few details about the game, Blizzard confirmed that both the Barbarian and Witch Doctor classes will appear in Diablo III; new class announcements will be made at Blizzcon 2008 this October. The Barbarian remains more-or-less the same as Diablo II, using war cries to bolster its strength while fighting enemies with an array of melee weapons. A destructible environment supplements its strength, so there will be times when the Barbarian may knock down a wall to crush a group of foes instead of taking them on directly. Meanwhile, the Witch Doctor will play like a beefed up version of Diablo II’s Necromancer, using a combination of dark spells and potions to repel, confuse and destroy enemies. And unlike the last game, players will be able to select the gender of their character during class selection.
Thankfully, classes aren’t the only thing to receive an overhaul. Blizzard will also get rid of the potion system that was so prevalent in previous games. A skill bar, similar to those seen in World of Warcraft, will take the place of the potion belt. Instead of carrying around sacks full of healing potions, fallen monsters will leave behind health orbs that players collect, or else they disappear after a set amount of time. This makes room for a different approach toward monster design. In Diablo III, big monsters will be geared toward wearing players down over time instead of simply using single shot powers to eliminate all their health, making for more exciting battles that require forethought and planning. Although there are no set details yet, players will also see major changes with the inventory system, as it will trade the Tetris-like grid system from past games for something more functional.
Diablo III will also employ a new crafting system, but that’s currently under development. The only thing that’s known for sure is that it won’t involve anything like stuffing items into a Horadric Cube. Other mysterious details, or lack thereof, include the game’s story and the identity of the new threat since the three Prime Evils were vanquished. The best we can do is wait. Of course, in the normal Blizzard tradition, Diablo III will release when it’s done.
Source: GameDaily
Jay Wilson - portly, laconic, in a black Diablo t-shirt, in a black briefing room, in Activision Blizzard’s black business suite at the Games Convention - is in Leipzig to talk about the game he left Relic Entertainment and joined Blizzard to make. At Relic he worked on fan favourite Dawn of War and critic’s favourite Company of Heroes, but he’s jumped from RTS to action-RPG now, as the lead designer on Diablo III. As we saw at its June unveiling, it’s a sumptuous, visceral update, whose traditional isometric camera belies some deceptively subtle twists in its design - all of which has been overshadowed by the fan-created brouhaha over its brighter art style. We sat down with Wilson to find out how he goes about making the old new, and the new old again.
Eurogamer: You’ve come fairly recently from outside Blizzard to work on a quintessential Blizzard game. Is that intimidating?
Jay Wilson: Yes, it was very intimidating. It’s funny, when I first arrived, they had somebody they were trying to hire and he was really nervous about it, he wasn’t sure if he was good enough to be working at Blizzard. And they were like: if we’re trying to hire him, of course he’s good enough. If you knew their interview process you would know that he must be.
For me, when I first interviewed with Blizzard, I was just trying to get information about how Blizzard worked. I wasn’t actually trying to get a job, because I didn’t think they would hire me. So yeah, it was intimidating to come in and work there and take over something like Diablo which is so precious to me. On the other hand, I would have hated to see somebody else take it over and not do it right, or I would have hated to see it not get made. So it felt like this weird sense of, almost, responsibility - like I needed to go do it because maybe somebody else wouldn’t.
The head below the bridge has a beard. That makes it for us.
Eurogamer: You’re a fan of the Diablo games?
Jay Wilson: As my wife likes to joke, Diablo was always said in hushed tones in my house. I remember seeing the first ad for Diablo on the back of the Warcraft II CD and thinking ‘what is that?’, and wanting to play it so bad. I was at day one for Diablo and Diablo II and [Diablo II expansion] Lord of Destruction, and I took days off of work for each one of them. At this point I think I’ve taken pretty much every class to Hell difficulty in Diablo II, and a few of them I’ve capped out. I only did one Hardcore character and I lost her, it was a Sorceress. I was grieving. Couldn’t do it again, it was so painful.
Eurogamer: Notwithstanding your affection for them, was there stuff about those games that you wanted to fix?
Jay Wilson: Uh-huh, yeah, there’s a lot of things, and I think a lot of those are evident in what we showed at WWI. I look at the Diablo series as an interesting mix of an action game and a role-playing game; and I felt that as a role-playing game, it really sold itself short, and as an action game, it really sold itself short. What it did right was the addiction, the drops.
Has anyone asked them why there are so many bridges?
