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Diablo III Announced!

Blizzard Entertainment announced that Diablo III is in development.

That's Diablo III. As in the successor to Diablo II, which was the most addictive game that I have ever played. It was detailed, engrossing and visually stunning. It came with a cinematic-quality animated movie, for goodness sake.

The real draw of Diablo II was the loot. It was a never-ending treadmill to obtain the next sword, or helm, or ring upgrade. Strangely enough, even when you were clearing the same area over and over again, it was still very enjoyable. For me, grinding was a Zen-like experience.

From the gameplay sample video at the new website, it looks like Diablo III will offer more of the same. The loot is there. In addition, if you want to feel powerful, this is the game for you. The two classes in the video (the Barbarian and Witch Doctor) are both worthy of the legacy of D2 and both can lay waste to thousands of undead enemies.

The game is also implementing destructable environments. In the demo, the Barbarian knocked over a wall into a horde of skeletons, destroying most of them. Pretty sweet. The Witch Doctor, which looks to me to be the successor to the old Necromancer class, has some abilities to animate corpses into a 'Zombie Wall', which was one of my favorite animations in the video.

Since the game is still in development, no release date has been set. For more details, here is the official press release. It remains to be seen if this game will knock me off of my current "World of Warcraft" addition (which is also made by Blizzard, coincidentally), or if I stick with what I know. Of course, I *could* quit my job and just play games all day...

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Posted by Fred on June 30, 2008 11:02 AM
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I agree, I've loved all the Diablo / Hellfire versions of that game. The zombie wall was excellent, as firewall was one of my standby spells to defend against hordes.

The upgrades demonstrated each raise the gameplay up a notch, so I am very much looking forward to this game.

-- Posted by: Jason M. Hendler at June 30, 2008 12:40 PM

My main was a Paladin in D2, so I am interested in seeing what the final three classes are going to be. The first two look incredible, though.

If I were to bet, I would predict a fire/ice mage class, a rogue-ish Assassin class and a class with some limited healing (unless the Witch Doctor already fulfills this role). Even though I loved the Paladin auras...I don't think they will be in this new version.

Hope I'm wrong!

-- Posted by: Fred at June 30, 2008 5:13 PM

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