Diablo III Preview

IGN continues their GamesCom coverage with a hands-on look at Blizzard’s highly anticipated action RPG sequel, Diablo III.

As tends to be the case in Diablo games and others like it, there are quite a few bad guys to absorb your punishment. I was attacked by hyena-like creatures, misshapen salamanders that popped out from beneath the earth, floating specters capable of unleashing deadly whirlwind attacks, giant demons carrying long jagged swords, four-legged ice mages, toxic bees, fallen guardians who could drive their minions to all attack at once, and slithering lizard people in crypts beneath the sands. The Witch Doctor’s posture isn’t exactly upright. Instead it’s almost comically hunched so that you could mistake him for the gnarled branch of a tree if he wasn’t moving. While he didn’t seem very powerful with melee, his mana recharged pretty quickly in this build so it was no problem to launch a near constant stream of fire skulls and horrify the area when things got too dangerous.

It took me a few minutes to realize I wasn’t spamming potions during all the fighting. I did have a few healing draughts on my hotbar (which, by the way, also accommodates skills, a change from Diablo II I barely even noticed), but in about 20 minutes of play time I only used one. That’s because some enemies will seemingly randomly drop health potions on the ground. You don’t pick these up. Instead, you just walk over them and they instantly restore your health as well as, to my surprise and delight, the health of my summons. Gold also seemed to be auto-collected from the ground as the Witch Doctor walked over it.

They’ve also uploaded a new “wide shot” video of the game being played at the event.