But as an action game, we really felt that it lacked some things. You have a character class that has endless health, endless resource, they can run faster than almost anything in the world. When you combine speed with endless power and endless health, really, the only way you can challenge that player is to kill them. And you see that with Diablo II - you’ll be running through the game having a great time and all of a sudden something will walk up and just step on you. That’s the only time the game ever feels challenging. But that’s also the time when you’re most likely to lose the player, with such harsh penalties. So a lot of our focus has been, can we set the game up so that we can have a higher barometer of challenge for the player without making the early game hard?
So we rein that [health] system in, and having basically a little bit more challenge to recover health means that we don’t need to make the monsters as gruelling - which is a good thing, but also means that a monster that can pin you down or slow you down or trap you in some way is suddenly way more threatening, even if he doesn’t do as much damage. We’ve tried to get away from damage as the big scary thing; we’ve tried to get towards restricted movement, and having a health system that actually plays into placement, where where you’re standing makes a difference. That really opens things up.
Source
It wasn’t too long ago that Diablo III was not much more than a hushed rumor. But as this year’s Blizzard-hosted World Wide Invitational came and went, the latest iteration of the definitive action-RPG came into clear focus. And perhaps unexpectedly, it turns out it’s a lot like what the most conservative guesstimates would have bet on it being.
Just like Blizzard famously releases its games when they’re done and no sooner, so are the company’s reps reluctant to speak on specifics in their games before they’re good and ready to. But don’t blame us for trying. We caught up with Diablo III lead designer Jay Wilson at the Games Convention earlier this afternoon, and asked him to speak on various topics surrounding Diablo III.
GameSpy: World of Warcraft essentially evolved out of Diablo II in many ways, but by its very nature never required a Battle.net-style system to keep its communities connected. Can you speak about how you plan to implement Diablo III into the upcoming version of Battle.net?
Jay Wilson, Lead Designer: One thing you mentioned is [how WoW was an evolution of Diablo II]. One of the things that we have people comment on a lot is, they say, “Oh, you’re doing that, just like World of Warcraft!” And we’re like, “yeah, but they took all that stuff from Diablo.” There is very much an evolution. We learn from every game. There’s stuff we pull from StarCraft, and they pull from us as well. We tend to look at games in general that we think are good, and we just happen to like our own games as well.
In terms of Battle.net features, to answer your question… we’re kind of waiting for a big unveiling to announce a lot of the new features. I don’t want to steal their thunder by talking about those features, but what I can talk about is the intent behind them — to create the best online experience that you will find in gaming, and really support the Blizzard community. We think we have the greatest community in the world. They’re wonderful people, they’re great gamers, and they really love the community. What we want is for it to be easier for them to be together. Easier for them to talk to one another, easier for them to play games together, easier for them to find each other, no matter what they’re doing. That’s really the core goal behind the new Battle.net.
GameSpy: Lots of games are doing the social networking thing — a good example is Battlefield Heroes. Can we expect social networking functionality on that level in the new Battle.net?
Jay Wilson: Maybe!
Source
UGO writes: “Late last week we got to spend two hours in a locked New York City hotel room talking PC games with three Blizzard designers, one of whom was Diablo III lead designer Jay Wilson. Well… the door wasn’t exactly locked; really, we could have left at any time. But when you’ve got face-time with one of the folks who is currently in the process of pouring his heart and soul into the greatest PC action-RPGs, you don’t walk away until you’re forcibly removed by a broadsword-wielding barbarian.
One of the earliest questions faced by Diablo III’s development team focused on the ways the series could be updated for a new generation of PC hardware. Obviously, the possibility of giving the game a new 3D look was considered… for the space of a meeting. The team chose to stick with the series’ standard isometric perspective (rather, isometric-style) from day one; changing that, they feared, would ultimately change the nature of the core gameplay too much.”
Diablo III may well be the sequel that all the fans want, but after the long rumbling drum-roll of rumours and hints that presaged its announcement, there is an odd sense of anti-climax.
Thanks to World of WarCraft, Blizzard has the highest of public profiles – a vast base of existing users who are eager for its product and easily and directly courted. Surely few companies are as well positioned to pull a new and radical IP from their sleeve? Instead, and perhaps inevitably, Blizzard returned to a familiar licence, doing so in a way which, on the surface, appears to differ little from its predecessor’s formula. It’s an assessment that the developers find surprising.
“Coming at it from the RPG side I don’t think we did stick to the formula in a lot of ways,” says Leonard Boyarsky, lead world designer. “I feel that Diablo II had a lot of room to grow in terms of the story and the RPG. I look at other games that have come out more recently, that are ‘action RPGs,’ and apart from changing where the camera is, I think we’re doing quite a bit more than what they’ve done. We could have done a completely different game style but that wouldn’t have been Diablo III.”
