Diablo III

Pre-Release Review

   By: Jim Gustav 

Diablo I & II as a franchise sold over 5 million units by 2006 only WoW has sold more in the same amount of time. Blizzard Entertainment only expects continued success from game titles such as Diablo III and World of Warcraft plus many other successful titles.
Diablo III the newest title in the series, is one that promises improved graphics, and game-play aspects, over the sprite driven Diablo I and II.
Starting with the graphics engine there will be many improved aspects of the game. It seems that Diablo III will be a truly three dimensional game, rather than a mostly 2D game designed to “look” 3D.                                   
Another plus and a huge step forward in the gameplay environment of Diablo's franchise is destructible environments. Physics for the players who love hacking an enemy and watching him flip-flop into a bottomless pit, and certainly many more technological advances over its predecessors.

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Within any Diablo title you can expect the dungeon crawling, high-intensity melee battles, or for the more magically inclined, huge spell casting with great visual quality, and quite a nice reaction from bodies getting flung about when hit by fireballs or such. There are already five classes slated to make release, including a barbarian, witch doctor, wizard, monk, and demon hunter. Each class will include unique spells, and abilities that will create a dynamic team (in multiplayer) to take on the hordes of enemies, where one player could take the role of a heavy front man to take the damage and dish out melee attacks, while other players could be longer ranged, distance attacking magic users, or perhaps the crossbow approach. Blizzard has said that character customization will be deeper than previous games, allowing for more variations of a single class, so players can get the right type of barbarian, or such, for their playing style.

In Diablo fashion, there will be randomly generated areas, loot, traps, and battles, to make each play-through a different experience, and keeping players on their toes, and apparently this system has been greatly improved since the days of good old Diablo II. You can expect to find each dungeon and each area to be quite different as you play the story again, even with the same character, or when you join another players campaign. This feature always promises to improve re-playability, so that its never gets old slaying the minions of evil, even after you have already defeated the end boss many times. One nice change is that instead of manually picking up each dropped gold pile, that it will automatically be collected by your player upon coming close enough to it.

The cooperation in Diablo III is where developers focused their efforts, but PvP (player-vs-player) is still a part of the multiplayer, allowing players to go hostile toward others any time, which is good if your having a disagreement over who deserves the loot at a location, or you just are feeling a little bit violent towards your pals. There is supposed to be a ranking system of sorts, which runs on Battle.net, that will likely track your attempts to take on the forces of evil, as well as how many times you have chopped your friends ear off with a broadsword for grabbing up a charm you had your eyes on. Each player who has played online will almost certainly have to connect to battle.net, and this prevents much pirating, and hopefully in turn, hacking in the online worlds.

The game takes place on “Sanctuary”, and will include areas from the older games, such as Tristram. Familiar faces will be making an appearance, so far only Deckard Cain has been officially announced on the Diablo III site. Its probably a similar setting to the previous games, where darkness lurks around every corner, and dense forest, and deep catacombs will make up a lot of your playtime. Hopefully this time around there will be much more variation to the different objects, and even weapons which you find, to create more immersion.

So far, there isn’t a release date from Blizzard, but I for-see this game in late 2011, probably before Christmas season, and also the demand should be very high due to the success of the older games, so you should strongly consider a pre-order if your gonna have a copy available for you when this certain blockbuster hits shelves. This will be available on both PC and Mac systems, but there is no word yet on a console port for either PS3 or Xbox360, but it seems this may be avoiding those platforms altogether. If your looking for more information on Diablo III you can check on the following webpages:

• http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_III

• http://diablo.incgamers.com/

For Diablo III Artwork, Screens, and Media check out these pages:

http://us.blizzard.com/diablo3/media/

http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/news/39572/Diablo-III-Artwork-Overload

http://www.diablowiki.com/Main_Page_%28Diablo_III%29