Diablo III Forum Tidbits

Diablo community manager “Bashiok” has returned to the official Diablo III forums to answer some more questions about the highly anticipated action RPG sequel.

On enemy corpses vanishing:

The main reason for the corpses not being able to stay permanently is the potential number of them on screen at one time, and specifically that each corpse is affected by physics, allowing them to be blasted and thrown all over the place by the force of player abilities.

It’s one of the trade offs when integrating new technology, you can get really awesome effects, but they do have a cost. In a 2D world, a sprite of a dead creature doesn’t really cost any more (system requirement-wise) than a sprite of something that’s alive. Probably less. In a 3D world where a creature dies and then needs to have physics calculations thrown onto it so it can bounce and fall and fly around, they cost substantially more.

We remember fondly those situations where you’ve just completely obliterated a camp of Fallen, and as you’re picking up items – marvel in your destruction. That’s a feeling and part of the gameplay where if we can realistically keep some of it without sacrificing features or having insane system requirements we’d definitely like to, but no promises.

And on why Diablo III is not an MMORPG:

MMO’s are generally categorized as being able to support hundreds of thousands of simultaneous players in a persistent world.

While Battle.net can certainly support that many players at one time, the lack of a persistent world and restrictions on how many players can be within each “world” (game) would keep Diablo III from being categorized as an MMO.