Diablo 3 Specs

This comes from a Forums admin at Blizzard:

There will almost definitely be some sort of system to respec; however, it isn’t likely to be as liberal as World of Warcraft. We don’t want to lock a player into a system that punishes them for mistakes, experimenting, or lack of knowledge early on in the game. We also don’t think a system that allows immediate, complete, and at-a-whim changes to a character spec matches the feel of Diablo. It’s likely to be somewhere in between.

That said we still feel like the desire to play the same class again that you may have played before is still a part of the game, and with some ability to respec could potentially require other incentives.

Ten Commandments of Diablo III

From IGN Australia:

1) Thou Shalt Play From An Isometric Perspective And Love It
2) Thou Shalt Have God-Like Power
3) Thy World Dost Change
4) Thy Avatar Shall Have A Voice
5) Co-Op Is The Natural Order
6) Thou Shall Not Use the C Word
7) Thou Shall Not Be A Degenerate Potion Huffer
8) Exploding Monsters Are Cool
9) Thou Shalt Be Top Of Your Class
10) Thou Shall Live For Loot

Now let's see if they put all that into the next release!

Diablo 3 Released On Consoles?

Asked if Blizzard could make a Diablo game for consoles, Rob Pardo said, "I think it's theoretically possible. It would have some control changes that I think you'd have to make... But it's probably, of our major franchises, the one that's most console friendly, for sure."

Pardo - formerly lead designer on World of Warcraft, now occupying a design role with oversight of all Blizzard's titles - quickly focused on the practical and design problems of a console version.

"You'd need to think about a lot of the point-and-click spells, like point to area-of-effect, or things like line-damage in this direction," Pardo said. "Target selection is something you're going to lose on console, you're really going to be able to do targeting direction, but not specific targeting."

Diablo 3 : ATI and DirectX 11 ?

Diablo 3 Release has learned that the next generation Diablo will be released on the ATI hardware platform possibly running Nvdia's Physx code. Support for All versions of Windows, including Vista, will be part of the package, as well as the Max OSX which Blizzard always includes in their releases.

One unusual twist to this story is that if Diablo 3 takes as long to produce as the next Windows OS, it will be running on DirectX 11 instead of DirextX 10, making it one of the first high-end PC games to support the platform. By then maybe they'll be calling it DirectXI.

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Latest Class Info

From Blizzard's Battle.net Forums:



We’re setting out to create unique, interesting, and diverse classes that each have their own style and flavor. Most importantly this isn’t just a basic look at each individual class, but how they compare to each other and overlap (or hopefully, don’t).



When you up the number of classes more and more you’re eventually going to begin down the route of homogenization, they start to bleed into each other’s core abilities and styles which really just detracts from each individual class’ recognizability and distinction within the game.



In addition, by limiting the number - and I say limiting not because it’s a low number, it’s the number of classes in Diablo II and a good one at that, but because we’re not going crazy with it - we can focus on making each class really impressive, both visually and through the way they each feel and play.

Release date estimations

While no official release date has been announced yet for Diablo 3, there has been much speculation to a potential “ball park” figure on the launch date for the much anticipated title.
Vivendi revealed that the newest World of Warcraft expansion is due sometime in the fall of 2008. In addition, Starcraft II is also due out around Christmas.
So what does this tell us? Well, if anything it reveals a pattern of release timing. After the first announcement of each of these respective games their release dates were scheduled between 8 and 12 months later. This same scenario should hold true for Diabo III.
This would put the game’s release date between March and July of 2009. A release date during this time fame allows Blizzard’s other title releases to soak up all the economic benefit to further bolster the companies revenues for the 2008 fiscal year. With no current releases or expansions scheduled for the 2009 year, it would be a pretty bleak stock outlook for the company to not release a game before Q2, or at the very latest Q3 of 2009.
Source = Diablo 3 Zugg