“It’s not like there’s been a ton of great Diablo clones out there,” joins in lead designer Jay Wilson. “It’s a pretty small genre that hasn’t evolved very much in its gameplay. It’s the game we wanted to play – and, we assume, the game our fans would want to play. That said, there are some new features that we haven’t announced yet that take it away from what the previous games did, but still at its core it’s a true sequel.”
One vital aspect of the game that carries the essence of its predecessors is its camera angle. Although now fully 3D, it’s a direct progression from the isometric view of the previous games – and it’s this loyalty to the spirit of that old technology that has led so many to assume that the game has done little to update itself.
“Camera is not technology,” says Wilson, clearly somewhat frustrated. “People associate the camera with isometric and say: ‘Oh, why didn’t you update the tech?’ Well, we did update the tech. The camera has nothing to do with tech, the camera is all about gameplay. Isometric gameplay is very different from FPS or over-the-shoulder thirdperson – which is pretty much what the entire industry is moving towards. But then some of the biggest hits of the last year were Guitar Hero and Rock Band, and those were not high-tech games. Gameplay is what matters; it’s what’s always mattered to us.”
But Wilson is keen to impress that this is not just an HD refit of its predecessors: and by no means has Diablo III eschewed new technology in bolstering and furthering the series’ hack-and-slash core.
“I think the most obvious kind of thing to look at is the addition of physics,” says Wilson. “I think it just makes combat feel better, which is essentially its goal; we’ve added a lot of opportunities to use the environment against people, or interact with it. The environments of Diablo I and II felt very much like a box for monsters. And being able to make them feel a lot more alive is really the thing that we’ve brought up the technology to do.”
Similarly, Blizzard has tweaked the degree with which environments are randomly generated, attempting to achieve a better balance between unpredictable encounters and worlds that feel coherent, interesting and credible.
“We mix static environments with random environments,” Wilson explains. “With our outdoor environments, we’ve focused a lot more on static environments – there’s not the complete randomness that there was with Diablo II, and that’s mainly to give the world a feeling of reality. In Diablo II, the only way you could take an area as organic as the outdoors and make it random was to pull all the interest out of it. So it didn’t make for a very compelling layout. What we’ve tried to do with Diablo III is to ask ourselves how we could make the randomness in those outdoor areas mean more.
“What we did was to come up with ‘Adventures,’ which allows us to cut huge blocks out of the outdoor areas and stick whatever we want in there. So, the next town is always to the North, but you don’t know if you’re going to encounter a camp along the way or a lost caravan or a summoning ritual. There are all these different kinds of events, and you don’t know where they are going to appear. There’s still a reason to explore, and that’s really what randomness provides. The encounters are all random, so you don’t know what’s around the next corner.”
The dungeons meanwhile, which Wilson says make up 60 percent of the game or more, use a completely random system. “We do either one of two things,” he says.
“We have an assortment of layouts with randomised entrances and exits or we go for the full randomised dungeon which is essentially a bunch of components that get reassembled together. And all of them can also have Adventures as well.”
Wilson makes it clear that these aren’t the only ways in which Diablo’s gameplay has been extended and enriched, although such details are still under wraps. But even if
Diablo III does no more than dust off the formula of its predecessors it will still be a formidable extension of a heavyweight franchise. The fans will almost certainly get what they want and more – Blizzard is already scrutinising the reaction to the game’s announcement and tailoring it to suit. But as solid a product as Diablo III promises to be, there’s still a part of us that wishes what Blizzard did next wasn’t something it had done before.
Source: Edge-online
After a decade of desperation, the prayers and ritual sacrifices of Diablo fans have been answered with the announcement of Diablo III. But with an eye to the past, not everybody’s happy about Diablo’s future. Here’s what we know - and what we think - about Blizzard’s next (best?) thing.
The Graphics
What we know: Diablo III is powered by a proprietary new 3D engine (with no catchy name as of yet), and the first screens and game footage offer a taste of what it’s been built to do. The world’s depth is immediately apparent: for instance, instead of simply spawning offscreen, ghouls scramble up the walls from the unseen depths of the Forgotten Tombs, only to fall off bridges back into the mist when they’re killed. And yet, even though the objects are built in a 3D space, many of the elements look painted, particularly in the autumnal Leoric Highlands. Ankle-deep water, hazy rain, fog, smoke, and swaying grass are all benefits of the modern tech beneath the gameplay - not to mention the splattery hunks of meat and gore that come from dispatched enemies. Diablo III will support both DirectX 9 and 10, so if you haven’t upgraded your rig in a year or two, you’re not completely sunk.
