The Ten Commandments of Diablo III

IGN has put online a three-pages article/preview for Diablo III, titled “the ten commandments of Diablo III”, which should refresh our memories on all of the design changes and additions made by Blizzard for their highly anticipated hack’n’slash title. Here’s a sampling:

Diablo II was a punishing and quirky game in many ways, with a lot of tricks for players to learn before it all clicked. For instance, in Diablo II dying could be a pretty big deal. Dying didn’t just restart you back at a checkpoint or take you back to town. Nope, dying meant your corpse would stay where you breathed your last, along with all your gear. You’d appear back in town, but if you wanted your stuff you had to venture out and retrieve your corpse or quit the game and reload, which carried its own penalties: especially on higher difficulty levels. Thus, if you died surrounded by enemies, retrieving your corpse meant fighting through that swarm to get to it. And without the weapons, armour, rings, amulets and other gear you had on you, that often meant getting enough new gear to survive the run. Just so you could retrieve the good stuff.

This unforgiving system meant players relied heavily on health potions and town portals. Having a good stock of the former was mandatory to stay alive as long as possible, while setting up a town portal to instantly transport back to town when the fight became hopeless was also a core tactic especially during boss battles.

How things have changed for Diablo III. Corpse runs are no more. If you die in a dungeon, you’ll be sent back to the last checkpoint you passed, but based on how it played in the beta all the enemies you’d killed up until you died stay dead. Thus, you’re not re-doing sections, just being taken back out of harm’s way so you can decide whether you want to wade back into the fray immediately, or level up/upgrade your gear before attempting the area that killed you again.

This change comes hand in hand with a re-think of the town portal concept. The team still want you to be able to instantly get back to town if you need to, but the town portal in Diablo II was just too convenient a ‘get out of gaol free’ card. Now players have the ‘stone of recall’ which serves the same purpose, but takes several seconds to activate. In other words, it’s an easy way to teleport back to town when things are quiet, but you’d be interrupted trying to cast the spell during a fight.

Blizzard has also completely changed the way health works. There’s far less of an emphasis on health potions now. Instead, enemies drop health orbs when defeated, creating an interesting dynamic where the best way to heal yourself is by fighting and fighting well.