Diablo III Preview

A 3-page preview for Diablo III is available on Eurogamer.

“Be an awesome action game.” “If you can click a mouse, you can play Diablo.” “It’s frickin’ cool to break stuff.” “I don’t think we’ve broken a hundred monsters on screen at a time, but we’ve flirted with it.” “It starts an awesomeness arms race.” “Monsters do two things: show up and die.” “We wanted to make that really loud.” “The only thing better than a zombie dog is an exploding zombie dog.”

Diablo III is more. More action, more death, more skills, more colour, more story, more beauty, more top-down, click-hungry, loot-happy, fast-paced, over-the-top, randomly-generated, fantasy-horror slaughter. Eight years after the last instalment in Blizzard’s classic action-RPG series – probably ten, by the time it comes out – Diablo III is more of the same. Beneath the waves of excitement generated by its return – in the form of twenty stunning minutes of game footage – there is the slightest undertow of anti-climax. Is ‘more of the same’ really all there is to it?

Blizzard’s chief design guru, Rob Pardo – formerly lead designer on World of Warcraft – argues that traditionalism can’t really be a sin when no-one else is upholding the tradition. “If there were a ton of games out in the market that are the isometric action-RPG model, then we probably would have more seriously done a different approach,” he says, pointing out that two Blizzard “splinter groups” – Flagship and ArenaNet – have already chosen to take “Diabloesque” gameplay in new directions with Hellgate: London and Guild Wars. “But it just always amazes me, with a game series that’s as successful as Diablo’s been, that I don’t feel like there’s a lot of great competing games in that same genre.”