What we think: Diablo in 3D? It’s not heresy - it’s about time! Or rather, it’s about every game being a product of its time. Diablo II made excellent use of 2D graphics, but that’s because it came out eight years ago. Don’t let nostalgia upscale the screenshots in your mind: Diablo II’s maximum resolution was a paltry 800×600. Diablo III’s overhead isometric view keeps the game’s look consistent with the series; the camera stays clear of the action and we’ve seen no gimmicky use of 3D so far. We really don’t see a downside to this one - it’s logical progress.
The Environment
What we know: Destructible environments are the order of the day, and they go hand in hand with the 3D engine. Some of it’s eye candy, like furniture that splinters after bearing the brunt of a magical attack, doors that can be blown off their hinges, and ancient bookshelves that spill dusty tomes (and their individual pages) onto the floor as they collapse. But some of it’s tactical, too: the Barbarian, for instance, can slam a wall in the Forgotten Tombs to make it collapse on and eliminate a crowd of walking dead. When he lunges into a wall, rubble falls away from the edges. Bits of concept art suggests a city desert environment with cave-like apartments, an Arabian palace dungeon reminiscent of Diablo II’s Lut Gholein, and the dilapidated town of New Tristram, which isn’t nearly as shiny as its name suggests.
What we think: We like wrecking stuff, so here’s hoping that the environmental destruction won’t be too cookie-cutter. It’s fun to see worlds collapse, but it becomes invisible if it always collapses the same way. We’re also curious to see how this feature plays out in outdoor environments - we’ve seen man-made structures fall apart in the early footage of the game, but no trees were toppled and grass remained curiously flameproof in fiery battles.
The Barbarian
What we know: The Barbarian was Diablo II’s ultimate melee badass, and the only class that could dual-wield. He’s back with a beefy update, but many of his old attacks have been seriously enhanced. The Leap was more like a hop in Diablo II; now, it’s truly a vault, as the Barbarian bounds about six feet into the air, both arms cocked behind his head, then lands with a thunderous shockwave and the crimson explosion of any nearby monsters. The Ground Stomp stuns enemies in the immediate vicinity, leaving them open to Cleave attacks that send corpses and body parts flying for several dozen feet. The Seismic Slam combines both those skills into a directional attack; smack the ground and a shockwave ripples the earth, liquefying anything in its path. And the fan-favorite Whirlwind - the best way to plow through hordes of encroaching monsters - is gorier than ever: the Barbarian spins as he moves, slicing enemies into bloody chunks.
What we think: There was no better class for tanking in Diablo II, so the Barbarian’s inclusion in Diablo III is really no surprise - what would a dungeon crawler be without a bruiser bashing open the doors? And the updated skills we’ve seen make the Barbarian much more dynamic - not merely a piece of meat, but a piece of finely trained, combat-honed meat - the filet mignon of fighting. The new Leap conveys impact and damage in a way the old attack utterly failed to do, and the updated, gory Whirlwind makes the Tasmanian Devil look like, well, a cartoon character.
The Witch Doctor
What we know: The only other playable class shown so far is the Witch Doctor, new for Diablo III. Hailing from the Tribe of the Five Hills in the Tegonze jungles, his specialties are disease attacks, mind control, and commanding other creatures to do his bidding. The voracious Locust Swarm not only skins enemy monsters down to the bone, but once the bugs have made their first kill, they seek out new targets automatically. Those swarms can ride shotgun with summoned Mongrels, giving the dog-like creatures an extra kick of disease damage when they strike.
When it’s time for defense, the Witch Doctor can summon a Wall of Zombies, effectively sealing off a pathway and letting the undead tear any approaching enemies to shreds. Soul Harvest does what it says, sucking the life essence out of enemies within range and transferring it to you. And when it comes to messing with people’s minds, Horrify and Mass Confusion offer mental anguish in two flavors: the former disperses packs of enemies in fear, giving you time to summon pets and pick off a few stragglers, while the latter turns the mob members against each other. Despite a penchant for violence by proxy, the Witch Doctor can still do direct damage with Firebomb, which immolates foes (and furniture) from a distance of about 10 feet.
What we think: If you’re going to call inter-Blizzard shenanigans with World of Warcraft, here’s the place to do it. The use of pets and pestilence - not to mention the Horrify skill, which is practically a clone of WoW’s Fear - make the Witch Doctor a close cousin of the minion-controlling Warlock. But he sounds like a great match for players who want to do indirect damage and control mobs for the party. Personally, we were sold by three little words: Wall. Of. Zombies.
Source
BlizzCon is likely to be the gaming world’s next chance to see some more on the highly anticipated Diablo III, but to tide you over just a little, we had a quick chat with Leonard Boyarsky, the game’s lead world designer, on the importance of lore in the game and the decision to give the character classes voices, among other things.
IGN: What do you do as the lead world designer, and what have you worked on in the past in that respect?
