Diablo 3 Game Review

Diablo III has a lot of the same style as its predecessor, Diablo II. It is a role-playing game full of action. It contains destructible environments with damage effects you can see and it incorporates havoc physics using the proprietary engine.

This game is currently still in development. It was veiled at the Blizzard Entertainment Worldwide Invitational on June 28, 2008.

The vision of this game set by developers is the ability to run a wide range of systems. DirectX10 will not be a requirement of this game. There will be a custom 3D game engine and uses an overhead view as seen in previous game series. The 3D environment will also be utilized by enemies where they are able crawl sides of wall from deeper regions of the combat area.

Development:

Diablo III was put into creation in 2005 during the time Blizzard North was still operating. It first had a different artistic design than what was later shown at the Blizzard Worldwide Invitational in 2008. It actually went through three different modifications before settling on the final one that was agreed on by the team which consists of fifty people. The game is mostly complete as far as mechanics and physics go. They are just working on minor revisions. Most of the focus will now turn to the game content.

Character Classes:

Want to go to school? Character can attend classes such as Barbarian, Witch Doctor and Wizard. Players can choose a gender for each class, unlike the earlier version. At this time Barbarian is the only class that will be brought back in the release, but other previous classes my come by in future expansions.

Art and Design:

On June 28, 2008, footage of the game was released which included Screenshots and game-play. This stirred up quite a ruckus and three days later many websites reported a petition concerning the art style which was used. Users wanted a "darker and more realistic" feel to the game. In the petition there were references to the similarities of Diablo III and World of Warcraft games. Including the alleged lack of "light radius" from former games, the "colorful cartoon-like" visuals and "out-of-proportion" character figures as well as armor.

Blizzard released a promotional video depicting what the game would look like with proposed changes on September 11, 2008.

Jay Wilson who is the lead designer later commented on fan altered screen shots that were used as examples. He stated in terms of texturing, where they grayed out everything and created a flat look, causing all monsters to take on a similar tone, which it does not play well. It would be boring to play more than just a couple times, which is not something that would work for them. He also stated in terms of a 3D engine, that it is almost impossible because you cannot get lighting that smart and able to run on reasonable systems. If possible they would do that with a few of the dungeons.