OMG RPG

It's early morning in Sanctuary, the birds are chirping and the pitter-patter of locals pumping water from the village well outside sounds like an elephant is stampeding through your head. The rising sun illuminates your quaint village on the edge of Tristram but all you can think about is how your mouth is dryer then that witch doctor you came home with last night.

You don't remember the moments that pass between when you got out of bed and when the coffee hit your palate, but you're thankful it's black with two sugars. As you sit at your sad excuse for a kitchen table, trying to piece together the blotchy events of the previous night, you're forced to take notice of a scuffle taking place just outside your crib.

The plywood board that you call your door swings open as each step you take is arduous and methodical. Before you can lift your axe above your head, the action is over. Nearly ten Fallen Imps lay mangled on the ground and all you saw was a cloud of dust and a few bright flashes. Out of that cloud emerges this rather tall, bald dude with a long scraggly beard who says, “just another day in the life of a Monk in Diablo III.”

OK, so maybe that isn't exactly the story Blizzard told in their cinematic announcement at BlizzCon '09, but it has a similar theme: the Monk is bad ass. I had a chance to get my hands on Diablo III while I was out in Anaheim, and after the jump I'll share the juicy details with you.

We're just getting started with the blood.

More violence, more gore, more fun

So far, Diablo III is shaping up to be a classic action RPG, primarily because the point and click, hack and slash style of the original games is still intact. With 21st century graphics, destructible environments, and an entirely new cast of characters, including the newly announced Monk, Diablo fans – old and new – have a lot to look forward to.

Beyond the Monk, which I'll get into in a bit, the biggest difference between this year's build of Diablo III and last year's is artwork. While the subtle changes may have gone unnoticed by most, the die-hard Diablo fans in attendance detected a much more grisly and grotesque feeling to the game – a feeling that, according to Blizzard's Julian Love, is there by design.

“At the announcement in Paris, we showed early (lighter) parts of the game. At last year's BlizzCon you saw darker stuff, and this year you're seeing really dark and gritty stuff,” said Love, the game's lead technical artist. “That's the whole idea is to have a progression in the game from light to dark so that the whole game doesn't feel like one monotonous world. It creates a big contrast, it makes those areas different, and it makes the game much more repayable as a result.”

On a mission from the Gods, all 1001 of them

The Monk, announced at BlizzCon '09, is the fourth character class to be revealed and fills the role of the second melee fighter. Contrasting the Barbarian – who's skills center around taking damage to dish out damage – the Monk is a close combat specialist that needs to hit and run to be successful. Using his quickness to damage opponents, as well as to stay alive, the Monk is a unique and difficult character to play, and I don't suggest beginners make him their first choice.

In addition to being deadly but fragile, the Monk introduces a refreshingly new gameplay mechanic – the combo – that gives Diablo III much more of a fighting game feel to it. Here's how it works: The Monk will be able to string three attacks together to form a combo. Each move the Monk can perform has three stages of attack and each stage gets progressively more deadly. The best part is that the player can chain together different stages of different moves to form a unique and effective attack that suites the situation at hand. And all of this is done by simply left or right clicking in succession.

But gameplay isn't the only thing that makes the Monk so unique; his belief in God – or all 1001 of them to be exact – tends to standout in a world seemingly devoid of religion.

“The Monk brings to the table a mix of Eastern influences and some sort of European influences with an over-arching holy vibe, to kind of create what is a 'good character,' or a 'good feeling' character,” said Love.

“The Monk, in fact, believes that there's 1001 Gods,” said Kevin Martens, lead content designer for Diablo III. “In fact, they believe it so strongly, as the holy warriors and pinnacles of the religion, that they will get 1001 tattoos on their back, one for each God, and it's something that takes their entire life to develop. Very few Monks live long enough, given their lifestyle of holy violence, to actually get the whole thing, so usually anyone who does is very high up in their society.”

The Monk is in the middle of that Crippling Wave somewhere, kicking ass.

Look out below

Last year's convention introduced us to Diablo III' destructible environments, something that just wasn't possible in the original games of a decade ago. This year, fans and members of the media were given an example of just how important these destructible environments will be in Diablo III.

Hacking stone pillars until they fall over, or slashing up some poor fellow's front yard is one thing, but how about an entire dungeon's ceiling coming crashing down, crushing and killing you? Now that's environmental interaction, and it's something that Martens hopes to leverage to create more unique scenarios and quests.

“We're calling it a 'time dungeon,' so it's sort of a challenge dungeon in that there's monsters to kill and there's a lot of chests in that area, but the challenge that we've added of the timer counting down and the roof collapsing and killing you makes it quite a variation of gameplay. The monsters aren't the main thing you want to do, in fact they are getting in your way of getting more treasure chests or finding the exit, so, you find yourself playing differently.

“As a Barbarian you're just trying to avoid the monsters. Or maybe you're doing a ground stomp to stop them so you can run behind them and get the chests, so you can move on before they can catch up. I thought that was really fun and I'm really happy with that one, so I'd like to do more stuff like that.”

100 enemies? It's all good, the Monk has the "way of 100 fists" attack.

Despite all these tantalizing tidbits of information, unfortunately Diablo III is scheduled to release sometime between next year and the end of time. Blizzard has promised to release StarCraft II next, but that game was recently pushed back to the first half of 2010, so it's likely that Diablo III won't ship until at least 2011.

Stay tuned for our video interview with Julian Love and Kevin Martens from BlizzCon '09.