Leonard Boyarsky:
As lead world designer I’m responsible for the lore of the game, the history, the story. I work with a quest designer named Michael Chu, who’s had a lot of experience in the RPG industry. We make sure that through the quests the story’s being conveyed to the player. We also work very closely with the art department to make sure - y’know, they’ll come to us and say to us ‘what’s going on with this civilisation or that civilisation, what’s the history?’ Because there’s a lot of ruins and building up on cities that have been around for a long time. So, building a world – the way we’re building this world – from the ground up and with a lot of history, really informs the art. And it’s a back and forth thing too, the artists will sometimes come up with really cool concepts and we’ll work that back into the lore. So that’s basically what we do there.
Brian was upset that his backstory included two years of tap, when in actuality it was more like three.
I started out as just an artist, and after that I was the art director on Fallout, where I was more the creative director, and really fleshed out that world in terms of the feeling of the world, the mood of the world, and then I progressed on that project to designer, and then, before leaving to start my own company, we designed Fallout 2. And then I started my own company with a couple of guys called Troika, and we made Arcanum and Vampire. I did way too many jobs on those games, from world design to animation, to texturing, to drawing, to concepting, to producing, but my love has always been the world creation part of it… and you’ve really got to choose. If you want to do it well you’ve got to pick your specialty, but it’s really great because I get to work with art directors like Brian [Morrisroe]… he’s really fantastic, and he wants to hear [what other people have to say]. Sometimes artists really just want to go in their own direction, but at Blizzard they’re really into the back and forth. Everybody has good ideas, so it’s been a really great experience.
IGN: How much has the lore changed and evolved over the development process?
Leonard Boyarsky: Well, there are certain things that are set in stone because they’ve been in the previous games, but – I guess this is on the good side – I think there’s a lot of potential that hasn’t been tapped. Looking at it from that level, we haven’t been boxed in as much as we could have, because we didn’t dig as deep in the past as we could have. That’s given us a lot of wiggle room. It changes – it’s a very fluid thing and it took a little while to get used to, because no one wants to throw out stuff that they’ve worked on, but the philosophy is that the best idea wins, it doesn’t matter if it comes from the top or it comes from the bottom, or it comes from wherever, so… it’s a process… but it works really well.
IGN: How much do you have to consider making sure that the world works and it’s coherent for the hardcore versus the average player? Are they even going to care about this? How do you factor that in to how you build the world, and introduce the player to the world?
Leonard Boyarsky: I think that’s what’s really great about – I feel like such a cheerleader – working at Blizzard, because they could have easily put out another Diablo game and very lightly skimmed the surface of these kind of things, and it would have sold very well, but Chris Metzen – he’s the creative director of the whole company - is a very big champion of the lore and the story and that stuff, and that is what the really hardcore players care about. [While] a lot of other people don’t – and it can’t be allowed to impede on the fun of the game… but if we take it into account when we’re developing the game, I think it comes across in the feel and the mood.
A lot of what I’ve done in my past games - even though they’ve had a lot more dialogue and hardcore RPG stuff than we’re going to have in this game - the thing I’m always trying to do is to create a mood for the player first and foremost, and that’s going to hopefully colour the player’s experience from the minute he steps into the game; the way people talk or the environment he’s running through… Diablo 1 had this really haunted, horror mood, Diablo 2 lost a little bit of that, and we really looked at the difference of those two things, so that’s the kind of thing that we’re trying to get the players to experience.
And when we get deeper into it, it’s kind of an opt-in kind of thing. We’re not shoving things in the players’ way that they have to decipher or go into these huge dialogues or read 15 different lore books or research the novels outside the game to understand this stuff, but it’s there for the more hardcore people if they want to search it out inside the game. One of the things we’re using the Adventures for is to hopefully intrigue people about this world. Y’know, if we have this knowledge about all this stuff that goes on, we can create intriguing little mysteries for people playing the game, and plus, this is a game that people play a lot. If you look at the Diablo series, people play these games for years and years, there’s a lot of replayability, so maybe you ignore the story the first time through, but on the fifth time through you see something that finally piques your interest…
IGN: What would be that thing that would pique someone’s interest? What are you building in that could draw someone’s interest and make them want to know more about the lore?
Leonard Boyarsky: What we’re thinking is that there are certain things you can see or have happen, that - if I run across a scripted event or I see two people fighting or a conversation that I can overhear as I’m running by that gives me a piece of information that I can use later, but I don’t need it. The hardcore action guys, they are first and foremost number crunchers, they’re loot crunchers, they want the best gaming experience in terms of, like, how to maximise those areas, so if we can drop clues into the story as to how they can maximise their loot and maximise their armour, that would intrigue, I think, the hardcore action player to maybe look more into that. Obviously that wouldn’t be the only way, and the minute the game comes out all that stuff is going to be available on the website anyway. There’s going to be some people who just want to play it as an action game and that’s fine. Our goal isn’t to impede that at all, it’s just – we want it there for the people that really want it.
