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.

OK, let’s go over how runes worked in Diablo 2. There are 33 runes that drop from monsters. Note that some runes drop often while others drop extremely (e.g. Zod rune). Also, there are items with sockets that are able to take runes (or jewels). Some rune combinations (called runewords) create Runic Items, which are among the most powerful items in the game.

For example, socketing the runes Hel + Ohm + Um + Lo + Cham gives your axe or hammer a whole bunch of additional stats and it also adds the label “Doom”.

OK, so what are the changes to the runes in Diablo 3? Runes will still be used to CUSTOMIZE your character, however, runes no longer modify ITEMS. Instead they’ll be added to skills (each skill has a single rune slot).

Also, to make runes easier to use, rune names will be changed to reflect their effect, e.g. Rune of Multistriking. How does this affect gameplay?

For example, a Minor Multistrike Rune attached to the Skull of Flame will make projectile skip along the ground once , but higher quality Runes like the Major Multistrike Rune may raise the amount of bounces and the distance traveled by the projectile.

Jay Wilson, Diablo 3 Lead designer, expressed his strong desire to make each skill customizable while at the same time retaining the uniqueness of each character. In other words, he doesn’t want the Barbarian to be able to mimic the Wizard by adding certain runes to skills.

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!

You can download the high-quality gameplay footage here. Check out the Diablo 3 screenshots too.