By Let’s not mess around, if you’re a gamer that knows what he’s talking about, one of the most expected things for you in 2011 is Diablo III.
Blizzard’s third installment in the Diablo franchise is like chocolate to a fat kid on a diet. Given how Diablo fans diet for new things has been spanning several years you can imagine the sort of munching that’s going to be done when this baby hits the market.
At the moment Diablo III is undergoing beta testing and that means two things:
First, it’s not long before you’ll get your hands on it, maybe the release date leak we talked about earlier is accurate.
Diablo III
And secondly, the beta stage means we can find out what some of the Diablo III details are.
Running through the highlights of what we have so far, one of the basic requirements of Diablo III will be to have a permanent connection to the Internet regardless of playing mode.
There are some technical reasons behind this, some anti-cheat ones as well but for the most part, people will see this as an annoyance for there’s plenty of people out there who’d play Diablo III via a local network and be perfectly happy with that.
Diablo III
A second juicy detail from Blizzard tells us that Diablo III will have two sorts of auction houses. One would use gold (the in game currency) to barter whereas the second would use real money.
Don’t worry though, this doesn’t mean Blizzard is getting greedy, it’s just that players can make money off of other players if they have worth while items to sell.
That should make for quite the interesting turn of events in this new Diablo game.
Another such turn would be in how Blizzard is expressly working against people coming up with mods for Diablo III. Again, if you’d played the second installation at some point you would have tried a mod for it. It promised some new items, higher levels or stuff like that and made the last game interesting despite several years of age.
Diablo III
In the case of Diablo III that’s not likely to happen. Blizzard isn’t going to make the game support mods from default and they even go as far as referring to Diablo III mods “expressly prohibited”.
Since there’s now an online component to worry about, a file integrity checker could easily stop Diablo III from getting mods out there. Who knows, maybe this time Blizzard plans more expansions for it.
For those more interested in how Diablo III itself works, let me tell you a few snippets revealed by the beta game experience.
To begin with, while we don’t know if the “nightmare” and “hell” are still around, Diablo III will be lending you a helping hand as you can still hire mercenaries. The system has changed a little from what you knew in Diablo II or Lord Of Destruction but you still have a chap fighting by your side which is almost comforting.
Diablo III
Something that is to list Diablo III as a new feature is a redesign of the skill system. As a great remember moment, character skill trees in Diablo III will be using the group style of new skills at levels 6, 12, 18, and 24.
What is a little different is the introduction of passive skills, these work differently from how you’d initially imagine because they are unlocked at different levels. You can have three of them at the most and they are unlocked at levels 10, 20 and 30.
On top of this, there seems to be one important detail about Diablo III that beta testers were willing to share, one which isn’t that big of a surprise.
Basically, once you get your hands on Diablo III it’s very, very difficult to let go.
