OK, let’s go over how runes worked in Diablo 2. There are 33 runes that drop from monsters. Note that some runes drop often while others drop extremely (e.g. Zod rune). Also, there are items with sockets that are able to take runes (or jewels). Some rune combinations (called runewords) create Runic Items, which are among the most powerful items in the game.

For example, socketing the runes Hel + Ohm + Um + Lo + Cham gives your axe or hammer a whole bunch of additional stats and it also adds the label “Doom”.

OK, so what are the changes to the runes in Diablo 3? Runes will still be used to CUSTOMIZE your character, however, runes no longer modify ITEMS. Instead they’ll be added to skills (each skill has a single rune slot).

Also, to make runes easier to use, rune names will be changed to reflect their effect, e.g. Rune of Multistriking. How does this affect gameplay?

For example, a Minor Multistrike Rune attached to the Skull of Flame will make projectile skip along the ground once , but higher quality Runes like the Major Multistrike Rune may raise the amount of bounces and the distance traveled by the projectile.

Jay Wilson, Diablo 3 Lead designer, expressed his strong desire to make each skill customizable while at the same time retaining the uniqueness of each character. In other words, he doesn’t want the Barbarian to be able to mimic the Wizard by adding certain runes to skills.

The barbarian character looks fine when reduced five times but zoom in and you see brush strokes – it looks like the artist had an hour or less.

It does carry the message that barbarian armor is crude and rugged but I’d love to see a bit more details. Other AAA titles have MUCH, MUCH superior art.

First, some background: a guy who played Diablo 2 for years got a DOL rune and experimented with it until it crushed the game. He got an error message … a series of meaningless numbers. Or are they?

64 69 61 62 6c 6f 20 33 20 20 30 39 2f 30 39 2f 30 39.

So why is this significant in ANY way? OK, this is the geek part: 64 69 61 62 6c 6f 20 33 20 20 30 39 2f 30 39 2f 30 39 is hex for : Diablo 3 09/09/09. That means that if you translate the hexadecimal code, it gives you Diablo 3’s release date.

Now, the critical part. How likely is that Diablo 2 developers knew in advance when Diablo 3 will be released? NOT LIKELY. At the same time, if I were head of development at Blizzard and I was a bit of a numerology freak… I’d pick EXACTLY this date. Why?

Well, it’s pretty obvious. 09-09-09 represents 666 if you turn it upside down. The number of the beast! (cue the Iron Maiden song here)

Remember those useless properties on some Diablo 2 items? Well, no more of that. You can go to battle.net and help brainstorm some of the affixes and modifiers for items. Go to forum.

Here’s an item to get your creative juices flowing!

MAPS

Will we be able to use the old overlay map instead of the mini-map?
Right now we don’t have any plans to do a fullscreen overlay. We really felt that the overlay was more there because the mini-map was not very usable as a small map. We feel like when you put that map and you cover it over the whole display it actually adds a lot of clutter but we are planning to do like a fullscreen map that just covers the whole screen so that you can kind of see an entire area like if want to check out if there are any areas of this dungeon that I haven’t explored yet, you can really see more of that. But right now we’re really focused on trying to make the mini-map is very usable at the size that it’s at and so we’ve put a lot of work and the maps are actually custom made. The ones in D2 were kind of auto-generated where as ours we literally we custom make every piece of it. We have an artist go through and draw out so we can make sure that they’re really visible and very usable and so far we’re finding that it’s working really well.

DEATH

Will there be special player deaths in various situations? Like when the Siegebreaker bit the Barbarian in half during the gameplay demo.

Well what we want to do with that, especially for particular bosses is have when essentially when the player is very low on health and they’re about to die the boss essentially checks like when it attacks you, did I just do enough damage to kill you? And if so then instead of just doing his normal attack he’d actually play some kind of special I pick you up and eat you or I throw you up in the air and knock you around like a baseball or something like that. It’s a system that really our announcement video we tested it for the first time, mainly just to see – can we actually do this kind of animation interaction between the characters but the actual system itself is still not in there but we do plan to do that and that’s primarily where. We might do some other things, we’ve talked about physics based deaths we’ve talked about having the characters if they like die to a cold monster he might completely freeze solid into a statue and then shatter or things like that but we haven’t decided at this point if that’s exactly what we’re going to do.

ELIXIRS

During the gameplay video an “Elixir of Vitality I” dropped. Can you explain Elixirs and the benefits and roles they will play in Diablo 3?

Well right now elixirs are primarily to provide a short term benefit to the player. I can’t remember exactly how many off the top of my head, I think there’s maybe six different kinds of elixirs and they do things like give you health boosts or give you damage boosts, give you different stats, things like that. So whenever you find one you can essentially use it whenever you want to give you a short term buff. And then as you go through the game the ‘one’ indicates quality so the ‘one’ is kind of a low end, not very good item, it’s not bad – at low levels it actually makes a pretty big difference, at high levels it doesn’t matter that much but as you go through the game they become more and more powerful. So we have a variety of different kinds of items like that we have added in to give the player some interesting buffs. Some of them are something like that were it’s just a nice bonus to have, whereas some of them are actually game changing kind of things like you can fire them off in an emergency to be able to deal with a particularly tough encounter.