Diablo III - PC

New Diablo III Cinematic Trailer: Black Soulstone

Jim Reilly — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 20:25:00 GMT

At Blizzcon this afternoon a new cinematic trailer for Diablo III was on display.

The trailer shows a female writing in manuscripts before awakening in front of a large, demonic army. Blizzard also announced that subscribers of the new World of Warcraft Annual Pass get a digital version of the game free whenever it launches.

Check out the trailer below!

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Diablo III Will Have Real Money Auction House

Adam Biessener — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 07:01:00 GMT

Blizzard is taking a wildly unconventional step with its upcoming action/RPG. Diablo III will allow players to buy and sell items from each other using real money.

Each currency region will have its own auction house, accessible in-game. Players must pay a flat listing fee per item (though Blizzard is leaning toward giving everyone a small number of free listings per week), and set initial bids and buyout prices. Buyers can set their bids to automatically increase up to set levels rather than paying the buyout price, if they wish. When the item sells, Blizzard takes a flat cut of the sale, and the seller can choose to cash it out via a third-party payment processor (which will charge a percentage fee) or to leave it in their Battle.net account to use on any Blizzard digital product. These purchases could vary from full games to World of Warcraft subscriptions and sparkleponies.

Once you transfer your funds to Battle.net, though, you can't choose to cash it back out into currency. Getting money out of the system is a one-time opportunity at the time of the sale. Blizzard says that this is for legal reasons; apparently if the company lets players withdraw money at will, it would face many additional legal requirements just like a bank.

Any item in the game can be put up for auction, and you can set the price wherever you like. Blizzard expects prices to stabilize in the single-digit dollar range for most good items, with perhaps a few exceptional ones making it to double digits. That sounds about right as a back-of-the-napkin estimate, based on what we've seen in secondary markets for other games.

Blizzard says it will not sell items directly. The auction house is strictly a player-to-player market – not that players would have any way to tell if the company slipped a few items into the economy, since the auction house is anonymous both ways. You'll never know who sold you an item, or who bought one of yours. There is no reason to assume bad faith on Blizzard's part here, but the fact remains that there is no transparency.

All cash transactions must go through the auction house. You can still trade with your friends and give them items in-game just like in Diablo II, but you can't make any trades involving cash outside the auction house.

A parallel in-game gold auction house will function identically with gold as the currency instead of dollars, euros, or pounds sterling. All of the functionality is shared between both markets.

Hardcore characters – in Diablo terms, characters that are deleted upon death – are excluded from the real money auction house. They can still use the gold auction house, but all hardcore characters are permanently barred from the real money side.

We all know that the gold farmers and other grey marketeers will look at this as an opportunity. Blizzard's stance is that they would do that anyway, and it intends to police cheating and botting as aggressively as ever. In fact, you can only play the game online (see the gameplay preview for more details) – every single Diablo III character is stored on Blizzard's secure servers.

To hate, or not to hate

Before you fly off the handle (trust me, that was my first reaction too), consider the fact that the secondary market will exist whether Blizzard sanctions it or not. Heck, people still pay cash for Diablo II items. At least this way you're not giving your credit card to a shady gray market operator in China.

That said, I wish there were a way I could flag a character to ignore the real money transactions and only play with other non-RMT heroes. Hardcore characters are like that already, but I don't always want to play hardcore style.

Ultimately, Diablo isn't about competition nearly to the extent of World of Warcraft or a competitive shooter or RTS – game director Jay Wilson flat-out stated that he's not worried about achieving any kind of e-sport-viable balance in PvP. As long as I can still co-op with my buddies and have a good time taking down the prime evils (which is a question I'm not worried about the answer to, as my gameplay hands-on preview reveals), I'm not going to throw a huge fit over the RMT auction house.

Diablo III Beta Hands-On

Adam Biessener — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 07:01:00 GMT

Playing through the first half of Act I in Blizzard's upcoming action/RPG changed me. I have seen the future, my friends, and it is glorious.

Diablo III may seem like more of the same on a superficial level. The game is still about blasting your way through randomized areas, hoovering up randomized loot, and getting killed by randomized minibosses. It’s still a click-fest of epic proportions, with players mowing down hordes of monsters with a constant barrage of devastating attacks. Once you sit down to play, though, every minute brings a new delight as Blizzard has smoothed away rough spots in traditional Diablo design and inserted creative new wrinkles.

