Diablo III Announced!
 

For those of you who haven't heard, yesterday at the BlizCon, a new addition to the Diablo franchise was announced. According to an interview with the executive vice-president, the game was in development back when Blizzard North was still functional. This means that the game has quite a bit of it already finished with a possible release date of this winter.

From the looks of some of the videos, I'd say that it looks mighty similar to the second game. Thoughts anyone?

It looks like fun. Dungeon bashing when it's at it's best. :)

The more similar, the better. You can't beat perfection - many have tried and failed. Sacred, Titan Quest, dungeonbasherXYZ, they all came and went. Diablo 2 is still awesome, and I strongly believe Diablo 3 will be as addicting and fun as its predecessor was. Besides, it is Blizzard. They only deliver perfection, no matter how non-innovative it might be.

I'd be interested in knowing where they plan to go with the story. The first game did leave a good setup for the second but I can't see where you continue from the end of the second (either the original or with the extension pack)

Diablo had a story? I must have missed it.

It was a heavily contrived story that was an excuse for killing loads of stuff but it was still a story. :)

Diablo 2 did a lot better in actually presenting a story arc of sorts over the various regions of the game.

Maybe Diablo and the brothers had an unknown sister?
A badass biatch who wants revenge! :P

How could you possibly miss those pretty cutscenes?

I wouldn't say it was any more/less contrived than, say, your standard Bioware plot.

The only difference would be that if it were a Bioware game, the Barbarian would be more obsessed with killing things and it would come off as comic relief, and the Paladin would be shagging the Sorceress.

I probably skipped them. I am not denying that the thing had a story, I'm just making a point that even if you missed out on it the game still was great fun. Now, take the story away from Mass Effect - you'll get pretty pictures and boring, boring gameplay (shooting aliens with ridiculously generous XP rewards and exploring the same planet over and over again).

On a slightly different note, some Diablo 2 obsessed fans made a petition demanding that Blizzard makes the Diablo III graphics more dark and creepy like "they are supposed to be". At first I was sceptical - I didn't really have a problem with the below average graphics and the comic style art, but looking at the fan-produced shopped Diablo III screens I must admit - that's what the next Diablo has got to look like. It's like day and night. Take a look.

Diablo 2 actually used quite sophisticated storytelling techniques for a game, and the story itself showed a richly designed world. I'm looking forward to Diablo 3, I hope they'll develop the story even more.

I was first skeptical about the petition, but the doctored shots do look a lot scarier. I wouldn't mind a few of those changes; like more darkness, a return of the light radius and less colourfulness. But I'm not signing the petition because the tone is completely inappropriate. First of all, there's loads of amateurish spelling errors. Get it straight. But worse is that they're basically demanding a few things here, and that is way out of line. If it were done diplomatically, as a suggestion, with a friendly tone, then maybe I'd have supported it. But they're neither speaking for 'all the fans', nor are they in the position to start demanding things to a well-respected developer who has always known what it was doing. That's a big thumbs down right there, so-called 'fans'.

Yes. Games need more brown and grey.


As someone who has only ever played the demo of Diablo 1... this would probably be a good time to sit down and actually play this.

Watching the gameplay trailer, what impresses me is that there are actually a few neat improvements to the actual gameplay coming. Me is looking forward to this :).

I was excited when I saw this announced, but disappointed when I saw the gamplay footage. I'm sure it'll be a great, addictive game, but the choice of color pallet, and cartoony character and monster models don't fit with the mood set for the previous two games.

As many fans of the Diablo games are aware, a lot of the developers for Diablo 2 went to work on Hellgate: London for Flagship Studios. That game got the graphics style I'd expect from Diablo 3... but other than that, it wasn't that great. It seems Diablo 3 will get the gameplay I wanted when playing Hellgate, while Hellgate had the graphics I hoped for in Diablo 3.

There's no question that gameplay is more important, and I'm sure getting a PG13 rating will help sales immensely for D3, but I'll play it with a hint of nausea until I get addicted and forget about it.

I think a lot of people are forgetting that they've shown all of two environments and most probably as you progress through the game it will get darker and darker in every sense of the word. You can't blow people away with extreme darkness at the end if that's what you start with...

Contrast, people!

Also if this gore-fest gets a PG-13 on colour palette alone the ratings board is crazy.

Ah, but I forget... decapitation > boobies.

Of course some locations will be dark, and others bright. Lack of variety would make the game boring... but:

Judging by the screenshots, they have chosen to portray darkness using shades of blue, green and purple, the way it's common to do it in cartoons to make it easy to see every detail even in "dark" scenes. They have also removed the fog of war. Part of the charm in the early Diablo games was hearing the monsters before you could see them, (unless you used hacks to remove the fog of war) and getting startled as they rushed at you out of the darkness.

Character and monster models presented so far, look like something Disney could have come up with. Character models look goofy, and monsters aren't scary.

Finally, the level of gore *seems* to have been reduced a lot. That might just be the parts they have chosen to show us, but every screen in Diablo 2 looked like a bomb had gone off in a slaughter house after you had cleared it.

The concept art for the game looks great, by the way, so why the actual screenshots and gameplay footage look so ...wrong, is a bit of a mystery. I hope I'm pleasantly surprised when the game gets released.

Don't get me wrong, I know that Blizzard has an exceptional track record when it comes to making games that are both fun to play, and addictive, and I'm sure this won't be an exception. I see no reason to pat them on their back when they seem to make design choices that would make their game less than it could have been, though.

The entire game and its expansion are about entities from the hells and more importantly one or more from the heavens, interfering with mankind's 'development'.

The 'devils', with a huge pool of talent to draw from other than the three brothers, seeking to control and wreak havok on the mortal plane. And from the heaven's, Tyreal trying to 'shepherd' mankind in his own self opinionated and domineering fashion not to mention the higher order he mentions in one of the cutscenes who flat out forbade him to interfere at all

I always questioned Tyreal's motives in D2 and especially D2X, so I expect it will go further into that this time around. I hope the comet is only celestial in origin and not some space tie-in.
...

Having just visited the site and seeing Tyreal's big mug front and center behind the logo... it could be good. But that comet is still a worry, I cross my fingers against the possibility of space alien shitty poo poo.

Hmmmm. Comet falling from the sky. Evil monsters on rampage.

Is this a single fighter version of Warcraft III? :)

I must say I heavily disagree. Titan Quest and even Dungeon Siege are better than Diablo 1&2. Until Diablo 3 comes out, Titan Quest is the best game in the genre.

Haha Dungeon Siege. That game wasn't, let's say, shitty, but it was definitely a snooze-fest for like 75% of it.

Depends on what's important to you. The basic game mechanics that made the Diablo games so much fun, have been copied, and you may even argue that other games have improved on them. The atmosphere that made the Diablo games so special to me has never been matched in a game that had equally addictive gameplay, and I doubt even Diablo 3 will manage that. It looks more like its clones than the original games.