Diablo III Preview

Eurogamer has conjured up a three-page hands-on preview of Diablo III, with quite a bit of added commentary from lead world designer Leonard Boyarsky and lead technical artist Julian Love. The information comes straight from this year’s BlizzCon, so you may have already read some of it in earlier previews.

Blizzard cheekily grabbed headlines during BlizzCon with the assertion that there are 97 billion possible builds per character class, not counting equipment or the new passive Traits. A silly piece of performance maths this may be, but the point is, there are many skills, they are all viable, you do have to choose between them, and you can customise them. A lot.

The interface is disarmingly simple. Skill trees are gone; you simply pick skills from a list on the right and plug them into slots on the left which unlock as you level up. Skill points awarded every level are spent on purchasing new skills or ranking up existing ones.

“We’ve put a lot of effort into making sure that every one of those skills aren’t throwaway skills,” says Love. “Diablo II has a design where the skills are intentionally built for you to use them and move on, throw them away. None of ours are designed with that in mind. We try to make them viable throughout the whole game in some way.

“So just by the nature of the large number set and the fact that so many of them are useful, I think you’re just inherently going to have, compared to past games or any other action RPG, a ginormous number of builds, which kind of gets us an out from the cookie-cutter syndrome. If you’re a player who really wants to set themselves apart, not look like everybody else and not be like everybody else, I think you’ll be able to do it in this game.”