Diablo III Preview Round-up

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Written by BuckGB on August 22nd, 2009

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Another useful active skill for the monk is radiant visage, which blinds enemies in a certain radius, allowing you to move in quickly and take them out before they can attack. But perhaps our most favorite skill is the impenetrable defense. This is the skill that lets the monk reflect projectile attacks back at enemies for a few seconds. It's incredibly useful when you're surrounded by enemies casting any variety of spells in your general direction. And thankfully, it doesn't seem like you always need to be facing in the direction of the projectile to use it. In terms of other skills, there's also inner sanctuary, way of a hundred fists, and force without thought. Inner sanctuary is pretty straightforward. It creates a small ring around the monk that enemies can't cross, so it's especially useful when you're surrounded by a large group of enemies that would otherwise be difficult to fight through. Way of a hundred fists is a fast series of strikes, while force without thought is a counterattack skill.

My biggest surprise with Diablo 3 isn't how insanely fast and fun the Monk is. Rather, it's how much I'm getting caught up with side quests. A good chunk of my hour's playtime ends up alternating between killing monsters for loot and XP, then finishing up side quests. One of the first ones I encountered has a girl undergoing some sort of sacrifice by cultists in the middle of nowhere -- killing them results in the (partially sacrificed, and therefore sick and dying) girl asking you to find her town and tell her family what happened: her protector actually sold her and her friends to the cultists. Right at the town gate, she explodes into a font of goo, and you then fight your way past some critters over to the same guy who literally sold her. He whimpers a bunch about how he has to sell girls to keep the cultists out, and I pretty much get sick of him sobbing, and leave. The town itself is under siege by monsters, but once I Exploding Palm-ed a bunch of them, I'm then able to tell the girl's father the truth about the his daughter. As a follow-up, I go back to the sobbing guy who confessed to selling the girls and kill him to even things out.

Also clearly a driving influence on the game is the Shaolin kung-fu monk tradition, or at least how it's portrayed in Asian cinema -- the Monk's three skill stages are called Way of the Hundred Fists, Crippling Pain, and Exploding Pain.

But still, "We'd seen the Asian kung-fu monk before," added lead world designer Leonard Boyarsky (also a veteran of Fallout and Fallout 2). "They're killing machines, but at the same time they're very holy men. It was really fun walking up to our artists and [giving them that description], and watching them go crazy."

The drop system will not be restricted to spoon feeding you with your class-specific equipment. Now, I hear some of you groaning out there, but trust me it's a good thing. Random drops support trading and economy, and, you know, make items you can't use worth a little more than vendor fodder. And in order to carry all these glorious items, you'll need to invest in bags of various sizes. That's right, they've decided on moving away from the system in Diablo II, where different items took up different amounts of space, to the ever popular World of Warcraft system, in which bags have a specific number of slots to store items.

Monsters are scattered all throughout the area, and they all seem desert-appropriate. Huge Sand Wasps (which sometimes fire out a stream of green glowing tiny wasps), lots of Fallen in big packs (Including shaman, overseers, and fallen imps. I didn't notice any Fallen Hounds.), huge panther-like demons that were called Lucani Hunters, and Dune Dervishes, which are humanoid torsos that dual wield long swords with their massive, muscular arms. The Dervishes can spin around with a Whirlwind style attack, which they do often, even when they're nowhere near your character. While spinning, they have a % chance to reflect projectile attacks. Bashiok said they were quite nasty, very dangerous to melee fighters, and tricky for mages to kill since they can reflect spells. It wasn't clear if these reflected spells actually damage your character. The Arcane Orbs the Wizard fired looked just the same after they bounced off, but none of them hit or passed through the character. Something to test tomorrow.

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