Hands On: Diablo III
By Tom Yeates | August 18, 2011 | Previews | No comments | Share
I bound along putrid hallways. The fetid smell of rotten flesh filling my nose and the sound of distant screams filtering through the stone around me. There is death here, so much death. I am about to add a lot more of it, but…you have to break a few eggs to make a few omlettes, or so people keep telling me. Nearby, an Iron Maiden bursts open, its deceased occupant spilling out towards me. He might be dead, but he’s pretty intent on eating my brains as an entree. So I cut him in twain with a two handed axe. A few more undead begin groaning and lurching their way towards me,shuffling awkwardly. They’re much too slow for my taste, I leap into their midst, smashing the ground and quickly decapitate three of them and then cut the others in half. It’s a rip-roaring bloody mess – precisely the kind of mess Barbarians thrive in…
Diablo III is great. I’m not going to beat about the bush here. It’s Diablo. It’s what I’ve been waiting to play for years. I honestly think that if Runic Games’ excellent Torchlight hadn’t been released, that I would have gone insane from waiting by now. I’d probably be rooted to the floor of a padded cell, rocking back and forth whispering “Stay a while and listen” or writing “Horadric Cube” over and over again on the walls using my feet.
It's a rip-roaring bloody mess - precisely the kind of mess Barbarians thrive in...
Blizzard have done it again, just as they did with Starcraft II last year. They’ve taken a relatively old format, realised that the core mechanics don’t need much tinkering and they have spruced it up and brought it into 2011. Diablo III is every inch a successor to its predecessors, delivering exactly what you want from a Diablo title. It scratches your loot itch and your trigger happy, bloodthirsty urges except now it adds an excellent, modern art direction and graphics complete with physics to make all that death look and more importantly, feel super satisfying.
It’s The Little Things…
The environment on show, was some sort of elaborate torture dungeon, ie. an ideal environment for a Diablo game and all classes were available to play. I got some time in with a female Barbarian called Grizelda (because I am very original) and I immediately felt at home. The basic gameplay that drives the game is mostly unchanged from Diablo II. You click a lot, you have hotkeys for abilities and you have a health orb and a mana (or fury/rage in the Barbarian’s case) orb. You can bind different attacks to left and right mouse and you can use tab to swap between certain abilities. There are only slight tweaks, for example many enemies drop health orbs which are immediately consumed by the player, restoring a portion of your health which saves on using potions all the time. This enables you to use potions as a cooldown safety mechanism, which makes more sense, at least in my opinion.The area was dotted with extra lore, scrolls which could be activated to begin a narrative, seemingly telling the tale of the “owner” of this particular sadistic torture festival and helping to flesh out the environment. Taken out of context like this, it obviously didn’t make too much sense to me, but the additional immersion is excellent.
Inventory management is much the same as it ever was, except Blizzard have introduced “Scrolls of Wealth” which allow you to immediately sell an item there and then without needing to Town Portal your way back to the vendors, allowing you to free up inventory space. This is not the only improvement made to inventory management but it was the only one available in the preview build at the show.
The skills system has also seen improvements. As well as being able to socket your gear, you can now also apply gems to your abilities. Different runes have different effects – as the Barbarian I had a ground slam ability, which of course, causes you to slam the ground and stun nearby enemies as well as causing damage. By socketing this skill, I was able to make it knock back enemies by 7 yards and as a result of the physics system being added to the game, they fell into each other and could cause a domino effect. Another rune upgraded my cleave ability so that it could draw enemies in closer and thus cause my cleave arc to hit more enemies – definitely a good thing! It’s little tweaks to the existing mechanics that really stand out.
“4 Strength 4 Stam Leather Belt?!”
But what about the loot? Well, Diablo III wouldn’t be a Diablo game without some sweet loot. Whilst I didn’t get any amazingly rare drops of course, I did manage to upgrade several items during my time in the dungeon. I got a pretty nifty spiked mace with two sockets that caved in skulls with consummate ease and I was able to find a gem that added +4 life steal to it, which is always a bonus…But the important thing here is that you pick up gold automatically now by running over it. No more extensive clicking and missing that one pixel of gold. Quality of life improvement number one! Scrolls of Identify make their return, to help you figure out exactly what that purple staff really does and I am told that in multiplayer, the loot that you see drop is purely for your own character, including gold as well which means no more item hoarding, picking everything up before anyone else. Now everybody gets a treat!
I loved crushing zombie skulls and beheading twisted necromancers and the level of polish on show whilst I was doing so was stellar.
I was sucked in by Blizzard’s incredible attention to detail which extends to all aspects of the game from the environments and sound to the core gameplay. I loved crushing zombie skulls and beheading twisted necromancers and the level of polish on show whilst I was doing so was stellar. The game is about to move into Beta, but it felt like it could be released tomorrow and probably be one of the most polished games on the market, which leads me to think that the only things remaining must be balance and class issues which need testing by a larger playerbase. The gameplay is simple at face value but has a great amount of depth to it via the skills and talent system and the rune system further sweetens the pot. Blizzard have become the masters of understanding where to innovate and where to iterate and it’s this reason that makes Diablo III feel so strong.
The bad news is…when it is finally released, I’ll actually have to do things other than play Diablo III. Like, “eating” and “sleeping”. Life certainly is a chore when you want to be a professional demon slayer. I think I’ll just record some Deckard Cain sound clips and listen to them during my non-Diablo hours to tide me over…