Story plays a larger role and is delivered organically this time. You can still ignore it, skipping through dialogue and sprinting for the next objective, but it doesn’t take much of a time commitment to listen to the many characters in the world narrating current events or an area’s backstory while you continue on your way. Lore pop-ups function like audio recordings in BioShock, giving a quick bit of voiced information about a new monster, area, or important character when you encounter it.

What I’ve seen of Diablo III’s grim tale fits the series’ gothic vibe perfectly. The pages of well-written lore, delivered in bite-sized voiced narrations, are a great complement to the action. The mysteries surrounding the fire in the sky and unquiet dead invading New Tristram drew me forward just as much as loot and levels.

Story is all well and good, but Diablo III’s staying power will depend on its mechanics. Since I last saw the game, Blizzard has removed skill points entirely. Instead, you unlock skills as you level but can only equip a handful at a time (two to start, six eventually). This may seem like a radical change, and in some respects it is, but I'm sold on it. Being able to freely experiment with new spells is such a massive benefit that it easily outweighs any downsides.

Carving my path through the outskirts of New Tristram on my way to the cathedral where mad king Leoric’s skeleton has been reanimated once again, I use five distinct ability loadouts. Each plays quite differently. Swapping out my single-target nuke for a chain lightning blast reduces my effectiveness against the disturbing minion-birthing mother zombies, but the ease with which it lets me wipe out entire groups is worth it. My defenses take a hit by flipping frost nova for wave of force, but it isn’t that hard to avoid being surrounded. Plus, having a long-cooldown spell that can one-shot a whole encampment of zombies is way more amusing.

It’s incredibly liberating to hit a new level in the middle of a battle and immediately bring a new skill into your arsenal. Unlike Diablo II, which required players to commit early to dumping points into a single skill in order to be effective, all of the powers now automatically scale with your level. Experimenting with different skills and the way that they alter your tactics has always been a big part of Diablo’s appeal, and this new system removes just about every barrier to that core tenet.

As much as I like being able to swap my build at a moment’s notice, I don't think this point-free system would work without the rune system. The ability to alter (sometimes drastically) each skill in six different ways means that there is still a ton of room to create a unique build that plays the way you want it to. I didn't get to play with the runes personally, but Blizzard showed off the system's power by taking a traditional ranged wizard character and turning her into a melee powerhouse. When you can go so far as to take a ranged projectile and turn it into an orbiting damage shield, you can get pretty darn creative.

Each class uses a unique resource (two, in the Demon Hunter’s case). This has obvious advantages in terms of differentiating their playstyles, but don’t expect any big surprises in the mechanics. The Wizard’s fast-regenerating arcane power functions like Rogue energy in World of Warcraft. The Barbarian’s fury is basically WoW rage, building off of basic attacks and being consumed by more powerful strikes. The Witch Doctor’s mana is exactly what you’d expect. The Monk’s spirit gauge is interesting; it builds slowly as he uses normal attacks and is quickly depleted by using special skills. On the other hand, his specials generally don’t have cooldowns, so Monks can burst huge power at the expense of being relatively weak until they can re-energize their spirit. Finally, the Demon Hunter combines the concepts of mana and arcane power, using quick-replenishing hatred to fuel their offense and slow-recharging discipline to power defensive escapes.

I didn’t have time to play through the whole build with each character, and spent more time with the Barbarian and Wizard than the others. Dabbling with all five left me impressed with the variety between them as well as the marked difference between playing different builds of the same class. Using debuffs and pets to keep monsters away from you and eat their life force as the Witch Doctor is nothing like a Wizard blasting them into bits with raw elemental power, despite the fact that they’re both spellcasting ranged classes. Likewise, the Barbarian’s gonzo smash-oriented combat style is distinct from the Monk’s stolid, defensive tactics. The Demon Hunter, as a physical ranged class, is unique among the five. I love what Blizzard has done with making positional tactics primary to that class, with powerful stationary traps and acrobatic escapes complementing bread-and-butter projectile attacks.

Dynamically generated one-off local events are a great addition to the game that help keep things from feeling too samey. I encounter an abandoned cellar being looted by pygmies. Fighting a swarm of bad guys in these tight quarters is an interesting battle for my fragile wizard, made more tense by the race to kill the treasure bearer before it opens a portal and escapes with the loot.

