I don’t often get excited about upcoming games; but when I do, that game is Diablo III. I’ve easily sunk more hours into Diablo II than any other game, and still find myself playing it to this day.
Thus Diablo III’s development has been somewhat of a big deal to me, and having finally had a chance to play through the beta I can tell you veteran Diablo II players out there what to expect from the sequel.
Visuals
Quite obviously, graphic rendering has improved since 2000, and Diablo III is a much better looking game than its predecessor. However, Blizzard has taken a gentle approach; you get just enough glow, detail and texture to make the game feel more immersive and a lot prettier, without distracting you with fancy light shows and GPU-melting effects.
A visual change I wasn’t expecting was the added layer of depth to the surroundings. While exploring the dank, underground catacombs, you can see the different levels – so while you’re battling a horde of nasties on a walkway you can look down below and see more evil minions milling around, awaiting a gory end.
This allows you to do some cool things, like leap over railings, ambushing a dim-witted zombie with an axe to the face. This added scope really makes you feel more absorbed and in control, rather than just groping through the fog of war hoping you’re going the right way.
The addition of proper physics is quite satisfying too. Limbs sail through the air and heads roll down staircases, while physics-based traps are placed throughout the game – cut a chandelier rope to crush some surprised minions, and watch their corpses fly through the air.
There are many ways to interact with the environment combined with the added visual depth – such as using our chandelier trap to crush baddies on the levels below.
Skills
As you may have read, the skill trees in Diablo III are very different. Firstly they’ve done away with manual stat levelling entirely. As for the tree, sets of skills are now unlocked at key levels, as opposed to choosing to put your points into new skills or improving current ones.
Character customisation comes in with runes, which allow you to power up and alter different skills –a choice left up to you. Overall this makes the experience a lot simpler, but some purists might think it too simplistic at face value.
In Diablo II, levelling skills or stats incorrectly did irrevocable damage to your character by the time you hit the higher levels – if you’d foolishly put a bunch of points into low level spells, you might as well start over. But for the novice player, this wasn’t obvious or intuitive. This new skill tree system prevents amateur players from hamstringing themselves at later levels, at the cost of taking out some of the nitty-gritty for hardened veterans.
From what I can tell so far, the system works. It’s less punishing than its predecessor, but it’ll still allow for the rest of us to invent crazy character builds (BATTLE DOCTOR) and scour the internet for the best and most interesting way to rune out our hero. If you wanted to go really deep in Diablo II, you basically couldn’t without a bit of internet research beforehand. It may sound a little like training wheels to some, but I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
Above is the skill tree for my primary skill. The top row is my available skills, and the bottom row is rune enhancements I can make. The greyed out icons will be unlocked at higher levels.
Interface
The real improvement here in my opinion is that the interface is extremely similar to Diablo II. If you’re familiar with that, playing Diablo III for the first time will be like slipping on an old pair of comfortable slippers. If you’re new to the franchise entirely, all the things that made the old interface great still apply – it’s very intuitive and not intimidating, you’ll have no trouble at all getting the hang of it.
There are however a couple of stand-out differences. For one, your carrying capacity while out battling evil is far greater than in Diablo II. Frankly it makes the whole experience a lot more pleasant, and it means you don’t have to port back to town every ten minutes just to offload all the junk you’ve been collecting.
You also now have more spells to play with; in addition to your standard primary and secondary spells, you also have the option of using other defensive and area effect spells, assigned to numbers. This gives battle a much less monotonous feel, as you can run around casting multiple spells and combining things together nicely. It makes long experience grinds/loot hunts a lot more fun and interactive than they were in Diablo II.
Mana is no longer the only complement to health; many characters have a replacement resource such as “arcane energy” for the Wizard that recharges by itself and “Fury” for the Barbarian. It helps adapt to different people’s play-styles, and also means you aren’t burdened down by mana potions for your hungrier spells.
Lastly the auction house looks to be a ton of fun, especially at the later levels which you don’t have access to in the beta. In Diablo II, I often had the problem of having nothing I particularly wanted to spend my enormous gold stash on, so shopping for high-powered items at the higher difficulties will really be great.
That swirling purple ball in the bottom right is my arcane energy. It’ll deplete when I use spells, but regenerate itself very quickly – no potions required!
Battle.net
This service certainly has its detractors, but honestly it’s fantastic in Diablo III. A friend can logon while you’re playing solo, and easily jump right into your game. You can check out your friends’ characters, their items, chat to them and join them in battle seamlessly and easily. Some of the most fun to be had in Diablo is sharing your epic loot find stories with your friends and grinding together, and this couldn’t be easier in Diablo 3.
Conclusion
Veterans of the predecessor are going to be more than satisfied with the sequel, it has enough change in it to make it fresh and exciting, but it’s still close enough to its roots to make you feel right at home.
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The people complaining if your not happy dont buy it simple