Last Decem­ber I had a few words to say about the next install­ment of the very suc­cess­ful Dia­blo fran­chise. Here’s a short recap: Bliz­zard was – and obvi­ously still is – look­ing for new per­son­nel to work on a “Top Secret” title. A few of these job open­ings ref­er­ence to Dia­blo I and Dia­blo II. Every job open­ing refer­ring to a next-gen MMO comes with­out such a ref­er­ence, though. And then there’s the mys­te­ri­ous insider called Surfer Girl who pro­vided the pub­lic with the infor­ma­tion, that the next Dia­blo “will fea­ture a single-player com­po­nent (akin to pre­vi­ous titles) and an MMO com­po­nent (less akin to pre­vi­ous titles)”.

Over the last days there has been a devel­op­ment I don’t want to ignore. Over at Diablo3.com a count­down teaser has been added. It doesn’t say all that much but it deliv­ers an impor­tant mes­sage: “The num­ber of days until half the web links to Diablo3.com. But why???” The count­down points to May 1^st. There has been quite a buzz on what this announce­ment will be about and it has been estab­lished that it’s not the offi­cial Dia­blo 3 announce­ment. Well, Dia­blo II and Dia­blo II: Lord of Destruc­tion have both been release on June 29, 2000 and 2001 respec­tively. It may well be that Bliz­zard has cho­sen to honor the sym­me­try and announce the third install­ment on this par­tic­u­lar date. But then, there may be no mean­ing attached to it.

Well, it cer­tainly makes sense to renew the MMO com­po­nent a lit­tle. Over the last few days I’ve again played a lit­tle Dia­blo II: Lord of Destruc­tion and while play­ing I did some think­ing on the next install­ment pre­sum­ably called Dia­blo III. How will it look like? Of course I don’t know but I think I know enough about how things work to make an edu­cated guess. It sure will look good but not too good, so that it can be played on as many sys­tems as pos­si­ble. You cer­tainly have to draw a line some­where, but in-between you can have some fun with fancy slid­ers reg­u­lat­ing the details of the graph­ics. I’d say expect some­thing sim­i­lar to what they did with Star­craft II.

That estab­lished, I asked myself what char­ac­ter classes Bliz­zard would make avail­able. Typ­i­cal for Dia­blo, there should be only humans to choose from. My best guess is that there will be a few war­riors for close and long-range com­bat respec­tively, a few magi­cians and a few mixes. Since the Dia­blo lore is quite a bit about reli­gion I would expect to see one or two classes finally live up to that fact. Cleric, any­one? Well, it’s pretty use­less to spec­u­late on that part because what­ever I can come up with, the devel­op­ment team will have it’s own ideas. Let’s see what they’ll bring.

Now, the most impor­tant part: How will the MMO com­po­nent look like? To my mind, there will be sim­i­lar­i­ties to World of War­craft. It makes sense to build on a proven base. There should be quite a few dif­fer­ences, though. For instance, Dia­blo has always been about hack­ing and slash­ing. I think it will become more com­plex but it is imper­a­tive for the fran­chise to retain a few of the key fea­tures that made it so suc­cess­ful. Thus, I think it’s safe to say that it won’t become a WoW clone. On top of that is the fact that Bliz­zard couldn’t pos­si­bly want Dia­blo to com­pete with World of Warcraft.

I got lots of ideas on how to make Dia­blo bet­ter but still, it’s point­less to spec­u­late until there is an estab­lished base to build upon. I don’t really like World of War­craft, even though it plays quite nicely. I can only con­grat­u­late the devel­op­ment team for cre­at­ing a game that is easy to learn but hard to mas­ter. So what­ever sur­prise they have in store for us on May 1^st, I seri­ously hope it’s get­ting us somewhere.