Diablo III Preview

After everything we’ve been reading about Diablo III’s artisan and crafting system, it’s kind of nice getting a few morsels of information about the game’s quest system, skill trees, and item drops. From IGN:

Transitioning to more general topics, Wilson touched on how big the game is compared to previous titles in the franchise. “Honestly it’s similar size to Diablo II. There are some differences here and there, exterior environments are a little more diverse, dungeons are about the same. Even the way the Acts increase in length and then scale down. We intentionally did that again because we thought, some of that was done to ship Diablo II, but we thought it had a good feel to it to reduce the length of later acts so that you feel like you’re accelerating towards the finale.”

Replayability is a big focus for the team, meaning once you’re done with the initial playthrough there’s an opportunity to hack and slash your way through again and again. “Just like Diablo II there’s a nightmare difficulty and a hell difficulty and the areas all have random distribution. All the dungeons are randomly generated. The exteriors have a set layout but they have random monster distribution and events within them. And most of the questing there is done in such a way that encourages exploration. For example you have to acquire some item that’s found somewhere in the zone, very similar to how D2 had some zones not random, so they quested them a little differently.”

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Wilson also specified why the Horadric Cube, the device used in Diablo II to squash together gems and produce new ones, was taken out. “Any system that essentially requires you to go on the internet to figure it out, that’s a fail. That’s a bad system. While we loved what those systems [like the Horadric Cube] did, we didn’t like how they played. We loved combining gems together and collecting gems and we wanted to enhance that, but we didn’t like that the collecting aspect caused you to not want to use your gems. So now we have an artisan that allows you to remove gems from items so that you can still keep them.”