The bleed effect is just ridiculous. Awesome in its spectacle, brilliant in its execution. It works like this: Diablo III's monk class plays as if he's stepped out of God of War, or any other console brawler. If he chains three punches in quick succession, he can set up a finishing move. One is a flashy flurry of strikes like something from the Pokemon cartoons - zipping through the air and hitting everything in range. You could finish your flurry with one epically violent slap - knocking your target backwards with full force through the scenery.
As one demon dies, another rushes in to take his place - it's Whack-a-Mole played with two mouse buttons and a warrior of unholy fury. Every creature gets a slap, a tickle and a stomp. Unless you want to be really, really clever, which is where the bleed effect comes in. Use this attack, and as a creature bleeds, it takes damage, its health bar ticking away to nothing. And if they die with the bleed still effective, they explode. The destruction is vicious, hilarious - a tsunami of gore. If you set two, maybe three bleeds running, you can time a chain reaction. Bubble Bobble, played with bile and bones. Diablo III is already gloriously, stupidly violent. It's already brilliant. But it won't be out until at least 2011.
Diablo III gameplay trailer
Official trailer
19:16
Diablo III gameplay trailer
Official trailer
19:16
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Leading the Diablo team is Jay Wilson. He's scruffy in that game developer way: smarts hidden behind a ruff of messy greying hair. Jay has serious form. He came to Blizzard via Relic, after leading the development of Company of Heroes and the Dawn of War games. There, with his designers, he made a point of emphasising violence and destruction. Few who've played CoH will forget the crumpled torsos that remain after a well placed artillery shell hits infantry, or the gruesome animation of an ork shredded to pulp in the claw of a Dreadnought.
Jay and his team at Blizzard are applying a similar sense of physical 'pop' to the four Diablo III classes revealed so far. The Barbarian is beefcake central. He charges into battle and slaps the monstrous hordes about with hammer blows and straight punches. His special moves, like the cleave (it hits all monsters directly in front of him) are pure melee might, tearing foes in half, or sending their torsos and limbs skittering across the desert sands. The Wizard's magic missiles have a similar effect - when they strike a skeleton it doesn't just crumble in a preset animation. Instead, bones scatter as if hit by a truck. Only the Witch Doctor feels like a nimbler, weaker foil, but that's because he isn't the one doing the damage. He summons zombie dogs to do the damage for him. And zombie spiders that spawn from zombie corpses. And the now infamous wall of zombies.
Is it Jay's thing, then, to obsess over the effects of violence? "Yes," he replies. "It's something very close to my heart. When something happens, I want to feel it, I want to see it, and I want it to be awesome. And if it's not awesome, we're going to keep on working on it until it is awesome."
As he talks, he becomes more animated - the excitement rising. "That's something I think Diablo and Diablo II did so well. If you play Diablo II again, do me a favour and go and start a sorceress. Go ahead and hit a Fallen on the head with a staff. It's the greatest sound in the world! It's a thonk, right in the side of his head. It's so good. We focus on that constantly. If it's not right, I give people no end of grief."
Diablo and Diablo II are rightly regarded as classics: two infinitely replayable dungeon crawlers that spawned their own genre. They're also regarded as PC-only classics, but that's an idea Jay challenges. Not because there are plans for Diablo III to appear on consoles, but to ensure that the console influence is acknowledged. For all its mouse-and-keyboard interface, Diablo plays like a beat-'em-up.
"On the action side, we're closer to God of War than World of Warcraft. When we were designing the Monk, we pulled a lot of his moves from fighting games and brawlers, even if our overall combat model has more in common with an MMO or a classic RPG. The Diablo games have in their core somewhat arcade ideas. And we're not afraid to play off that. Like our hit counter system. If you kill 20 enemies in one set of moves, you'll get a bonus to your experience."
The console heritage is also applied to monster design. In the demo, Jay points to the engorged Sand Wasps buzzing across the desert. They're not hard to punt across the dunes, if you can get to them, but reaching melee range is a problem - because they spit smaller versions of themselves at the player. "When we were designing the Sand Wasp, we had the idea of bullet hell (a reference to top-down 2D shooters like Galaga). In fact, our designers mocked up a Galaga level with Diablo graphics, to illustrate exactly what we meant to our artists."
Lone sharks All the enemies have that similar sense of ideas swiftly appropriated. There are the land-sharks: monsters that dig into the soil and reappear underneath your feet. There are dervish warriors who spin like fans of knives. (The only strategy you need: run away as they spin, and attack them as they rest.) There are mages who shoot fireballs, easily dodged, or reflected by the Monk's bubble ability. There are skeletons, undead, wizards, fanatics and followers - boss monsters and elites, rares and fodder. It's the PC RPG equivalent of Double Dragon - every encounter presenting a new combination of bads to beat down.
