BlizzCon '09: Hands-On with Diablo III

Aug 22, 2009

Diablo III is playable at BlizzCon, offering gamers the chance to check out an expansive desert zone filled with all sorts of deadly critters, demonic Fallen, and of course the promise of lots of shiny random loot drops. I cleared the entire map as a Monk, the newly playable class, exploring all of its abilities in the process.

In the Diablo III Heroes and Monsters panel, the combo-based fighting-game character concept was detailed, and I got to see how it worked in action. The Monk's skill trees conceptually break down as follows...

It's Easy as A-B-C

Tree A appears to be a direct damage and melee combat tree. Force Without Thought allows the Monk to counterattack without interrupting its own attacks, passively dealing a percentage of weapon damage. Seven-Sided Strike deals a series of attacks to any enemy caught within its area of effect, with an additional attack for each rank. Inner Sanctum creates an area of denial that can not be passed by enemies. Way of the Hundred Fists is a three-stage attack, starting with a dash, then dealing multiple attacks, and finishing with an AOE attack.

Tree B looks like a debuff-driven tree. Crippling Wave's three tiers are a speed reduction debuff, followed by a reduction in enemy damage dealt, while the third strike refreshes these debuffs. Exploding Palm was a personal favorite, starting with a pair of weapon damage-based strikes, and finishing with a bleed effect that deals damage as the enemy moves. If an enemy dies with this bleed effect active, it explodes in a splash of blood, dealing damage equal to 60-100% of its maximum health to all enemies around it.

Tree C feels like a more defensive, enemy-manipulation tree. Impenetrable Defense, if you decide to drop a skill point into it, grants you the ability to rebound enemy ranged attacks, while also causing you to dodge all melee attacks for a short while with a 100% success rate. This is a great move to trigger right before dashing into large groups. Radiant Visage is the other C-tree ability, giving the Monk the ability to unleash a flash of holy light that blinds all enemies within 20 feet, causing them to stand confused. If you attack these enemies, which you should, they "wake up," but still suffer from a penalty to their chance to hit.

More Explosions!

A favorite tactic of mine was to use Seven-Sided Strike to deal damage to clumped groups of enemies. You're immune to attacks during the animation for this move, so it's a great opener. Depending on how large the enemy group, I'd often trigger Impenetrable Defense of Radiant Visage, as either ability makes it easier to tackle large packs. I'd then tag the healthiest-looking enemy with the Exploding Palm. Finishing that one off would usually clear the entire pack, and it wasn't unusual to take out 30 or more enemies at once with such an attack. Exploding Palm ends up feeling very much like the Diablo II Necromancer's Corpse Explosion, except you have to trigger it up close and personal.

Enemies fill various roles in Diablo III. You have the fodder like the wasps and Fallen that only provide a real threat in large groups. I found it most satisfying to ignore these guys individually, kiting them along behind me in a long train, like enemies in Geometry Wars. Once I'd built a large enough group, I'd wipe them out en masse, racking up the bonuses to experience that you get for massacring many at once.

While Diablo III is still played very much like the prior games, destined to destroy very many mice, I got a very different feel from the combat. You have a hotbar with up to four abilities now, so it's edging closer to World of Warcraft in that way. You also have the tab key to swap in a secondary ability to your right mouse click, making it feel like you have a phantom third mouse button attack available.

You can still shift-click to attack while stationary, and holding down an alt modifier will reveal loot on the ground, though it's not really necessary anymore. Your character will pick up gold on the ground automatically, and when items drop, their tags stay on-screen for a short while, and will reappear if you move off-screen and come back.

The concept of dropping a town portal to make a safe retreat is also gone completely. While town portals were very handy, the designers feel that it was an easy out that trivialized the challenge of combat. You also won't be able to simply spam a belt full of those rejuvenation potions to get you through tough fights. There is a single potion slot, and potions are now on a timer, so they serve more of a role as a life-saver in near-death situations, instead of a never-ending health refill.

A Healthy Solution

Diablo III's new health orb system takes over where potions have been set aside. Minions and bosses alike will drop red health orbs that serve the same purpose as potions, except they're not as predictable as a flask in your inventory. The idea is to bring a powerful sense of tension to combat that was lacking in Diablo II (unless you played Hardcore on a poor connection). Without knowing exactly when the next health orb drops, you have to choose whether or not to risk staying in the fray as your health starts to plummet.

To keep the experience satisfying, a lot of the familiar effects from Diablo II have been revamped to be more visually exciting while also adding challenge. Electrified, poisonous, and frozen enemies will attempt to take you out during their death animations, as you'd expect, but they're far more spectacular now. A Poisonous rare that I encountered starting pulsating and glowing green during its death throes, before finally exploding in a blob of green goop that left my Monk reeling. Ice-hurling enemies are particularly bothersome, slowing you down to a crawl, while electrified enemies will make you pay with every whack to their charged hides.

Diablo III is going to maintain the Act and Chapter structure of the previous games, but there'll be far more to do than just chase after one boss after the next, always arriving just a little too late. Now you'll have a full complement of missions and side-missions to find and complete. These can include simple tasks like digging up a dying man's buried treasure or protecting some stranded footmen from an impending attack. They can also include escort quests, like leading a sick, puking, and dying girl back to her camp (at least until she finally keels over).

These quests aren't just part of the overland experience. Dungeons that litter the overworld are part and parcel of the Diablo experience, but now they offer more than just a few screens' worth of critters to kill and a few chests. I explored a couple underground areas that mixed things up.

One was a collapsing ruin that introduced a timed challenge element. I had three minutes to clear as much of the dungeon as possible, gathering loot and experience as I raced from hall to hall as the roof came crashing down on me. Linger too long in any one area and you take some serious damage from the falling rubble, a very effective incentive for moving on. Make it out in time and you net a big experience bonus as well as a memento of your success in the quest journal.

Another mission combined the classic dungeon crawl with an escort quest. Treasure hunter Poltahr isn't much of a fighter, but he is an explorer, and he needed my help to capture the Idol of Rygnar, a golden trinket that laid waiting at the end of another dungeon. He didn't seem particularly vulnerable, but it was an interesting change to what could easily have been just another featureless underground region.

So Far, So Good

Ultimately, Diablo III is about killing lots of enemies and gathering loot. I found plenty of rare items (but no sets or uniques) with the sort of stat boosts that I'd expect, like frost resistance, bonuses to all attributes, and of course magic find. While the developers have stated that they want to avoid characters that are built around magic find, and they've built systems to discourage this (like requiring the Wizard to amass the Willpower stat to boost the power of her spells), I'm still not sure how the magic find system will end up working out. This aspect of the game is definitely still a work in progress.

I was very pleased with my hands-on Monk experience. There's a nice sense of synergy with the existing abilities, and as the skill trees are fleshed out, I can see there being plenty of opportunity for players to agonize over the most fun or the most effective character builds. I'm also very pleased that some of the issues that came about with griefing players have been dealt with. Now every member of a group will have their own unique loot drop, so no one will be stealing your drops, and players won't have to worry about players popping into their games and abusing a flagging system to get a dirty kill.

There's a relatively simple formula behind Diablo. After all, it's just about clicking on enemies and grabbing loot. But there's far more to it than that. There has to be a sense of challenge, to go along with a sense of accomplishment for killing increasingly larger groups of enemies or for clearing content in a quick and efficient manner. That, when combined with the feel of winning a mini-lottery every time a nice piece of loot drops, is how you build a game that'll keep players coming back for more hours than is healthy. So far, Diablo III is on the right track.