Following Up on Diablo III

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Last Friday, Flux of diii.net linked to my first impressions of the announcement of Diablo 3. Since I worked on Diablo II, he also contacted me regarding my thoughts about the upcoming sequel. I've sent in my answers to his questions, but in the meantime, I'm absolutely floored by the comments left by the visitors. They do ask some questions that Flux doesn't ask, so I'll attempt to answer those.

Many of the commenters have mentioned the sorceress and her ability to Teleport in D2, and ask whether I think the Sorceress is a broken class as well.

I don't think the Sorceress is broken. The Sorceress is the successor to D1's Sorcerer class, and we felt that we had to be true to D1's spells, which include Telekinesis. In D2, all the characters can run, but the spell casters aren't very physical, and so it seemed to make sense that the lazy spellcasters would want to travel at their own pace. The necromancer has his minions and corpse explosion to clear his path for him, and the sorceress can teleport. Leaping isn't the only thing that makes the Barbarian unbalanced when compared to the other characters in D2. The Barbarian also has the cheese that is Whirlwind and Leap Attack.

In the context of Diablo 3, the Barbarian is broken because he already has an advantage the Witch Doctor does not, and that is to be able to Leap across the otherwise uncrossable gap. To me, that seems like a problem, in the eyes of others, it's a feature.

There's also a lot of encouragement that the commenters have written, which really warms my heart, but unfortunately, the Blizzard North team has moved on.

In my first post, I said that I think the PC is dying as a platform, and this is largely due to what I see in the marketplace; essentially unless you're developing a FPS, or an MMO, your game will likely not make it to the store shelves. Blizzard games are an exception, as are Will Wright's (Spore and Sims), but this is because they've carefully cultivated their products to provide long-lasting returns over time. Most publishers are not willing to take that kind of risk; they want a game they can sell (preferably right before Thanksgiving) which will provide a nice fourth quarter boost on earnings.

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