Diablo III Previews

The BlizzCon coverage continues, this time with hands-on previews of Diablo III surfacing at GameSpot and GameSpy. An excerpt from GameSpot’s article:

Playing as a level 10 barbarian the skills at our disposal included a few different melee attacks and a couple of buffs that could be activated anytime we amassed enough rage. One of the melee attacks was mapped to the left mouse button, which is used for movement anytime your cursor isn’t hovering over an enemy. The remaining two mele attacks were mapped to the right button, and could be switched between either using the Tab key or the mouse wheel. Furthermore, keys 1 through 4 can have abilities mapped to them, and keys 5 and 6 are used for potions. It’s certainly a more complex system than anything that was used in previous Diablo games, but it still looks very accessible by today’s standards.

As we explored the labyrinthine catacombs, we were please to find that there were lots of environmental objects that we could interact with. Lose floor stones invariably had coins hidden under them, bookshelves could be searched for scrolls, locked doors could be smashed, and inconspicuous switched triggered traps such as falling chandeliers. There were also plenty of treasure chests to find, of course, though the severely limited bag space afforded to us in the demo (not to mention the limited time that we had with the game) meant that we weren’t able to pick up and examine everything that we found. Discarding items is as easy as dragging them out of the bag, but when you’re playing Diablo III for the first time ever, item storage isn’t really what you want to be concerning yourself with.

And an excerpt from GameSpy’s article:

Combat and gathering loot are at the core of the Diablo III experience, and Blizzard has certainly come up with interesting ways to keep combat exciting, particularly in the unique approach to death animations. Abilities that you use to destroy enemies are generally tied to unique death animations. If you use a sweeping bladed strike against enemies, you can lop off their heads. Use a smashing hammer blow, and you can smash bodies to bits, making them explode into chunks of bloody body parts. The Wizard’s disintegration ray literally melts faces (and everything else) while acid-based attacks will more slowly take creatures apart, breaking them down into a bubbly mess. Not only are there unique death animations for most attacks, but there are even secondary death animations for critical hits with these attacks. The idea is that even when you’re killing swarms of similar enemies, you’ll always see them dying in explosively entertaining ways.

The enemies in Diablo III are as unique as the many ways in which they can die. Skeletal executioners drag enormous two-handed axes behind them, leaving a trail of sparks in their wake. Your average skeletal soldier is anything but, as evidenced by the crazed, maniacal laughter that they’ll surprise you with if you give them enough time to cackle before smashing them to bits. The enormous grotesque is a particularly interesting enemy creature model, a bloated sack of evil that waddles towards you, soaking up tremendous damage before defeat. Once you do manage to deal a death blow, they shudder and inflate, finally bursting into a mass of horrid slithering silverfish-like lampreys, which then swarm towards you, desperate for revenge.