As is traditional for the series, you occasionally encounter unique monsters with random properties. Many of these will be familiar to Diablo II players, like the Molten minibosses and their minions who add fire damage to their attacks and explode on death. The Illusionist ability is a new one, though, and served me my only death during my playtime. These minibosses create mirror images of themselves at intervals – identical-looking copies that thankfully have a fraction of the true boss’s health and damage. That’s a challenge in itself, but when the Illusionist in question is a Grotesque that explodes on death and leaves Corpse Worms in its wake, it’s extremely deadly. Killing the copies takes a quarter of my health off the top and drops more mobs to deal with, and I’m pretty sure the boss itself gets several casts of fresh images off while I am trying to deal with the copies and the worms.

Blizzard also showed a battle where the hero fights her way onto a lonely hilltop in the middle of a forest with the Templar companion at her side. The Templar shouts a warning as a massive wave of undead gather at the foot of the hill and begin a shambling assault at the order of their long-dead commander. After the battle, the hero finds a book on the hilltop that tells the story of an ancient battle that took place there. The whole scenario plays out in perhaps a single minute, but it’s a great example of the extent of the little details Blizzard is adding to Diablo III that take the game to the next level.

Next up: More stuff that's awesome, plus two things that aren't

New Details & Video On Follower System

Adam Biessener — Fri, 13 May 2011 07:01:00 GMT

I know, I know, it's not "Diablo III Beta Started – Get Your Key Now!" We have to make do with what Blizzard gives us. Read on for the nuances of the follower system, but the big surprise is that they're unavailable in multiplayer.

Followers in Diablo III take the place of mercenaries from Diablo II: non-player characters that autonomously support you in combat. The system is unsurprisingly much more developed than the often kludgy mercenaries. Rather than choosing between hilariously imbalanced (life leeching unhittable barbarians) and pointless (mages that die in two hits and have all the firepower of a Super Soaker), you can develop your companions into customized support roles.

Followers aren't intended to contribute a lot to your direct damage, though you can make up for that to some extent with equipment and skill selection. Instead, each of the three followers primarily helps you out in a less face-smashing but still useful way. The templar can perform moderate tanking, the scoundrel can distract and misdirect your foes, and the enchantress can confuse their minds with her spells.

Eirena, the enchantress

Part of a mysterious band of women led by an enigmatic prophet who she says is training them to prevent the end of the world, Eirena shares the same goal as the player. However, with the prophet and her sisters missing, Eirena is on her own until she meets up with you. In battle, the enchantress focuses on buffing the player while debuffing opponents with a variety of status effects.

All three followers will join you along the adventure's critical path. Unlike the BioWare approach, they don't hand out sidequests or dramatically alter the path of the story. You can dig into their backstories by chatting with them in camp, but it's all lore fluff – you won't unlock an uber skill or a secret dungeon for doing so.

Though you can have just one follower active at a time, the other two hang out at your camp, conveniently sitting near your waypoint, and can be switched out for no cost. Respeccing them is a nominal gold fee, which goes up as you level but that Blizzard intends to be minor relative to your wealth at any stage of the game. Instead of dying and costing you a hefty resurrection fee, they get KO'ed at zero health and can be revived for free after the battle.

Kormac, the templar

The templar order, like Diablo II's paladins, is dedicated to the eradication of evil in Sanctuary. Unlike those noble warriors, the templar also believe in the enrichment and empowerment of themselves. Once you rescue Kormac from a double-cross by a corrupted templar, he assists you in melee with his shield and spear.

You can specialize each of the three followers between twelve skills that come in groups of three. Possibly more importantly, you can equip them with weapons, jewelry, and a class-specific item to customize their capabilities. Much of any Diablo character's power is tied to their equipment, and followers will be no different.

Followers cannot be controlled at all, not even with MMO-esque "aggressive/defensive/passive" commands. Blizzard toyed with the idea, but decided that those controls didn't mesh at all with fast-paced Diablo combat. Instead, the developers have focused their efforts on improving follower AI. Your adventure buddies will react to situations, like the enchantress casting a missile shield spell when facing archers or healing you when you're wounded. Follower behavior also changes depending on what skills you've given them, so hopefully a damage-specced templar will naturally be more aggressive than a defensively focused one.

Lyndon, the scoundrel

A disgraced member of the Kingsport thieves guild, Lyndon will flirt with anything remotely female and steal anything not bolted down. In exchange for your protection from his murderous former guild, Lyndon will happily shoot your foes with his heavy crossbow, use poison and distraction to cripple your enemies, and increase your chances of finding valuable gems and jewelry.

