The Environment: Destructible environments are the order of the day, and they go hand in hand with the 3D engine. Some of it’s eye candy, like furniture that splinters after bearing the brunt of a magical attack, doors that can be blown off their hinges, and ancient bookshelves that spill dusty tomes (and their individual pages) onto the floor as they collapse. But some of it’s tactical, too: the Barbarian, for instance, can slam a wall in the Forgotten Tombs to make it collapse on and eliminate a crowd of walking dead. When he lunges into a wall, rubble falls away from the edges. Bits of concept art suggests a city desert environment with cave-like apartments, an Arabian palace dungeon reminiscent of Diablo II’s Lut Gholein, and the dilapidated town of New Tristram, which isn’t nearly as shiny as its name suggests.

The Witch-Doctor: If you’re going to call inter-Blizzard shenanigans with World of Warcraft, here’s the place to do it. The use of pets and pestilence - not to mention the Horrify skill, which is practically a clone of WoW’s Fear - make the Witch Doctor a close cousin of the minion-controlling Warlock. But he sounds like a great match for players who want to do indirect damage and control mobs for the party. Personally, we were sold by three little words: Wall. Of. Zombies.

Why co-op focus is good: Our co-op focus is something that we’re really proud of. I think Diablo and Diablo II were always focused on co-op, but they unintentionally did things that harmed the co-op game. We’ve really learned from that and are getting rid of [those things]. How we do loot drops is a big change for us. It used to be in Diablo II that everyone fought over the loot - the Barbs and the Paladins usually managed to win that fight, and we changed that system completely so that essentially whatever drops, drops individually for each player. So, when a monster dies, if you’ve got three people in the game, it can actually drop three different things, one for each person, and then people just see their own drops, so if you see it on the ground, you can pick it up. Overall, not only is it more friendly to cooperative play, it also doesn’t encourage people to fight - it encourages people to work together. What we found is that it actually encourages a lot of trading.

Sticking to the gameplay: It really becomes hard to decide what’s sacred and what’s not, so for us on the design side, one of the things that was most important was to be the voice of reason and say, “These are the things that actually matter” and to boil things down to their simplest form. For example, there was a lot of conversation like that when we first talked about, "Should we make an isometric game? Should we make a first-person game? Should we make a third-person game? Should we make an MMO? Well, what do we want to play?" And we want to play a true Diablo and Diablo II sequel - we wanted to keep that gameplay going. So that kind of made a decision for us.​