Diablo III Beta Previews, Interviews, and More

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Written by BuckGB on August 1st, 2011

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Pushing the limits of what a character can take on also promotes learning how to use all of the chosen character's strengths and tools. Since the last time I saw the game, the skill system has been switched up. Characters will be able to ultimately equip a combination of six active and three passive skills. These slots open up with new levels. Everyone starts with two actives, and gains one additional at levels 6, 12, 18, and 24 to reach the full complement of six. The first passive skill unlocks at level 10, with the other two opening up at levels 20 and 30.

The new approach may sound a little simplified. One of the points behind the change was to make it more flexible, and easily adaptable to situations in the game. As I progressed through the beta, I found this to be the case. Trudging through the swampy graveyards above ground, I found myself using a lot of snare traps combined with rapid fire to entrap and then take down groups of zombies. When the action shifted into the halls beneath the Cathedral, so did my plan of attack.

The Cauldron of Jordan saves you from having to head back to town every time you load up with stuff that you want to sell. Simply drop the item on the cauldron, and it will be sold for the standard market price. Also, if you sell something that you actually want back, you can head to town and buy it back from the appropriate vendor. Torchlight paved the way by having pets that could head back to town and barter for you, but Diablo 3 takes it a step farther with instant drop and cash. Additionally, you'll notice that your stash back in town has five tiers to it that can be unlocked throughout the game, with the fifth tier representing a fairly huge stash. No more inventory micromanagement!

While this isn't the first time we've had our hands on Diablo 3, it is the first time we've been able to play the beta all the way through. Blizzard made it clear that things might change when this beta finally ships, but hopefully not by much. By now you've heard about Blizzard's upcoming auction house system to allow real world money transactions for bidding on weapons, armor, and other things, but that wasn't working in our beta experience. However, it should be in the actual beta when that launches. We hope that will be sometime soon, but Blizzard still likes to say "When it's ready."

So rather than engage gold sellers on a second battlefield Blizzard is doing the progressive thing -legalizing it. "The hope is with Diablo III that because of the way we're doing the design on this stuff a lot of that really negative black market stuff maybe goes away," Pardo says. "But we'll probably have new stuff that we haven't contemplated before."

Blizzard is going to great lengths to make ensure that item trading in Diablo III is secure and pain free. "Historically it has kind of sucked to trade in Diablo," Pardo explains. "For us this is all about facilitating player trading...not about us selling items directly to the player." Still, Pardo suggests micro-transactions aren't entirely off the table. "At this point we have no plans of selling items to the player that would be player power items," Pardo says, "I could foresee us doing cosmetic stuff." For now the Diablo III auction house is going to about players selling to other players.

In terms of the skills themselves, there are three very general categories that most of the skills in the game fall into. Spammables are primary attacks that can be used to build your character classes' resource meter. Breakout attacks are higher damage skills -- or skills with powerful and unique effects -- that require a lot of resources and generally need time to recharge. Escape-type abilites are generally defensive moves that allow you to get out of nasty situations and keep the battlefield under control.

You'll need to utilize all three types of skills to be effective -- the game is difficult enough now that you won't get by just spamming a single skill over and over again. Even regular monsters can require some significant strategy to beat, and encounters have been designed to require much more battlefield management than in prior games. Boss monsters are their own special fights unto themselves, and bosses have unique attacks and strategies you must master in order to defeat them. Cheng described the boss fights as being somewhat inspired by World of Warcraft raid bosses, where you have to do much more than just run in and spam attacks until they die.

'¢ D1 Warrior (the Dark Wanderer) was retconned, he is now King Leoric's eldest son.
'¢ Fire reigns from the sky, dead arise from graves, bring heroes to Tristram.
'¢ Book of Cain fills the 20-year gap between LoD and D3.
'¢ Leah is Adria's daughter and Cain's adopted niece.
'¢ 6 active skills instead of 7. Traits revamped into "passive skills," only 3 active at a time.
'¢ Each class has ~20 skills and ~15 passives.
'¢ Cauldron of Jordan: Allows you to sell items from battle.
'¢ Nephalem Cube: Salvages items.
'¢ Stone of Recall: D3's version of a hearthstone.
'¢ Stash is huge! Larger than LoD's and has 5 pages, that you can purchase for gold.
'¢ DH has 2 separate resources, Hatred and Discipline, both regenerate at a certain rate.
'¢ Beta will only be a portion of Act 1 and will be relatively small.
'¢ Real money auction house as well as a gold auction house and direct trading.
'¢ Banner system to represent each person individually.
'¢ Character naming system is exactly like SC2's. Name#XXX.
'¢ Willpower is removed.

Jay_DS: This may have already been stated, so sorry for the potential redundancy. But will this game keep the pre-rendered Act cut-scenes from D2? Also, are there options for passive abilities, a la the Paladin's auras in D3? It seems to me that most of the roles present in D1 and D2 were conserved in some shape in D3 (Necromancer and Druid to Witch Doctor, Assassin and Amazon to Demon Hunter), except for the Pally.

Right now, the game uses a sort of line illustration style to its cut-scenes -- it somewhat reminds me of a mix of line art from the game manuals with a bit of an old-school Disney animation flair to it. I'm basing this off of seeing a version of the introduction and the Demon Hunter's specific intro. For that latter point, each character class has a specific intro that outlines that character's specific context/background for the overall story.

For your second query, the Paladin's Auras have a new name and home: the Monk's Mantras -- one basic Mantra I see is when my fellow Monk player activated one that would increase the party's health regeneration. Another similar mechanics comes from the Witch Doctor, who can lay down various totems and shamans to provide beneficial effects.

There's also the currently-being-redesigned Passive Ability list. In addition to the six Active ability slots, players will have up to three Passive Ability Slots (which unlock at levels 10, 20, and 30) that will be "class defining" ones. I don't get a chance to see these for myself, as I only reach level nine, but browsing the menu shows Passives that do things like affect your overall critical chance and so forth. Though, I don't take a close look at these, since they are flagged as "work-in-progress," and I don't want to commit to saying, "Passives are these" when they turn out to be different. The Mercenaries from StarCraft 2 had a similar tweak/change that I ultimately ended up being wrong about.

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