A sparkler is a dangerous weapon in the right hands.
IGN: In terms of drawing people into the game, you’ve introduced voices for the player characters. What was the process behind that decision? On one hand, with a player character that doesn’t talk, you embody that role, whereas there’s a danger that the player is distanced from a character with a defined personality.
Leonard Boyarsky: We went back and forth a lot on that. First we wanted to do it, then we didn’t want to do it, then we wanted to do it. The reason we decided we wanted to do it was because it really enables us to have your player drive the action more.
IGN: How much choice do you have as a player to shape your character’s persona? Dialogue trees or anything like that?
Leonard Boyarsky: There won’t be any dialogue trees per se, but we’re working on ways of your player affecting things. That’s all I’ll really say about that right now. We do want your player to feel like he’s driving the story, and we looked at it more like a character that you can watch develop and identify with, as if, a bit more like a book you’re reading or a movie you’re watching, you know, a character you can identify with and be fired up to be that character, be excited to be that character. And it remains to be seen whether people get behind that or not. It is a risk…
IGN: Is it a matter of having enough classes that there’s going to be a character that everyone wants to play?
Leonard Boyarsky: I think so, and it falls on us to make these guys compelling and to make them characters that people want to find out about. The one thing is that when you have a character that doesn’t have a voice it always felt to me like you can’t really put anything on that character of any substance. I can’t have any history as a character – we kind of make the character a void so you can project all that into it, but the downside of that is that I can’t have your character know anything, so therefore the other characters have to explain a lot. If you have a conversation between two people who supposedly know something, the player can pick up through context a lot more information in a lot shorter a period of time. It actually helps to tell the story in a much more succinct fashion. You don’t have to listen to someone go on for five minutes about the history of the temple you’re going to raid or whatever. So it helps us in a lot of ways that I think will make the story in the game more compelling, and it also allows us to have the mystery of ‘what is your character’s past?’, ‘why did he come to this place?’ so that’s another mystery that you can delve into deeper, or not.
Source: IGN
Diablo fans rejoice! The rumored third game has finally been announced. Blizzard recently made the announcement at its event in Paris.
The story is set 20 years after the likes of Diablo and Baal. It has been revealed that one of the well-known non-playing characters will return in Diablo III, Decard Cain. Cain returns to the remains of the Cathedral of Tristram, searching for ideas as to a new evil that seems to be approaching. Following that, a comet hit ground where Diablo once entered the world… Heroes of the world must now save humanity from the great evils that have arisen from the underworld.
Who will you choose to be?
Two classes of characters have been confirmed at this point in time. There will be female versions of each class, as well, and armor will be specific to each character class.
The barbarian is back and comes with fury and some other familiar characteristics. Other abilities have been added or revamped. A few of his known skills include the ground stomp, leap, whirlwind, seismic slam and cleave.
The witch doctor is one of the newly added character classes in this sequel. His tribe is the tribe of the Five Hills. These people were thought to be legend, but they do exist. The witch doctor has the power to summon undead creatures to literally tear apart his enemies. His (or her) skill set includes the firebomb, locust swarm, mass confusion, soul harvest and horrify.
More information on these character classes and others currently unannounced will inevitably be revealed in time. Keep watch on the official Diablo III website.
The Undead will again rise along with the following enemies that must be fought off: the Khazra, Gnarled Walkers and Dark Cultists. The Undead are skeletons that have risen up from various parts of other former living and breathing beings. They are easily summoned if pieces of skeletons lie around. They can be ‘organized and directed’, unlike other types of enemies. Also known as ‘goatmen’, the Khazra were originally human but sought only to prevail over other adversaries and now only partially resemble the semblance of a human being.
Various enhancements have been made to the game overall. A new dropped item is an orb of life, which is supposed to save you from having to click a potion to heal when in the heat of battle. This should make things interesting. The mana and vita bars are more animated and look cool. A hotbar to easily choose different skills is now available, making it much quicker. The mouse can be used to quickly switch between skills. The game seems to be more colorful than I remember Diablo 2 being. Case in point, the barbarian may be using an axe with lightning and it is lit up with blue and white flickering animation. The visuals that I’ve seen from the trailer (of cutscenes) are astounding, with the candle looking almost indistinguishable from the real thing. The glimmering reddish-orange light emanates from the wick while the wax slowly melts. The environmental aspects of the game will come more into play in Diablo III, such as massive walls being destroyed. Oh, and the game will be represented in 3D this time around!
