Dia­blo 3 Has Been Unveiled

Finally, Dia­blo III has been unveiled on June 28, 2008 at the 2008 Bliz­zard Enter­tain­ment World­wide Invi­ta­tional in Paris, France. Dia­blo III, D3 in short, is an action role play­ing game sim­i­lar to its pre­de­ces­sor, Dia­blo II. D3 will have a focus on coop­er­a­tive play over Battle.Net. There will also be a sin­gle player com­po­nent, but its main focus def­i­nitely is on team play. The game fea­tures a pro­pri­etary 3D engine that will incor­po­rate Havok physics. As a result, there will be par­tially destruc­tive envi­ron­ments which will be of use to the player. Accord­ing to some news over at IGN Dia­blo 3 won’t require DirectX 10, though, so it should be able to run on a lot of sys­tems. As always, Bliz­zard is plan­ning a simul­ta­ne­ous release on both Win­dows and Mac OS X platforms.

The devel­op­ers want to keep the focus on action and expand the role play­ing ele­ments while stay­ing true to the orig­i­nal con­cept. There will be a focus on mak­ing D3 replayable and because of ran­dom adven­tures and class-specific quests that should prove no prob­lem at all. With­out a doubt, we will see large scale com­bat and scores of ene­mies on screen which is one of the key points of the dia­blo fran­chise. Addi­tion­ally, they made the game eas­ier by imple­ment­ing a hot­bar. Eas­ier con­trols allow to quickly swap through skills which directly trans­lates to a more fast-paced expe­ri­ence. Bliz­zard also redid the health sys­tem. It tried to elim­i­nate down­times in com­bat and it came up with health globes. These appear ran­domly after a mon­ster is slewn. In coop­er­a­tive play all play­ers ben­e­fit from the restora­tive effects of this globe.

The inven­tory is still being worked on but it will be sim­i­lar to WoW. No grid inven­tory will be used this time and they haven’t set­tled upon a final inven­tory size. There will be new and return­ing classes. Up to now, only the Bar­bar­ian and the Witch Doc­tor have been unveiled. In Dia­blo III you can select the gen­der of your char­ac­ter, though. There should be five classes ini­tially, but they’re not really quite sure about that yet, I sup­pose. Sto­ry­wise, D3 will play 20 years after the events that took place in Dia­blo II and some evil is stir­ring again in Tris­tram. Deckard Cain has already been announced as a return­ing NPC.

Nei­ther the sys­tem require­ments nor the launch date have been announced as of yet. Be sure to check out the offi­cial site now and then to get the lat­est info.