The game world you fight these beasts in is enormous. The mission in the demo is to discover the fate of a town to the north - getting there takes a good ten minutes of trekking - interspersed by combat every ten seconds or so. But it's easy to be distracted and head off course. Easy, and encouraged. Off-road, I discovered ruins, dungeons, sub-quests and loot beyond my wildest dreams. Diablo III showers you with gold and upgrades like they're going out of fashion.
Diablo is famed for randomisation. Here, the desert level I played wasn't randomised - but the dungeons I happened across were. In one, as I entered the ceiling began to collapse, the rock supports starting to buckle under the pressure. A time limit appeared: four minutes before I'm buried alive. It becomes a race - to see how much loot I can scavenge before fleeing for the exit. As I fought, I began to see tactical opportunities: bringing down the roof on the monsters by hacking at the struts as I went. As the clock ticked down, my clicking became all the more frantic - particularly after I lost my way back to the entrance.
If Diablo is good in singleplayer, it's a phenomenal multiplayer game. Second try, I teamed up as the Witchdoctor with a Warrior. I would run in first - scattering the enemies with my fear ability, before unleashing the zombie dogs. They'd hold down two, five, ten monsters each, while the warrior concentrated on the harder foes, elites and rares. As my meat-head friend took his time, I threw in fire bombs and corpse spiders. It's funny to watch the undead explode.
Duel play? Can Diablo do more than co-op? Could it ever be a competitive multiplayer game? Jay says his team is 'exploring it', even if they've got nothing yet to show for their efforts. The original Diablo dungeon crawls had the option to duel, but, as Jay points out, "it was tacked on, a button that you'd just enable. We'd like to give it a bit more thought than that." The irony is that the Diablo community took duelling seriously, even if Blizzard did little to support it. "We'd like to serve that community, and put real time and effort into making it much more than an afterthought," is all Jay will say.
The desert level ends at a town, now infested with 'Fallen': cults of humans who want little more than to tear out your spine. What used to be a thriving city is now a savage free-for-all. Lining the streets are caged innocents, waiting to be sacrificed. One, after being freed, begins to vomit. And vomit. And continue to vomit. She's a fountain of undigested gruel. Finally, she keels over, another victim. This is what passes for comedy in Diablo.
It's dark. Darker than the hardcore fans spreading rumours of the 'World of Warcraftisation' of Diablo might expect, but not quite the grim and grown-up ultra-morose setting that the same fans want. Jay points out that those fans may be wearing rose-tinted... no, blood-tinted glasses. "Players have a memory of Diablo as very serious, very dark, and very straight. But Diablo was full of humour that took the edge off that seriousness. That's our goal today. We're not going to be silly as World of Warcraft. We're not going to put any of our characters in a hand-made rocket car. Having said that, I don't think any licence lives in one note. This is a big world that our players are going to live in, maybe for years. It's got to have more than just a serious tone."
As if to illustrate that, my friend begins to scythe through even more monsters - spinning around on the spot in a whirlwind of axes. It takes just a few seconds to splatter the soil with blood and gore - nothing is left standing. We giggle. Violence this clever deserves recognition. Just imagine how good it's going to be in a year's time.
This has got to be a joke 2011. This game has been planned for years, then after years of delays they actaully make the game and now we have to wait to more year. There is building up interest and then there is taking the p**s
One acronym should suffice in regards to the money claim: "WoW".
Anyway, this certainly sounds brilliant to my sensibilities and I concur that 2011 does seem faaaaar away in regards to waiting for a game in anticipation. Oh well. Eventually it'll slip to the murky back part of your mind, mostly forgotten until it is triggered to arise in its full glory with the release of "Diablo III"!
If activision didn't limit blizzard to two games a year it'll be out with SC2
Personally i think the delay will be good for blizzard at least if BattleNet mucks up with SC2 at least they only hurt the one IP not both - BNet's already a bit iffy with WoW stack their 'Xbox Live/PS2' things into the mix with SC2 - lets hope it works
I'm way more interested in this than SC2. I was hoping Mythos would keep me going until D3, but obviously that wasn't meant to be.
Would be nice to have a new game come out that actually runs on my poor old PC. And maybe by 2011 I'll have got the cash together to upgrade
Same here. I read recently that SC2 will apparently require mandatory online registration to activate the game. While I appreciate that for many, many people SC2's multiplayer features are part of the big attraction, for me it has always been about the single player campaign. Couple that with the three segment release of the game over what I can only imagine will be several years (and at presumably premium price,) and I'll pass.
Incidentally the lack of LAN support has also greatly displeased a number of SC fans. Hopefuly "Diablo III" won't have the stupid activation system, but since it's Activision I'm concerned...Come to think of it, I'm also concerned about where that leaves MW2. Maybe I will end up cancelling my pre-order for that game as well. I cancelled my "Borderlands" pre-order over the lack of info about what sort of DRM it comes with. "MW2" and "Borderlands" are my two most anticipated games for the remainder of the year, so it makes me an unhappy panda. At least "Borderlands" may dodge the DRM bullet since the developers seem to have a sane stance on it (i.e. pro-customer), but T2K Games do like their DRM.
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