Blizzard starts hyping up Diablo III

June 29th, 2008

At Blizzard’s annual Worldwide Invitational the company has announced the future launch of Diablo III only shortly after the announcements of StarCraft 2 and Gas Powered Games’ Dungeon siege 3 with which it is bound to be compared.

It’s been eight years since the release of Diablo II and still the BattleNet game servers are crowded with players of this aging behemoth of a game so there will be countless Diablo fans eagerly awaiting a launch of the latest title which is bound to be successful.

So what will Diablo fanatics think of the new title? Will Diablo III be sufficiently better than Diablo II to justify the decade-long gestation period? And how will it compare to competitors such as Dungeon Siege III due for launch at around the same time?

Blizzard answers many of these questions with the new media on its site.

The Good News

The preview movies on the site are recorded at 800 x 600 resolution which may indicate that this is still the maximum resolution but the quality of the graphics is markedly better than that of Diablo II which was rather crude. The new imagery is more reminiscent of Dungeon Siege — a major improvement. Blizzard says:

“a new graphics engine that can display characters and hordes of monsters in lush, fully 3D environments. Powerful special-effects systems and Havok-powered physics allow the player to lay waste to the Hells’ minions in spectacular ways.”

Soon after the movie begins we see evil minions climbing up the side of a building so the game engine has certainly moved on from Diablo II.

Those who played Diablo II through to the end of the ‘Baal’ Expansion pack will have been wondering how the ‘remade world’ would be handles in a new Diablo title release. Diablo III is set twenty years after the destruction of the worldstone by Tyrael so while many things about the world are familiar to II players enough time has passed for the world to be a different place and for events to have changed it enough to provide a fresh environment for dedicated players. Diablo III retains the feature of Diablo II of generating random environments, unlike DS’s fixed world, which keeps each campaign fresh.

Diablo III, unlike Dungeon Siege III, will be released simultaneously for PC and OS X.

The Bad News

Unfortunately it’s not all good.

The movies give a great feel for the game and the new dynamics involved in playing it but there seems to be no evidence in any of them that the player can change the camera angle. This impression may be erroneous as changing the camera angle would cause a spike in the bandwidth of the streamed movies but if the feature was there you’d think Blizzard would want to show it off.

Diablo II had seven character types; Amazon, Assassin, Barbarian, Druid, Necromancer, Paladin and Sorceress. Blizzard is only showing two characters at the moment; Barbarian and Witch Doctor but also tells us that there are only five character classes. So three of the established classes will disappear. This is only partly compensated for by the option of male and female genders for each class.

Summing up

Overall the new site provides enough engaging material to have Diablo II players champing at the bit for the opportunity to part with their cash. Expect further information about the character classes, world environment and gameplay to be released over the next several months.