Diablo III Preview

Big Download Blog tried out Diablo III at BlizzCon and – like most everyone else – was impressed with the sequel.

It played great. This is Diablo — the camera doesn’t rotate, you click to move and click to attack and click to loot, you level up and point points into talent trees and just generally murder everything that moves with spells and abilities of awesome power. It works. We played three classes, the Barbarian, the Witch Doctor (the only really new class, though it’s slightly related to the Necromancer, our favorite class from the earlier Diablo games), and the brand new Wizard, and they all played very well.

The Barbarian is a hulking Norseman (or bulky norsewoman) who flings his huge frame into the fray, swords swinging with blood and rage. The Wizard is, well, a wizard — fireballs go flying, ice novas freeze enemies in place, and rays blast from her hands with magical abandon. The Witch Doctor has a bevy of different mechanics — it’s a pet-based class, in a sense, like the Necromancer in that you can summon demon dogs (which can then be sprayed with other spells to imbibe with different attributes), but in another sense, the Witch Doctor is very much a damage over time class: summon a swarm of spiders on the ground, for example, and cackle wildly as your enemies are consumed by their little legs and pincers.

And as you’d expect, Blizzard is clearly pushing the envelope here — the Barbarian builds up rage, and can then dispense it with abilities that get more and more brutal. The Wizard’s spells are more location-based than ever — the Disentegrate ray was a favorite at the convention all weekend long, and it depends on aiming your mouse at a certain angle to attack. And the Witch Doctor is full of new mechanics — use the “plague of frogs” spell to send out a trio of bouncing frogs, which burst into area-of-effect plague when they hit enemies, or cast that same spell on your summoned dogs to give them a poison bonus to their attacks.

Spotted on Blue’s News.