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UGO.com has a look at Diablo III that doesn’t really offer much insight into the gameplay but summarises some of the known development decisions:

Pricing for the game is still being decided, but don’t expect to pay subscription fees for access to Battle.net.  Sure, there’s always the possibility that different membership tiers will be introduced later on, but nothing we heard during our chat suggested that the team has anything other than a free-to-play model in mind for Diablo III’s online play.

From the sound of things, fans may as well settle in for a healthy wait.  With so many design decisions still being squared away on a weekly basis, development for Diablo III is moving along nicely but the game is nowhere near finished.  Blizzard will have a presence at Leipzig in two weeks, so expect a bit more news then.  Perhaps even word on another of those mystery classes. 

And some insight about the new classes and Blizzard’s explanation for why the Witch Doctor replaced the Necromancer can be found at the MTV Multiplayer site:

Although many “Diablo” fans have expressed fondness for the Necromancer from “Diablo II,” lead “Diablo III” designer Jay Wilson confirmed to MTV Multiplayer that the character class will not appear in the initial release of the game.

When the team was choosing which classes to include in the long-awaited sequel for Blizzard’s best-selling action-RPG series, they decided to create a brand-new one - the Witch Doctor. And with only five classes in the game, “Diablo III” just didn’t have room for two curse-dealing, pet-wielding classes.

Here’s Blizzard’s explanation for why the Witch Doctor replaced the Necromancer:

“Our approach for classes in ‘Diablo III’ is that we don’t have a strong desire to bring back classes from the previous game,” Wilson told me. “The goal is to try and give people new gameplay and not just re-hash old gameplay. We’re not just making a ‘Diablo II’ with updated 3D graphics.”

Blizzard’s Diablo III  website