Diablo III
Deck the hells.
"We want them to be maximally interesting from a conceptual point of view, but at the same time never losing that readability," says Love. "That process involves doing something that we call finding the line by crossing it. Our number one goal when sitting down to design an effect is to go too far. Where do we think the line is? Go way past it."
That said, not everything is extreme; Diablo III achieves its astonishing depth of customisation through a breadth of interlocking systems, each of which has been ruthlessly stripped down and simplified. Spending attribute points when you level up has been binned in favour of the more characterful Traits, passive bonuses you can select to fit your play style. Futher passive effects come from Chrams, items which are plugged into a new Talisman board which grows as you level, rather than taking space in your inventory.
Although the Blizzard community has a habit of "theorycrafting" its way to perfect class builds and tactics, the options here are simply too great. "I think one important thing to keep in mind about the appeal of Diablo... is it isn't so much the hardcore progression but the exploration," says Cheng.
"People might try to get level 99 characters in Diablo II, but it was far more common to hear people having multiple level 80s. 'Now I want to try a Frenzy Barb... Now I want to try a Multi-shot Amazon.' That's always been so much more the focus." It's evident even from the bite-sized BlizzCon demo, where picking Grenades or Multi-shot for the Demon Hunter led to a radically different experience.
BlizzCon's final big reveal was Battle Arenas, the first time Diablo has had a dedicated home for PVP. The team is adamant that playing through the campaign on its multiple difficulties, solo or in four-player co-op, is the focus. However, Blizzard has never been a developer to stand in the way of players fighting each other – unless, as it did in Diablo II, it spoils things for everyone else.
"In Diablo II, PVP itself was very unstructured – you'd have people that would just be in the middle of the game world then go hostile on one another, and for people who wanted a safe PVE experience, it wasn't very fun," says Regier.
"The game really became not actually fair PVP, what it was was social engineering," adds Love. "How can I socially engineer this person into letting down his guard so I can obliterate him? So obviously there's a desire to PVP and there's a desire for some people to not have to engage in it."
In other words, Battle Arenas are a ghetto to contain PVP, and as that might suggest, they're pretty simplistic, if frantic and enjoyable. They take the form of three-on-three team deathmatches over multiple short rounds, on a tight map with a few pillars littered about. You don't earn experience or material rewards for PVP, but there will be matchmaking and a progression-based ranking system offering titles, vanity rewards and Achievements, and some of the classes' skills (particularly crowd control and counters for it) are being designed with PVP in mind.
It's not well balanced – a team of three Wizards appeared able to destroy any other combination at BlizzCon – but will Blizzard's community eventually mould an e-sport out of it, as it does most of the companies' games? Love doesn't think so. "With 97 billion builds possible per character, it's pretty clear that there's no way that we could really realistically balance it enough to make it a serious e-sport, at least in the current incarnation that we have now."
It's sociable, fast-paced and fun enough that it doesn't matter too much, as I discover with a couple of friends as BlizzCon winds down on the Saturday night. Then we merrily butcher our way through the campaign demo together for the umpteenth time, ignoring the free Tenacious D concert in the hall next door just to spend another few minutes with this murderously pretty and playable game.
It's hard to imagine not wanting to play it all the time, or to countenance waiting another year for it to arrive. Diablo III is for life – not just for Christmas.