Product Mini Profile Diablo III in: Massively Multiplayer RPG (PC) links » p/reviews

At long last, the rumor and speculation turned out to be true yesterday, and Diablo III was officially announced and previewed, to much applause from gamers and industry folk alike. Today we have some interviews, screenshots, and high quality gameplay videos for you, scoured up from various bits of the net.

Firstly, a video interview with executive producer Rob Pardo in which he discusses why they chose to announce it now, how progress is going (very well!), and the goals they have in mind:

Funny that in mentioning its influences, God of War is brought up, because before it was mentioned I couldn't help but think how weird it was the gameplay featured looked astonishingly like the GoW titles. Not a bad thing at all, though. Pardo said to IGN the idea has been to expand the game beyond its previous standards:

"[...] this is the game we ultimately wanted to make. Obviously I love MMOs, I think it's a great genre, but that doesn't mean that other genres aren't great too. I actually see a huge opportunity in the action-RPG genre because nobody's really doing a lot of games in that genres and I don't understand why, personally."

The Diablo III team currently consists of about 50 people, who originally had the game looking a lot more like its prequels.

"We probably did three rev[ision]s on the visual direction until we got to this and now we're really happy with it," said Pardo.

They seem fully aware of what (believe it or not) has prevented the series from being even better. In discussing the period of time from Starcraft to Warcraft 3, Pardo says the games were not as involving as they could have been, or were too point, click, build up your base-fare:

"A lot of people in that time period were doing RTS missions where you just build up your base, slug it out against another base, do that 30 times and you're done with the campaign. With War 3 we tried to come up with interesting scenarios and I think that's the same thing with Diablo III. You guys may have been used to Diablo and Diablo II being really just kind of a point and click game…fun but not really immersive."

"We had bosses in Diablo II but, again, they weren't really involved. We really want to try to implement bosses that are much more epic, there's much more gameplay to actually defeating them. We're taking cues from games like Zelda, God of War, games like that, bring that to the action-RPG genre. We want to have side quests and scenarios that are much more involved…like defend the town from attack or something like that."

But don't let this think it'll be completely different, as stated in the interview, they know what makes the series great and a lot of it will be kept intact, like the acts, overground and underground maps, and randomization of items, monsters and dungeons (less so for the outdoor environment, though). Pardo commented on the approach they took on what to add and what to remove:

"With any sort of sequel, and I'm going to go ahead and use Sid Meier's rule because we use something similar…The way he approaches sequels is one-third proven, one-third improved, and one-third new. That's pretty much how we approached StarCraft 2…some of the old units came in, some of the old units got improvements, we brought in some new units, and we also got rid of some units. I think you'll see something similar [in Diablo III]. The barbarian as you saw has a ton of abilities that are totally new but we had to bring over things like whirlwind."

Now, here are a few gameplay videos to whet your appetite a bit:

This is one game I'll be playing on launch day, me and at least a few hundred thousand others.