Diablo III Previews and Video Interview

It was fairly easy to predict that BlizzCon would kickstart a new wave of coverage for the upcoming (planned for early 2012) Diablo III, and this obviously translates in some new things for us to round up.

We start with a piece from IGN, with some talk from Blizzard about the title’s launch and post-launch plans:

One of the big benefits for Blizzard with the beta is testing the game with plenty of users concurrently online. “It’s really helping us stress test the servers and it’s helping us identify areas we need to fix. On the gameplay side we’ve gotten a lot of feedback from players. The big thing we’re looking at now is, we don’t want players playing the game with the skill window up and swapping in and out as fast as they can.”

In case you’re not aware, the skill system in Diablo III has been dramatically changed since Diablo II. Instead of being locked into a skill build, your active skills are entirely moddable. Skills unlock as you level up, and you can eventually equip six active skills and three passive ones. These aren’t permanently equipped, but can be moved around even while in the middle of a fight. It seems like if Blizzard were to make a change to this system, they might make it so skills are locked while in combat.

“We are making some changes to how [skills] are swapped in and out,” said Mayberry. “I’m not going to reveal it, but it’ll come out in the beta. We haven’t completely locked it down. We’re going to make incremental, minute changes and get player reaction.”

GameWit has some quick thoughts on the beta:

Part of the draw of the (Diablo) games is their emphasis on all manners of loot. As someone who gets a bit tired of the loot grind after a while, I appreciated some changes brought to this game. Two items you can carry, the Cauldron of Jordan and the Nephalem Cube, allow you to sell your useless items without going back to town or to convert them into component parts used in crafting.

To pick up gold, you just walk over it. If walking over to the gold is too much for your feeble mouse-clicking fingers to handle, you’ll frequently come across scrolls that will summon an animal companion who’ll pick up the gold for you. I found myself obsessing over these little critters. The first time I used the scroll, I ended up with a golden chicken. The second time, I got a snake, and I later got a rat.

Another frequent drop you’ll get, besides the Scroll of Companion is the Page of Training. These are torn from a Tome of Training and when you assemble five pages, you can use them to boost various non-player characters’ abilities.

If you’re one of those freaks like me who’ll spend a half-hour reading codex entries in the (Mass Effect) games, (Diablo III) has you covered there, too. Every time you meet a new enemy type, you unlock a lore entry in your journal to enable later nerdery.

BeefJack writes down some Blizzard talk on difficulty:

(Hardcore games for everyone is what Blizzard does,) said Jay Wilson. (We’re making the early game for casual players so we can turn them into hardcore players.)

On Normal mode, enemies won’t use the full range of their abilities, and have been made far less responsive and slower than their Nightmare difficulty equivalents.

To conclude, Destructoid interviewed lead content designer Kevin Martens and lead console designer Josh Mosquiera. While the whole video interview takes a little bit less than 7 minutes, here’s a written snippet from Destructoid itself to get you started:

When asked if his title was a harbinger of things to come, Mosquiera responded, “We’re not announcing anything because, literally, there’s three of us on the team right now … but that’s what we’re trying to do… We’re trying to build the best console team at Blizzard. Blizzard is really serious about going back to the console.” No general timeline was given, but it seems likely that development has either begun or will do so very soon.

I also got a chance to speak with Kevin Martens, Diablo III’s Lead Content Developer, who confirmed that Blizzard will not be doing a public beta for the game prior to launch.

“We’re doing it in waves, so we’ll keep adding people. The beta will be going for some time; we’re going to be patching it, supporting it, and adding new stuff to it, as well.”