Normalverkehr

1UP has  posted a 4 page preview of Blizzard’s upcoming Diablo 3, featuring  a discussion with game director Jay Wilson on, among other things, combat, character creation and class differentiation:

With the Diablo series, Blizzard took the dungeon-crawling formula of games like Rogue and Angband and redefined it into the loot-driven action-role-playing game that so many others have come to imitate. So you’d think that Blizzard would just chill. But no, they need to see if they can show up the imitators by developing a third Diablo game for a modern audience — one that might consider 2001, when Diablo 2: Lord of Destruction came out, as “ancient history.” We recently talked with game director Jay Wilson and covered all sorts of nitty-gritty Diablo 3 topics, like why the Barbarian class is the only holdover from Diablo 2, what makes a Witch Doctor different than a Necromancer, and just how far along the classes are (you’d be surprised!).

And on the progress of the classes in development:

1UP: Can you talk about the state of the classes? For example, is every class — even the two that you have yet to reveal — playable in the game right now?

JW: No. The fourth class is playable in game but is using a placeholder model — one of an NPC, actually. And all of the skills are what we call “programmer art” because we haven’t implemented actual skill effects. So that one is just in gameplay testing for us while we determine signature skills. The fifth class, we’re just about finished concepting it and are about to start building it. We can’t use placeholder art, so we’re now just going to build a model and start working on the first series of skills for that one. We’re actually spending more time on the Witch Doctor, Wizard, and Barbarian because of a big change we made to the skill system that we wanted to [integrate them] with — so it’s mostly just artwork that’s going on for the other two classes.

Links:

• Blizzard Homepage
• Diablo III