Mysteries of the Mighty Barbarians.

[Purrrfect]

Inferno difficulty naturally comes with rewards beyond sightseeing, Wilson says. Some armor, weapons and items will be exclusive to Inferno (while other highly coveted items will drop more frequently at that level). Some of the game's Runestones, the socketable items that modify player skills and spells, are also found only in Inferno, offering all new abilities to those willing to run the risk of playing at the top tier difficulty—or willing to pay for the good stuff in Diablo III's auction house.

Well, at least they will know where to find the bots at.

[aurik]

And that would be different from Diablo 2 how?

Flattened top-level difficulty setting is a great idea. Much like how everything flatlined at mlvl 85 pretty early in hell in D2 1.10+, it meant you could go farm/kill whatever, instead of being forced to run only act 4 / act 5 for top-level xp and drops.

On the other hand, I think letting players hit the level cap easily is a bad idea. You could make the argument that in d2 there was very little difference between a clvl85 and a clvl 90 -- slightly more vit, slightly higher effective AR, and a few more points in tertiary/quaternary abilities. However, grinding monsters had a very quantifiable return on time invested, and this was a big addiction factor. "Only 5 more cow runs until..." or "Only 10 more Baals until..." versus merely looking for item upgrades, which can be a very feast-or-famine form of progression.

[Lucavi]

Now the addiction factor is buying your car with blizz bux from farming all day, this making blizz even moar money.

Problem solved (for them).

[Maaglin]

Obviously, and it seems like they're doing it, the only way to make large area's of content replayable is to have meaningful drops in those areas. Player's aren't going to care if the monsters are challenging to kill, but drop shit.

As far as reaching cap quickly, yeah kinda sucks, but gives casuals that feeling of accomplishment. The real drive could be finding those runestones at higher difficulties since those are what will define your skills and set you apart from other players in drastic ways. Runestones will be the key to this game in my mind, for that reason. In any case, blizz has been saying since day 1 that the driving force at "end game" will be items.

There's also that totem thing or whatever at character screen, that's just basically an achievement tracker. Not sure how it interacts with the game environment, i.e., can other players see it, and grovel at your e-peen? But that could end up being a reason to continue slugging through outside of items.

[aurik]

I think of it like merit points in FFXI. Looking at it objectively, merit points gave you extremely minor power gains in return for absurd time investment--especially back when they were introduced and a single merit point could take 2-3 hours to earn. Congratulations, you spent 10 hours grinding weapons in Ro'Maeve, now you can reduce your 2 minute cooldown ability by 6 seconds. Yet the system was unquestionably a success.

Similarly, running Halls of Pain endlessly on my druid in 1.09 gave me extremely minor xp gains (2-3m per full clear at 98) for absurd time. I did eventually hit 99 and get my extra +5 vit which was like 20 health or something. But since it was a concrete goal, every time I signed in and did something I walked away with the feeling that I had made progress. Meanwhile, when I got on a MF char and killed pindle / baal / meph a few dozen times and got nothing good, I felt like I had wasted my time.

The same can be said of Valor Points / raid reputation in WoW. Even when no useful items are found, I've made some sort of progress by logging hours.

If D3 is entirely centered around farming up items I don't think it will have that same draw. Once your characters are geared to the teeth, playing them will exhibit extremely diminished returns: what's the chance that you will find something that you can use? Almost zero. And the cost to buy something you can use? Extremely high. Unless you're very active in the trade scene or willing to shell out real$, there is no progress left to be attained for a character once it's "beat the game".

Perhaps they should introduce something like merit points in D3 once you hit the level cap to give people something to make concrete progress on.

[miokomioko]

I feel that's the best route to take in any online RPG... especially when it comes to events/raids that can have incredibly stupid drop rates. Participation in its simplest form should yield at least some tangible progress/accomplishment towards a goal. I feel XI did this rather well when they started creating points/currency systems for just about every event. (Dynamis and Salvage kinda' failed at this, though.)

[Militant]

I really like the idea of flattened difficulty in inferno. Kind of reminds me of playthrough 2.5 in borderlands, opens the entire game up to you so you can farm where ever is most interesting to you, and keep things fresh, rather than killing the same mob over and over. The 60 cap seems a little low to me, but perhaps it will be raised when they add classes via expansion?

[avelle]

http://kotaku.com/5831780/diablo-iii...l-release-date
Diablo III's beta will hit by September, hopefully before, Blizzard game director Jay Wilson said during a Gamescom press conference today. When's the game coming out? "When it's ready." Got it? Read more about Diablo III and its "inferno difficulty."

Source: Blizzard

That's weird, they originally had the exact quote in their Inferno article and then pulled it out and only quoted "When it's ready." in that new mini-blip thing. I think his original quote on Kotaku was "by the end of September" but I didn't copy it down.

Anyway, to set expectations straight, beta in August is unlikely. But it shouldn't be too long after.

[vrumpt]

I can wait 2 weeks. no biggie

[avelle]

I can wait 2 weeks. no biggie

Ya, it's not a super big deal, but I like finding excuses to use those faces.

[avelle]

Gameplay video taken at Gamescom:
http://www.videogamer.com/videos/dia...scom_2011.html

Wish I could embed it but I can't find it on youtube.

[Zzsark]

Not much in the way of 'new' info but some fun visuals

[Guitarman]

good to see the hydra spell in the game.

[6souls]

Want some hardcore dungeon-crawling Diablo III action on your PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360? Well, you might be in luck: today, the game’s lead designer Josh Mosqueira dropped some heavy-duty hints about the prospect of such a thing occurring at a press conference during GamesCom.

Mosqueira said that Blizzard “is very, very serious about brining the Diablo III experience to the console,” according to a Eurogamer post about the story.

Mosqueira continued:

“Today, we’re trying to build the best console team at Blizzard. We’re looking for programmers, designers, artists who think their dream job would be to bring Diablo to the console. Trust me, it is a dream job. All I can say is it’s going to be awesome. Stay tuned.”

Despite the fact that Mosqueira didn’t actually confirm the fact that the game will be coming to consoles, this is about as close as one would need to get. To add more fuel to the fire of this idea is the fact that back in June the company was looking to hire a lead designer, lead programmer and a senior producer for a “Diablo-related concept for consoles.”

http://blog.machinima.com/insidegami...i-on-consoles/
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/20...nsole-diablo-3
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/20...ng-to-consoles

[avelle]

The official D3 forums are now up. Stay a while and troll some people!

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/

Beta soon please!

[Purrrfect]

The official D3 forums are now up. Stay a while and troll some people!

2 cookies for you good sir! Well done.

[CasualPlayer]

Not good for XIV if Blizz ports this shit to console. Just sayin

[Spoony Bob]

Because XIV is currently a hot title on PS3

[Priran]

we'll all have jetpacks before there's a console version of D3 and/or FF14 is good enough to get released for PS3

[Takiwaki]

we'll all have jetpacks before there's a console version of D3 and/or FF14 is good enough to get released for PS3

Great, thanks for dashing my hopes of having a jetpack =/