Visit: A to Z

This is another article from the Category:Diabloii.net Archives. It was originally posted in December 1999, and the game info in it is obviously no longer current. Enjoy it for the historical value.

This was the largest report written after Diabloii.net's visit to Blizzard North. It ran 9 pages in the original HTML format. Many of the original images have been restored, but most of the links are not included, since they point to long-dead pages on the old website.

Diablo II Overview: From Acts to Zoom

Here is our extensive report on Diablo II, based on 3 days of nearly non-stop gaming at Blizzard North. The report is alphabetised, based mostly on the questions you guys submitted before our visit. Where there have been no changes to what has been released previously we link to the appropriate section which contains the most up to date information. The report spans nine pages covering a vast range of topics and includes a healthy crop of brand new pictures. This overview covers nearly every aspect of Diablo II, except for specific character skill info, and that will be covered in our Character Section as we update the existing pages in the days to come. There is much here, most of it new information, so grab a hot toddy, kick your slippers off and get stuck in.

Acts

The Acts of Diablo II are far, far too large and complicated to describe in detail in this format, but we can provide a quick general overview:

Act One serves as the introduction to the world of Diablo II. So many things have changed, including the interface, the speed of the game, the lack of blue and red potions to buy, the lack of a healing skill, and much more, that Act One has to be kept somewhat simple for people to get the hang of the game. So the difficulty here is lower than in the rest of the game, the quests are simplier and more straight-forward, and you are generally guided through the Act as it proceeds in a much more linear fashion than the rest of the game will.

Which is not to say that it's just a training mission, or extremely easy, there is still challenge and fun aplenty to be found. The landscape and monsters of Act One will all be somewhat familiar from Diablo. Not that many of the monsters are repeated, but none of them are really new or radical. They fit well with their environment. The Act is structured so that you can't wander off and suddenly find yourself facing monsters that are far too powerful for you to deal with; to get to the more difficult areas you must pass through very large intermediate areas, which build up your character and prepare you for the more difficult action that is yet to come. The NPC's give you a lot of introductory information about the quests and the plot of the game, and the monsters aren't too vicious. It is not a complete cakewalk though; there are still plenty of difficulties, you can die very quickly and very easily if you are careless, and Andariel and some of the other bosses you'll encounter on the level are not at all easy.

Act Two is a bit more wide open. You'll need to search out the appropriate NPC's to get more info on the quests, and you can wander the desert (literally) for quite a while and not find the right tombs to search for quest items. The setting is well-known from screenshots, but it's a desert: Rocks, sand, palm trees, lots of stone crypts, massive monoliths half-buried in sand, a level set under the city in the sewers, and some other, very interesting areas that have not been publicly revealed yet. The quests are noticeably more difficult. You have to talk to a lot of NPC's to see where to go next, unless you want to just go everywhere and eventually complete the quests by process of elimination. And this is not a speedy process; the act is enormous, far larger than Act One. The monsters are a lot nastier also, more of them have powerful magical attacks, they are able to hide or reproduce rapidly, and they are larger and tougher as well.

Act Three is sort of Act Two to a higher power. The jungle setting is less open than the highlands of Act One or the desert of Act Two, with lots of twisting pathways between impenetrable forest and swampy lagoons. Less is known about the quests of this act, but we expect them to be still grander in scale than the ones of Act Two, requiring intelligent and observant play to solve them. The monsters are much more fearsome as well: spell-casting monster mages, fast-moving packs of Fetish (with a variety of nasty attacks), powerful swamp monsters and heavily-armoured Thorned Hulks are among the demons that await you in this act.

Act Four, also known as the Finale, is still entirely unknown. Rumours about the setting range from icy wastelands to the fiery pits of hell, and everything in between. The monsters you'll face here, the types of quests and townsfolk you'll see, the items you will find, whether it will be set in a single or multiple locations, and everything else is still nothing more than rumour and guesswork, and looks likely to remain so until the game is actually released. The only hope for some earlier info is if Blizzard will leak a few tidbits, but they have remained totally silent about it thus far.

