Outdoors will be persistent, however, and will not change from game to game. In other words, you can use landmarks in multiplayer as meeting places. I.e. Meet me by the river ford.

CG: Are the dungeons still going to be randomly generated?

JW: All the dungeons’ layouts are randomly generated. The exteriors are not. We have a new system of adventures that allows us to cut sections out of the terrain to put random — whatever — in there. We can put random terrain, we can put in scripted events — we wanted to add a lot more scripted events into the game.

So expect that outdoor monsters could be heavily scripted (as the terrain stays constant). They could run to a chest, get a bigger axe and come back.

The other thing I’d like to see in Diablo 3 is getting better, bigger “rogue camps”. Come on, Jay, you can make a city that’s more than 3 houses. Let’s hope that Caldium (picture right) is that city.

You can purchase a Diablo 2 CD key for just $5 online. Once you have your CD KEY, you go to Blizzard’s online store, you register and then proceed to DOWNLOAD your copies of Diablo 2 and LoD.

Update: You can purchase a cheap Diablo 2 cd key here: link 1 and link 2.

Remember those useless properties on some Diablo 2 items? Well, no more of that. You can go to battle.net and help brainstorm some of the affixes and modifiers for items. Go to forum.

Here’s an item to get your creative juices flowing!

The environments that they like are: deserts and wastelands, forests, ancient ruins, and corrupted regions. They didn’t like Hell (Act IV) and think it was done in a hurry with only two waypoints.

I tend to agree - Act IV seems a bit dull compared to the others. However, my list of worst environments is easily topped by the jungles of Kurast! The pygmies were a NIGHTMARE for my Ice Sorceress!

The quality of the video is way better that most I’ve seen. You need to wait a bit for the multiplayer gameplay to start (at 3:08). The party is complete with all three Diablo 3 characters: Wizard, Barbarian and Witch Doctor.

The only complaint was that the screen was a bit overwhelmed with all the special effects:

The only negative thing we could see was the messy screens you’d get when playing in a party. If you have a Witch Doctor in your group casting Locust Swarm, and a ton of enemies are massing around your group, you’ll start frantically clicking at any and everything on screen.

Check out the Skeleton King fight at the end! I’m still not sure if the Wizard managed to kill it… I guess not.

Think again. They are now thinking of “monetizing” the new version of Battle.net.

Initially, I thought “oh, we had banner ads in battle.net before, no problem”. Here’s from the horse’s mouth (Rob Pardo interview):

So Julian Wilson told us that you guys are looking monetize Battle.Net in some way. Is that right?

Wow, that’s an evil way of putting it. Julian’s turning into a business guy on me. Here’s the way I would put it. We’re definitely not looking at turning Diablo into a subscription based game…

With Battle.Net we’re definitely looking at possible different features that we might be able to do for additional money… I think World of Warcraft is a great example to look at. We charge people if they want to switch servers or if they want name changes, things that aren’t core to the game experience, they’re really just optional things that some people want.

OK, that’s a relief: Diablo 3 isn’t a subscription game; changing your name to GobbleCoque is going to cost $29.

However, I still get a bit suspicious of Blizzard’s “innovation” when it comes to pricing. After Starcraft 2 is split into three separate games we need to purchase separately, I wonder if Diablo 3 is going to be the same way.

Purchase Acts I and II for $49 and then shell more money for Acts III, IV and V which are entirely optional. Optional in the sense you option OUT of all the end-game bosses, equipment, etc.

The Wizard skills revealed thus far are:

• Disintegrate – constant ray of energy going through multiple enemies
• Electrocute – chain lightning
• Teleport – blink about half a screen away
• Magic Missile – single target damage spell
• Slow Time – creates a sphere that slows down projectiles (very similar to the Protoss Mothership skill)

You can watch the Wizard in action at Blizzard’s site here.

A recent rumor that Diablo III will be released BEFORE Starcraft 2 actually prompted Blizzard to officially address the issue of the release date.

Here’s the summary in short: Battle.net 2.0 will be released simultaneously with the release of Starcraft 2. The best guess for that is early 2009, with a Starcraft 2 beta coming out late in 2008.

So Diablo 3 will come out AFTER that … possibly by the end of 2009. An encouraging news will be if Blizzard have a playable “demo” at Blizzcon.

Update: Here’s the quote from Rob Pardo (Wired blog):

A lot of the way we develop is: We wanna make sure the game is really fun and the visual fidelity we want … we wanna make sure we have a small area that feels really done so we know what to build. So even though it looks really complete a lot of the content is just not there. We have a long ways to go to build each of the different acts in the game and put in all the quests and all the different monsters. We have a lot of development ahead of us before it will be something … It will definitely be out after StarCraft II.”

I hope this answers the last comment!

UPDATE: Diablo 3 is OFFICIAL! Live news from the event:

12:15 — Announcement…..!! Guy playing Diablo music on an acoustic guitar…

12:18 — Footage of large scale battles, comets streaking across the sky, demons, Diablo 3 officially announced.

12:20 — Jay Wilson, lead designer on Diablo 3 coming out. He’s going to demo the game.

12:20 — It’s apparently still an action RPG. Same interface — red
health and blue orbs. Skill bar at bottom. 3/4 overhead perspective.
Character with 2 axes hacking at demons in what appears to be a foggy
cathedral. Has a jumping attack where he smashes the two axes into the
ground.

(Watch Diablo 3 trailer here)

12:21 — The axe guy is the barbarian class. Says improvements have
been made, like the hotbar for skills. Using the mouse wheel and tab
key you can quickly switch between skills. Whoing inventory. Appears to
still have slot limits. Using enchanted axes with frost and lighting
,which stuns and freezes opponents.

12:25 — Each piece of gear is custom designed for each class. Barbarian puts on demonic sort of garb with giant devil horns. Barbarian can hop across gaps on the map. Barbarian dislodged a rock wall and dropped it on zombies, killing them. Demoing moving whirlwind attack.

12:33 — Witch doctor can cast out locus swarm, which spreads between targets and deals damage. Can summon mongrel things that he can cast locust swarm on, which buffs their damage. Outdoor environment now. Quite pretty in that vibrant, slightly cartoonish Blizzard graphical style. Like with StarCraft 2 and it’s similarities to the original, Diablo 3 looks and sounds, at least at a glance, quite similar to previous games. Witch doctor also has a mass fear type of ability.

12:36 — Multiplayer will work over battle.net. Heads into a final fight against some gigantic moving trees. Final boss here, called siegebreaker assault beast, is absolutely gigantic, maybe around six or seven times taller than the player characters.

12:37 — Demo ends. The crowd roars…

Update: Diablo 3 release date has been tentatively set to follow the launch of Starcraft 2 and Battle.net 2.0 some time in early 2009.

The Barbarian hacking through skeletons. Note the duel-wield.

The Witch Doctor and his mass-effect spells. I guess he’s the new Sorceress!

This is a close-up of the armor. Note the level of details. It looks proper 3D.

It’s the Witch Doctor again. Note the depth of the level. It looks pre-rendered but it’s certainly beautiful.

Enter the Boss! It looks five times bigger than the character!