Diablo 3 - News Roundup

IGN has scored an interview with Blizzard's Rob Pardo, presented in article format.  Pardo claims Diablo III will offer deeper questing:

Pardo cited what Blizzard did with real-time strategy design from StarCraft to Warcraft 3. "A lot of people in that time period were doing RTS missions where you just build up your base, slug it out against another base, do that 30 times and you're done with the campaign. With War 3 we tried to come up with interesting scenarios and I think that's the same thing with Diablo III. You guys may have been used to Diablo and Diablo II being really just kind of a point and click game…fun but not really immersive."

Incorporating more involved questing and role-playing elements is something Blizzard is focusing on with Diablo III, but also make the gameplay more dynamic. "We had bosses in Diablo II but, again, they weren't really involved. We really want to try to implement bosses that are much more epic, there's much more gameplay to actually defeating them. We're taking cues from games like Zelda, God of War, games like that, bring that to the action-RPG genre. We want to have side quests and scenarios that are much more involved…like defend the town from attack or something like that."

...meanwhile GameSpot has a First Look:

The Witch Doctor will have control over disease, can summon pets, and can even control the minds of his or her enemies. We saw a few examples of these different approaches in the game demo: Locust Swarm is a spell that summons a nasty horde of flying locusts that can overwhelm an opponent. Better yet, the locusts will automatically spawn to attack additional enemies in the area. We saw one pet in use too; the mongrel. This pet can attack enemies and can be buffed with other Witch Doctor spells; during the demo, the player cast Locust Swarm on his mongrel, giving the pet an attack bonus. We also briefly saw the Horrify spell, which causes enemies to temporarily flee in terror. By far his coolest ability was the Wall of Zombie which was truly terrifying. If you've seen a wall of fire or ice in a game before, you probably have a pretty good idea of what this skill is all about.

...and Destructoid hosts a blog by Solivagent, who writes that Blizzard has honoured the Diablo name with a faithful sequel, while Bethsoft has done something else with Fallout:

And now we got D3. It looks the same as D2 and D1. Two orbs. Mouse clicking. Iconic classes. It looks gorgeous as well. Using the same isometric (sic) perspective. And from what I can see, people are lapping it up. People are loving it, me included. Why? Well I guess it's reassuring to see a team that is made up of several different members from D2's team (even though it's still Blizzard) behind the steering wheel of this game, and how they managed to make the game be like what Diablo III SHOULD be like, in the hearts of fans and gamers in general.

All of this disturbs me. Why? Because I'm a fan of another franchise. One where action takes a sidestep into turn-based chaos, and dialog, options, different routes, take the center stage. A game whose setting was, and still is, unique.