Diablo III Previews

With BlizzCon officially over, several more hands-on previews of Diablo III have made their way to the Internet.

GameSpy:

To keep the experience satisfying, a lot of the familiar effects from Diablo II have been revamped to be more visually exciting while also adding challenge. Electrified, poisonous, and frozen enemies will attempt to take you out during their death animations, as you’d expect, but they’re far more spectacular now. A Poisonous rare that I encountered starting pulsating and glowing green during its death throes, before finally exploding in a blob of green goop that left my Monk reeling. Ice-hurling enemies are particularly bothersome, slowing you down to a crawl, while electrified enemies will make you pay with every whack to their charged hides.

AtomicGamer:

Quests come often but can be finished up quickly, meaning that while you’ll go through a lot more of them than in D2, you’ll never have more than a few open at any one time. I don’t think any Diablo player wants to open up a big scrolling quest log window and see a list pulled almost straight out of an MMORPG, so this is a good thing. What’s interesting is that some quests now pop up only when you discover an NPC out in the field; it’s a nice change after having everything come directly out of towns and quest hubs in the past games. Also, some other quests only appear right when you start them, like the collapsing tomb that gives you four minutes to get as much loot as you can and find the exit. This interesting take on a dungeon wouldn’t have stood out to me too much, but the place was full of monsters – ones that might be better avoided if you want more loot – and many pillars and ceilings could be triggered to collapse. Players could set them to fall on your enemies to quickly do some splash damage, or accidentally trigger them and have them fall on you and cause damage if they’re not careful. This really increased the excitement in the old tomb and made for an exhilarating little high-tension treasure hunt.

Shacknews:

When you die, you simply respawn at the last checkpoint. The importance of health potions has been diminished by health orbs and cooldown timers for potions, but as much as potion spam defined the Diablo experience, I’m not sorry to see it go. When you nuke ten enemies at once, they don’t all die in that chunky, satisfyingly synchronous death animation, instead exploding dynamically into random bits and pieces–it’s different, but my brain enjoys it on the same level.

WarCry:

When I encountered large groups of enemies, I’d find the mob who might have the most HP, tag them with a combo that ended with Exploding Palm, and then use the Seven-Sided Strike move which has the Monk do lightning fast strikes on multiple enemies (It’s like Diablo II’s Chain Lightning but “you’re the lightning”) and tip the enemy with the Exploding Palm damage-over-time into death, exploding the thing’s body and causing huge area-of-effect damage. One body exploded, then the rest of them exploded.