Diablo III Previews and Interview

We have rounded up two new previews and one new interview for Blizzard’s highly anticipated and hotly debated sequel to Diablo II, coming from this year’s edition of BlizzCon.

MyGaming has a Witch Doctor-focused piece:

The Witch Doctor is one of Diablo III’s more interesting classes due to the fact that it suits a passive, hands-off play style. RPG veterans familiar with using pets and summoning beasts to “tank” damage from mobs of enemies will be familiar with the dynamic. A plethora of interesting and often quirky spells ensure that things stay interesting as the character progresses.

In some ways, the Witch Doctor feels like the most potentially powerful character in Diablo III, although this is probably just due to the casual nature with which he dispatches hordes of Zombie Dogs, Plague Frogs, Firebats and Corpse Spiders to do his dirty work for him.

Gadget Review:

One thing that’s really nice is the redesigned hot bar. You start out with only two slots to put skills to, meaning you’ll have to make some difficult choices when starting up on what you want to be available. You get your third slot at level 6 (you unlock the rest at levels 12, 18, and 24 respectively), and it really forces you to know what skills do what so you’re properly equipped for any situation. Another really interesting change, is the fact that no longer does everyone use the standard (mana). Now, different classes have different resources to spend for skills, and different ways of regenerating them.

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These changes don’t detract anything from the magic that made the Diablo franchise a money printing machine, and if anything makes the third installment seem completely fresh. While change is good though, people know what they want in a Diablo game a retarded amount of loot, and Diablo 3 delivers this in spades. You’ll be madly clicking to pick up an immense amount of (stuff) within minutes of starting the game, and won’t stop unless you’re in town. If your inventory gets too full, you can break the items down to basic parts to use in crafting, or you can sell items outright for gold anywhere in the world. These two features are great for keeping things organized.

Digital Trends calls its article-style interview a preview, for some reason I’m unaware of. Here’s a snippet:

For those who didn’t attend the sold-out BlizzCon, the beta is allowing the developer to fine-tune every aspect of the RPG.

(We get to find all those things that are maybe not working as well as we would like, things that are confusing to people,) said Love. (It’s also given us a chance to look at the way the skill system works and to re-evaluate how complicated that is. We’re trying to find that balance of usability and freedom of exploration, but also a sense of ownership and feeling like this is a class that you’re going to invest in. We have to do that in a way that doesn’t make it too complicated, as well.)

Love said the beta has also allowed the team to learn which systems might be too complicated early on in the game.

(We want to try to take that complexity of the game, which is very rich indeed, and introduce it slowly over time so that you don’t hit some phases where the game is just overwhelming to new players,) added Love.