Diablo III is an upcoming dark fantasy/horror-themed action role-playing game in development by Blizzard, making it the third installment in the Diablo franchise. The game, which features elements of the hack and slash and dungeon crawl genres, was first announced on June 28, 2008, at the Blizzard Worldwide Invitational in Paris, France,
and is stated for release in North America and Europe on May 15, 2012,
and in Latin American countries and Russia on June 7, 2012.
The game takes place in Sanctuary, the dark fantasy world of the Diablo series. This world was saved twenty years prior by a handful of unnamed heroes in Diablo II,
heroes who, having survived the onslaught brought by the armies of the
Burning Hells, have gone mad from their ordeals. It is up to a new
generation of heroes to face the forces of evil threatening the world of
Sanctuary.
Players will have the opportunity to explore familiar settings such as Tristram.
The only confirmed NPCs are Deckard Cain, who has appeared in both of the previous games, and his niece, Leah, a
new character who accompanies the hero in quests from time to time. The
plot will revolve around two surviving Lesser Evils, Azmodan and Belial,
and an artifact known as the Black Soulstone.Diablo's world map is composed primarily of two main continents with several small islands in the Northwest region. The world of Sanctuary has been dramatically changed by the events of Diablo II: Lord of Destruction, for the destruction of the World Stone underneath Mount Arreat has reshaped the world's geography.
Days after finishing Mass Effect 3,
I find myself still haunted by a decision I made midway through my
30-hour campaign to rally the galaxy against the invasion of giant
chthonic god-machines known as "the Reapers." It's the sort of decision
that had me truly wracking my brain and deliberating over how the
options the game offered me were no longer simply "good Boy Scout"
versus "bad boy Bauer" (from 24, a show that the developers at
BioWare have frequently mentioned in reference to the general attitude
of a player who follows the "Renegade" path) as in previous Mass Effect
installments. Both decisions contributed to the greater good; but they
also involved the possibility of triggering a war between two species
and betraying a long-trusted friend who's been with Commander Shepard --
and by extension, me -- for the past two games over the course of five
years.
This kind of moment -- one where I'm caught between bleak and bleaker --
comes up frequently in Mass Effect 3. What's remarkable is that this
was a choice affected by decisions I made as far back as the original Mass Effect
in 2007. I knew my choice would have tangible consequences on the rest
of my ME3 play-through; in many cases, the consequences didn't become
obvious until hours later. That's a video game storytelling device first
seen in The Witcher, and I'm glad BioWare has picked up on it, though it's not as prevalent in ME3.
It's not just that one moment, either. A man I told off in the first
game shows up in ME3, forcing me to juggle his fate versus that of the
known galaxy. An in-the-moment impulse that I had indulged in for Mass Effect 2
rears its head in a boss battle for Mass Effect 3. My choice in a ME2
loyalty mission -- which I justified as the right decision at the time
-- subsequently prevents me from fulfilling a promise I had made to
another ME1 character. A cynic could reduce most of these decisions and
interactions into a giant Mad Lib where the game either inserts a
known-and-living character from previous games or a generic nobody to
fulfill a needed story role, but for someone like me who's swept up with
the fiction and has personal attachment to my save file, I can excuse
the incredible array of coincidences that lead to me re-encountering
every person I know in the galaxy for this go-around. For me, seeing
this labyrinthine interplay between decisions and their consequences
stands out most during my ME3 playthrough.
That's a tall feat in itself considering how, on a gameplay level, Mass
Effect 3 stands triumphant over its predecessors. Practically every
criticism of the previous games has been addressed or mitigated for this
installment. Hated the hacking minigames that had Shepard match
circuits or strings of computer code? Those are gone in favor of a basic
timer that simulates Shepard hacking or bypassing the objective.
Thought strip-mining planets was tedious? Scanning now works on a system
level, and moves much more quickly; it's still something of a weak
point, where scanning systems for artifacts becomes silly busywork, but
it's nowhere as toilsome as scanning for minerals in ME2. Hated the last
game's limited array of weapons? Your arsenal includes all of those,
plus some new and distinct ones; I particularly favor the new Scorpion
pistol that fires weird little sticky glops of explosives. Moreover,
each weapon can host two modifications to help fine-tune and customize
your load-out, similar to the weapon attachments in a first-person
shooter. Bothered by how straightforward each squadmate's skill tree was
in ME2? Instead of simply deciding between two branches at the end of
each skill's highest rank (rank six), you now make similar (and
non-repeating) branching decisions for ranks four through six. This may
not allow for true min-maxing like classic RPGs, but between weapon
mods, armor types, and skill allocations, different and very distinct
"builds" of the same Shepard class and his squadmates can now exist.
While ME3 adds many tweaks and changes in response to player and critic
feedback, the most significant change comes from how combat has evolved
from a the sense that it's not good (but that's OK because it's a hybrid
RPG-shooter) to something that can actually compete with pure
cover-based third-person shooters. Sure, you can tweak the ratio of
combat-to-RPG with story, action, and RPG mode selectors at the start of
the game (and you're free to tweak the game with option menu sliders
afterwards), but those are imperfect and somewhat haphazard tweaks. Good
combat but auto-dialogue? Full storytelling and decision-making but
boring combat? The "RPG" setting provides the best mix of action-RPG
gameplay that the series has been refining since the start, and this
installment solidifies the great blend of shooting-and-talking that the
first game strived for.
