Tuesday, July 01, 2008

Diablo III announced!

One of the worst kept "secrets" in gaming history was officially revealed at the weekend in Paris of all places at a special event organised by one of the greatest interactive entertainment houses in the world- Blizzard.

The creators of the StarCraft and WarCraft franchises including the overwhelmingly popular World Of Warcraft MMORPG revealed that they had been working for the past three years on the third installment of their dark hack & slash fantasy series...

They unveiled a pretty extraordinary website packed with features, but there are still many more to come. One of the most interesting is a 19 minute gameplay video wich showcases two of the revealed character classes. In it we discover many improvements over the not too dissimilar previous installments which used practically the same engine. In this game health potions have been replaced with the ability to pick up life essence from fallen enemies keeping the pace of combat quick and simple - the more you kill: the more you heal. We will have very destructible environments which can be used to your advantage such as dropping a wall on a crowd of zombies or it may work against you as do insidious traps. While Blizzard suggest that quests, story and events far more abundant than previous incarnations of Diablo I'm sure that the core hack & slash game mechanic will remain intact.

I played the original game in 1995 on a friends laptop (Where are you now Master Lo?) and it was one of the first games I played when I got my own PC shortly thereafter. Unfortunately I felt I had grown beyond the limited hack & slash model by the time the sequel came around in 2000 as I had been lured into more epic true RPG's like Baldur's Gate; Diablo II was forgotten. However times change and now with such limited time on my hands, the prospect of having to spend literally months on these expansive RPG's like the Neverwinter Nights saga often fill me with apprehension, so perhaps it is time to return to a "simpler" life for want of a better term? Hopefully they have a Paladin or some sort of Holy-empowered warrior so I can play it!

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Master Lo was sent for re-education.

Anonymous said...

A simpler life eh... Try DDO

Anonymous said...

Baldur's Gate ... I hear the Lt.Col had an interesting experience in the Friendly Arm Inn. Most improper.

Major General Creedon said...

@ Civvy: Damn commies!

@ Anon.: I did. It was brilliant and it won a Whopper Award for best game that year..
Read my impressive and much lauded review from 2006 right here!

@ Anon.(2): I have no recollection of this establishment...

Anonymous said...

Oh you do, Lt.Col, you do ...
Remember the Arrows of Detonation?
Remember the cries of the innocent civilians as your she-Paladin brutally suppressed them?
Remember the 'Despised' rating these actions got you?

Major General Creedon said...

@ Anon.: Is that you Sith?
It was such a long time ago. But it sounds like an awful friendly fire incident caused by malfunctioning technology.