From what we currently know and have seen so far, Diablo III looks to mark the sensational return of the classic franchise. With the success of World of Warcraft, I expect no less with Diablo III. Keep your eyes open for more information to be released!
Source: Realm of Gaming
Call me a reactionary, cantankerous old diehard if you will, but I’m not ashamed to admit that when Diablo 3 was announced, tears welled up in these ageing eyes. Tears of sheer, nostalgic happiness. Diablo has been out of the picture for a decade, and the absence has been a painful one.A stroll through sunless catacombs
But I soon scrubbed my tears away when Blizzard promised to walk us through one of the levels. I needed crystal clear vision to take in all the details.
True to the spirit of dungeon crawling, the Diablo 3 presentation kicked off with the arrival of a large muscle-bound man sporting more weapons than the average South American dictatorship. He stood in the bowels of the earth, amidst the dust of what might have been a mausoleum or a complex series of catacombs. The grey stone around and overhead looked as though it would crumble at the slightest sound. The torches hanging over the path before him failed to penetrate the darkness of the pit which yawned beneath.
(Excuse us for getting a little theatrical. We obviously missed our vocation.)
The barbarian had but a few seconds to take in his surroundings before he was assailed by a horde of zombies. He held his ground, dexterously avoiding their frenzied assaults and delivering crushing counterattacks. Moments later the ground was littered with bodies and the barbarian stood triumphant. He considered reaching for an elixir, but decided instead to heal the few scratches he’d sustained with a red orb, one of Diablo 3’s new pick-ups.
A second, more formidable creature awaited him at the end of the corridor. The barbarian leapt forward and struck it with terrible force, but the creature began to shudder ominously. Acting on instinct, the warrior dived backwards- and not a moment too soon, for the creature exploded. Hideous serpents fountained from its smoking corpse, but our hero soon stamped them flat or beheaded them.
A familiar faceBeware of the dogTwo’s company, three’s a crowd
As if he knew what would follow, the barbarian swapped his mundane battleaxe for a pair of magical blades. They shone pale blue in the subterranean gloom. The next chamber contained a surprise- Deckard Cain, the village elder from the original Diablo. This wise old soul began to recount an ancient tale, but the barbarian caught his arm and requested more practical aid. Cain was more than obliging: at the elder’s command, two archers sprung from the shadows and took up a station to the rear.
The newly-formed party proceeded carefully. After a few paces the barbarian caught sight of a group of monsters loitering ahead. Rather than charge in amongst them, he halted and cunningly used his weapons to demolish the wall nearby, bringing tons of rubble down on his oblivious foes. The few monsters that escaped the shower of stones were easy prey for the archers, and the barbarian sealed the deal with a devastating Whirlwind attack.
After dispatching countless opponents, the barbarian and his companions entered a high vaulted room with a single doorway. Daylight glinted on the threshold. But as soon as the party set foot inside the room, the air changed and four eerie flames erupted on an elevated square slab at the centre. The fires roared furiously and a huge, misshapen creature appeared in their midst: a zombie hound, tendons and bones plainly visible beneath its rotting hide.
The hound was a canny adversary, focusing its attacks on the archers while the barbarian approached. Despite its unearthly fury, however, our hero was able to deliver some telling blows and eventually the creature lay dead in a pool of its own vile gore. The death of this mighty guardian presented Cain and his companions with an opportunity to escape the dungeon. The barbarian followed- but not before he’d helped himself to the treasures he’d discovered within a nearby chest, sturdy magical armor and enough gold to pave a palace.
While Cain was quick to make his exit, he lingered long enough to summon some further assistance. The stairs up from the underground arena gave out onto a dense jungle, out of which stepped a masked shaman swathed in jade green feathers. The shaman was well-versed in the dangers of the tropical environment, and when enemies appeared from the undergrowth he eviscerated them with a swarm of bees.
As yet more opponents appeared the shaman conjured a group of horrid demons into being. A dire threat in themselves, these creatures became even more lethal when the shaman cast another spell on them, enabling them to call upon their own swarms of bees. While the demons ripped and tore a path, their creator mopped up any strays with awe-inspiring lightning magic.
The barbarian was left speechless by the power of his newfound ally. He’d encountered many species of magic in his life, but nothing could compare to the shaman’s eerie enchantments, which caused a wall of zombies to rise from the earth.