Ambient Features

Part of the atmosphere of Diablo II are numerous ambient features. Such visual treats as chickens squawking around the Act One Rogue Encampment, bats and rats in cave and dungeon areas, scorpions and large scarab beetles in the Act Two desert, and small snakes in Act Three are great for the mood and theme of those areas. There are also ambient sounds: the soft background chirping of crickets, frogs croaking, the rustle of wind in the trees, and more. All non-essential, but there to add some more realism and character to the game. You will like.

Arenas

A special "Arena" game mode, designed exclusively for PvP combat, was initially planned for Diablo II. But at this point, the Development Team has decided that it will not be included in the game at this point. There is talk from Blizzard North that they might include it at a later time, possibly in a patch or an expansion pack, if they do one for Diablo II.

Duelling is not a major part of Diablo II, and PK'ing is going to be very difficult to manage, with how the party system is set up. You have to go to "hostile" to even harm another character, and be in town to go "hostile," and everyone else in the game receives a warning message when you do, so they'll always see you coming, and have time to flee, unless they are right next to a town portal or waypoint that you are coming though.

The PK, even if he is successful, receives virtually no reward for his actions. A token, such as an ear drops, and half of the gold the victim was carrying falls to the ground (the other half vanishes), but no equipment is lost, and the PK can't even get any evil thrills by guarding the body, since the victim can just start a new game and the corpse will be right there in town when he starts up.

The point is that recreational PK'ing is almost eliminated in Diablo II. Thus, one of the main reasons to include the Arena - to give people who wanted to fight a place to do it and reduce PKing in games - is no longer as essential. If people want to fight, they have to agree to it, since it's so easy to avoid combat now. So the need for an Arena is mostly lost if people can and will be duelling in normal games.

The Arena would have taken much more time to create, to develop the tile sets and programme the mechanics of it, to set up the ladders, to balance for PvP play, etc. And we all agree that Diablo II has taken just about long enough already. There is still the possibility that Blizzard North will add it in later, in a future product.

See PK'ing and PVP for more on this subject.

Battle.net

Battle.net for Diablo II is much different than it was for Diablo. You can see the new chat channel interface here. We didn't get much new info about Battle.net in our time at Blizzard North, so if you want full info on it you should look over our Battle.net section since there haven't really been any big changes made lately. A few new things we did hear about mostly involve features that were considered but won't be in the final game. Friends will be able to message into and out of games, similar to how it is in Battle.net now. But plans to allow trading of items from right in the Battle.net chat had to be scrapped; you will have to chat with a person who wants to trade something, and then get into a game with them to trade it. Also, they will need to have their character stored on the same Realm as you to play or trade together.

There are a lot of outstanding issues that have not yet been resolved, at least not publicly. Things we don't yet know about but are looking into include: If there will be some sort of bulletin board for trading and/or bounty hunter issues, where exactly the new Diablo II European and world-wide servers will be located and when they'll be operational, what will happen with unique character names when/if they allow server-to-server transfers, and if 3rd party programmes like Topaz chat will be allowed and function in the new Diablo II Battle.net chat interface.

Many issues remain to be tested or resolved with Battle.net for Diablo II, and certainly those will be dealt with intensively once the beta test starts, and there are 1000+ warm bodies packing on to Battle.net and running into problems about which no one has yet thought.

Belt

See Interface.

Beta

At this point, Blizzard has stated there will be two stages to the beta test. You can read all about the test and what you need to know if you want to participate in it in our Beta Buzz Section. We didn't get a whole lot of new info from Blizzard North about the beta, mainly since they've not substantially changed their plans on it recently. As a result our Beta Buzz info is still largely correct.

What we do know about it is that the closed, private beta is currently targeted to begin after the Holidays, most likely in January 2000. This "closed" beta will be carried out by 1000 testers selected from the general public, and a few hundred others, including Blizzard employees, members of the media, others in the gaming industry, friends and family, etc. This closed beta will be most of Act One, all five characters, and at least half of the skills, and there will be intensive testing involving both server and Battle.net issues, as well as lots of bug-hunting and opportunities for feedback to Blizzard North about all sorts of game issues from difficulty to skill functioning to interface ease of use.

After as long as they feel the closed beta needs to run (hard to estimate, but say 4-6 weeks?), there will probably be an open beta. This would be almost like a Battle.net-only demo, where anyone who wanted it could download the beta client (or possibly get it from computer game magazine CD-ROMs) and participate. This would be much more a server stress test, just a way to get as many people as possible on Battle.net at once, to see if it could handle the strain before the actual game was released. The open beta would most likely be just one character and a limited amount of Act One, since character and monster animations, and background art, take up tons of size, and since the open beta will presumably be for downloading, size will be a major issue.