The follower system, like everything about Diablo III, is subject to change between now and release. If Blizzard is going into this much detail on it, though, you can place a pretty safe bet that the final design will be close if not identical. I'm dismayed that followers are disabled in multiplayer, since an effective, complementary merc in Diablo II could be a big part of your character. At the same time, the rest of the plan sounds great. Even if Blizzard is still dodging the question about secret lightning hoses.

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Diablo III Game Director Discusses Monks, Health Globes, And The Mysterious Fifth Class

Phil Kollar — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 01:02:00 GMT

If you’ve had to chance to check out Issue #199 of Game Informer (that’s the one with the hot Epic Mickey cover that’s on newsstands now), you may have chanced upon my preview for Diablo III, wherein I laid out details on the game’s recently revealed Monk class. While there’s a lot to be excited about from the game’s fourth announced class, there’s plenty of other interesting changes that Diablo III is bringing to the franchise.

I had the chance to speak with Diablo III game director Jay Wilson about some of the biggest changes and how Blizzard’s fans have reacted. How did a Halo-style health regeneration system almost end up in Diablo III? How is this new hack-and-slash RPG inspired by Zelda and fighting games? And who is (or is not) the fifth playable class? Read on to find out!

Game Informer: The big news for Diablo III at BlizzCon was the new Monk class. Has there been any other big news or interesting updates on the game since BlizzCon?

Jay Wilson: No, I don’t know that we’ve announced anything big since then. We usually save up for BlizzCon. That was our last big new information push.

GI: Of course there’s one more class left to be revealed at some point in the future. Will eager Diablo III fans will have to wait until BlizzCon next year before we see that class?

JW: We haven’t decided on the release schedule and when we’re going to announce that class. It will depend heavily on when the class is ready to be shown. If it’s ready to show at the next BlizzCon, then yeah, maybe then. Or if it’s ready sooner, then we might do it at some other event.

GI: Let’s focus on the Monk for a little bit then. The idea of a Monk in Diablo III is interesting because you aren’t just doing a melee fighter, like a lot of people may think of because of monks from other RPGs. Diablo III’s Monk has strong magical abilities as well. I’m curious where that idea came from.

JW: When you’re dealing with a melee character in a game like this, they’re actually some of the more challenging characters to make. When we were thinking up the idea of what character we would want to do, we knew we wanted to make a faster, more fragile, high DPS (damage per second) melee character who was a nice contrast from the Barbarian. We pegged that as one of the things we really wanted to do. We wanted a magical character, again, because it was a great contrast from the Barbarian. It also opens doors for us to do different kinds of abilities that you wouldn’t normally get to do on a melee character.

That was one of the reasons we liked the Monk. It wasn’t the only reason, but it was definitely one of them. It felt to us that the more priest-oriented holy abilities hadn’t been explored on that type of a character in depth, and we thought that would be really fun to add in and would be a nice twist on the class.

GI: Speaking of the Monk’s abilities, I think it’s really interesting that each Monk ability has three separate moves that can be mixed and matched with the other abilities. That makes for a much more engaging melee character. I would have to imagine it also means that from the animation standpoint it’s pretty complicated to work on the character. Did you have any films or other sources that you were using as inspiration to help flesh out some of those moves?

JW: The biggest inspiration was fighting games. Especially on our animation team, but across the whole game, we have a big fighting game culture, bigger than any team I’ve ever been on. We like us some fighting games. (Laughs)

When we decided to make a character like this, we really wanted to make a fighting game character. We looked at Street Fighter and God of War and games like that, more melee brawler-type games. We knew walking in that it was a more expensive character animation-wise. This character’s going to have more animations than any of our other characters, maybe more than two or three characters put together. But every class has a different cost associated with it. The Barbarian takes longer to iterate his skills and get it right, so we tend to have to do more versions of his skills before they really shine. The Wizard is really effects-heavy. The Witch Doctor has whole creatures that we have to build for him. Every class has their cost, so we thought it was acceptable for the Monk to have more animation, and at least it was a very different cost than any of the other characters.

GI: Are there any specific fighting games that are particularly popular around the office?

JW: Right now, Street Fighter IV.

GI: Are you guys psyched about the Super Street Fighter IV announcement?

JW: There’s debate. [Laughs] There’s back and forth. Everyone’s pretty excited about it. Of course, we’re all debating about who they chose to put back in. But yeah, we’re pretty excited about it. A lot of the guys are playing UFC right now, but I haven’t had a chance to try it yet. I hear it’s pretty good. We’ve got a big arcade machine in here that has like 200 games on it, so we’ve got all kinds of games. My classic favorite is Samurai Shodown. I particularly like the fourth one.