The two heroes made short work of any monsters they encountered, and before long they reached a glade. The shaman detected the advance of a mighty foe, and disintegrated his demon servants with a wave of one hand to leave room for two further heroes- a dauntless female warrior and fearsome witch. The four readied themselves for their greatest challenge yet- a monster so massive it crushed stones underfoot. But even a creature of such bulk was no match for the barbarian’s blades and the shaman’s charms, and after a few minutes of intense battle it dropped like a felled oak, leaving the party free to continue their adventure…
Diablo 3 has been announced for PC and Mac, with a release date still to be confirmed.
Source: Gamers Universe
It’s easy to figure out where Blizzard is going with Diablo III. Or so it seems. Throughout the weekend of press conferences, panels and interviews that followed the game’s memorable unveiling in Paris last weekend, the developers’ speech was peppered with phrases like this:
“Be an awesome action game.” “If you can click a mouse, you can play Diablo.” “It’s frickin’ cool to break stuff.” “I don’t think we’ve broken a hundred monsters on screen at a time, but we’ve flirted with it.” “It starts an awesomeness arms race.” “Monsters do two things: show up and die.” “We wanted to make that really loud.” “The only thing better than a zombie dog is an exploding zombie dog.”
Diablo III is more. More action, more death, more skills, more colour, more story, more beauty, more top-down, click-hungry, loot-happy, fast-paced, over-the-top, randomly-generated, fantasy-horror slaughter. Eight years after the last instalment in Blizzard’s classic action-RPG series - probably ten, by the time it comes out - Diablo III is more of the same. Beneath the waves of excitement generated by its return - in the form of twenty stunning minutes of game footage - there is the slightest undertow of anti-climax. Is ‘more of the same’ really all there is to it?
Blizzard’s chief design guru, Rob Pardo - formerly lead designer on World of Warcraft - argues that traditionalism can’t really be a sin when no-one else is upholding the tradition. “If there were a ton of games out in the market that are the isometric action-RPG model, then we probably would have more seriously done a different approach,” he says, pointing out that two Blizzard “splinter groups” - Flagship and ArenaNet - have already chosen to take “Diabloesque” gameplay in new directions with Hellgate: London and Guild Wars. “But it just always amazes me, with a game series that’s as successful as Diablo’s been, that I don’t feel like there’s a lot of great competing games in that same genre.”
The backdrops have a gorgeous, painterly look.
So the road well-travelled it was, laid out under the eagle eye of the camera; although Diablo III is fully 3D, its top-down camera perspective apes the isometric 2D bitmaps of the previous games in the series. Art director Bryan Morrisroe isn’t equivocal: “Isometric was the best decision we could have made,” he says. Blizzard is rock-solid in this conviction, and it’s right to be for a host of reasons: the quintessential Diablo point-and-click control scheme, the need for spatial awareness of hordes of monsters attacking from all sides, and the randomised modular maps, to name but three.
Oddly, “random” wasn’t a word you heard much during the game’s initial presentation at the Worldwide Invitational, but it’s a cornerstone of the Diablo franchise - randomly-generated maps and monster spawns making the games as frighteningly replayable as they are addictive. Lead designer Jay Wilson - who previously worked at Relic on Dawn of War and Company of Heroes - later explained that dungeons would still be heavily randomsied, but the overworld much less so in Diablo III.
“We decided we’re going to make that a more static geography, because we wanted to also start building a world,” Pardo explains. “We want you to learn these places, learn where towns and villages are. But we’re still going to randomise the monsters on top of it, and that’s where the idea for random adventures came from.”
Female models don’t have different stats. Take note, Age of Conan.
Random adventures are the most intriguing concept in Diablo III at present, although Blizzard is quite vague about them, because it’s still deciding exactly how they should be implemented. The idea is that, along with layouts and enemy spawns, actual events - some scripted, some AI-driven - can be dropped into play at random, whether in dungeons or on the set overworld maps. The example in the demo footage is a wall collapsing and blocking a path, but others might take the form of moments of NPC drama, or complex, multi-layered enemy encounters.
We’ll have to wait - patiently, as followers of Blizzard always have to wait - to find out more about these. But the implications of random adventures are arresting, to say the least. They promise to grant Diablo III the cinematic impact of a heavily scripted, linear action game in a free-form scenario that never plays the same twice, that’s always ready to surprise. Suddenly, Diablo III is starting to look a little less traditional.
It’s always this way with Blizzard: conservative, sometimes even derivative on the surface, you have to dig deep into the games’ designs to find the modest-sounding innovations that subtly but fundamentally rewrite the rules of whatever genre they’re working in. The other example in Diablo III - that we currently know about, again - is health globes.
Source and Full Preview
Copyright © 2009 - Diablo-III.com | Diablo 3 Blog
Either this big guy killed someone or he pooped blood. Either way, it’s nasty.
