Whenever Blizzard announces a new game, it's an event. At this year's Worldwide Invitational in Paris, the esteemed developer revealed its next project: Diablo III. While this demonic apple doesn't fall far from the tree, Blizzard is doing what it does best: refining the hell out of the design and polishing the gameplay until it sparkles.

The general idea of clicking on monsters until they pop like loot pinatas hasn't changed. Likewise, randomly generated levels punctuated by set-piece boss fights are back - with the addition of the occasional scripted event. However, everything that surrounds these core tenets has gotten a makeover.

A new health mechanic headlines the gameplay changes. Rather than recycling the potion-chugging gameplay seen in most action/RPG titles since the original Diablo, Diablo III's monsters occasionally drop health orbs that restore a portion of your entire party's hit points when touched. As lead designer Jay Wilson explained  it,  this  results  in more

exciting "positional gameplay" where players have an incentive to charge headlong into a pack of monsters to get the health they need, or try to lure the enemies away from the health orbs. Ideally, this throws another twist in to the endless hack n' slash to keep the experience grind from becoming too repetitive.

One of Blizzard's goals is to encourage players to use more than the one or two skills that most past Diablo character builds utilized. To facilitate this, a more modern MMORPG-like interface replaces Diablo's traditional two-button system. From what we saw, it closely resembles Titan Quest, with numbers bound to hotkeys and a very clean, simplistic HUD leaving the screen free to showcase the constant carnage. Wilson admitted to exploring a World of Warcraft-like customizable interface for Diablo III, but the idea was ultimately rejected as adding unnecessary and undesirable complexity to what Blizzard envisions as a streamlined, more simplistic RPG.

Blizzard refused to discuss character progression, other than to say that the team is exploring several different ways of handling

the acquisition and improvement of skills. Ultimately, the goal is to offer plenty of differentiation between the five hero classes, but the skill system's specifies are still under wraps.

The two classes Blizzard showcased, the Barbarian and the Witch Doctor, seems like the kind of powerful, unique heroes that players expect our of Diablo. Leaping in and out of combat and dispatching swarms of enemies with a giant hammer and dual-wielded axes, the Barbarian appears very similar to the Diablo II version. The Witch Doctor, by contrast, fights with the assistance of pets and disease and decay-based magic powers. Horrifying groups of monsters with a fear skill, bombing them with lobbed fireballs, and swarming them with plagues of locusts (which also spread to nearby enemies and the Doctor's own pets, draining the life of baddies and augmenting the pets' attacks), the Witch

Doctor is a fitting addition to the Diablo universe. Blizzard was mum on the identity of the final three classes.

Moreso than in most other action/RPGs, Diablo III has different enemy types working together to create new combat situations. We witnessed shield-bearing skeletons guarding highly dangerous archers, which were dispatched by first stunning them with a massive shockwave to remove the nigh-impenetrable shields from the equation. Without the added protection, the soldiers and their archer compatriots were easily annihilated. Wilson stated that this sort of cooperation is something players will see throughout the quest.

Blizzard's consistently excellent art direction continues to wring the best presentation possible out of the rendering tech-

nology. The graphics speak for themselves, though you have to see the game in motion to truly appreciate how much the smooth animations, environmental desctruction, and integrated Havok physics help bring the world to life. Sending a zombie flying into a wall and watching its limbs flail lifelessly as it crashes to the ground is much more visceral and immediate than seeing yet another pre-canned death animation

For our money, the Diablo III first look was worth the wait. Now we just have to endure the months (hopefully not years) between seeing this glimpse of the game and playing it for ourselves.