The open beta would not be compatible with the closed beta, since all of the art, four of the characters, skills, etc, on the closed beta CD would be incompatible with the demo-sized open beta players.

None of this is at all set in stone though, so expect changes still.

Combat

The combat engine for Diablo II has been completely rewritten. Any similarities between it and the way combat worked in Diablo are completely coincidental. And it is our feeling that most of the changes in Diablo II are definitely for the better. The whole game flows much more smoothly, but also more rapidly, and the way combat is handled is a large part of this new feeling.

Diablo was not turn-based, but the combat was much more orderly. Monsters would often walk up one at a time, mostly at a rather sedate pace. They had to get right next to you to hit you, and you had plenty of time to aim your spells or arrows, or swing and wait for them to get into range. Most monsters, once you got a haste weapon, were doomed, because they were unable to recover from your hit before you were hitting them again. Also, movement in Diablo was very stilted. If monsters were hitting your character, you often couldn't fight back or escape, since they would hit you and interrupt your movement animation.

All this is very different in Diablo II. The speed of everything - movement, swing speed, spell casting, etc. - is much increased. Even things that aren't actually faster just feel faster, since the floor isn't tile based, so you can always stop on a dime and cast a spell or swing, and you don't need to be right next to something to hit it. Different weapons have much different ranges. You can stand more than a step away from something and stick it with a spear or swing a pole arm at it, where you do need to get up close to hit with a short sword.

This makes the game feel much more realistic, and much smoother. Running makes a big difference also. Both monsters and characters can run, and being able to dart in and out of a tight spot is very nice.

The whole combat system is different, not just in swing speed and range, but in how blocking, hitting, hit recovery, and everything else works. Characters and monsters don't stop as though paralysed then they get hit while walking or running. Recovery time from being hit is much shorter also, for both monsters and characters and this makes it possible to run past something, get hit, and not come instantly to a stop. This contributes to the whole game having a much smoother flow, as we said a moment ago.

Other factors that add to this are the more reasonable swing speeds for characters (Mage chars aren't laughably slow with larger weapons now), the full 360 degree directional running, and better monster AI, so their movement doesn't occur in such fits and starts.

PvP combat is much like PvM. The same changes that so greatly improve the feel of battling the monsters come into play when battling other characters as well. PvP in Diablo II will not be just "two-hit kills," or one-shot Fireball deaths. Skills and stats will be better balanced, damage will be generally more reasonable, arrows and Chain Lightning won't strike you down from two or three screens away, and so forth.

The most anticipated addition for PvP play was going to be the Arena game, a type of game designed specifically and exclusively for head-to-head combat. This is unfortunately not going to be in Diablo II initially, but you can still fight in a regular game if you wish. The Arena might be implemented in the Diablo II Expansion pack if Blizzard North does such a project.

See also Arenas and PK'ing.

The Character Window

The Character window is much changed for Diablo II, and people have long been wondering what exactly all of the new numbers and terms mean. Well wonder no more, here is your full explanation. Click here for full details about all of the information boxes on the page.

Characters

The five characters in Diablo II all start off pretty weak, with only a few attributes. Characters only get around 75 total attribute points to start with, compared to 85 in Diablo. The Sorceress and Necromancer have but 10 or 15 strength at the beginning, so it's a long climb to get strong enough to equip even the most mediocre of weapons or armour. The actual figures for their starting attributes are subject to change, and could be raised if people in the beta test find them too weak, so don't attach too much importance to debating them at this point.

For starting equipment, the Amazon gets a small stack of javelins, the Paladin gets a short sword and a buckler, and the Barbarian gets an axe. The Sorceress and Necromancer get more interesting items, since they aren't good enough at melee to turn them loose in that fashion. They don't get a skill point though (no one does), they instead get a newbie magical item. Worth nothing to sell, costing just one gold to repair, these items are nevertheless essential. The Sorceress gets a wand of +1 Firebolt, which gives her Slvl one firebolt as long as she has the wand equipped. The Necromancer get a wand of +1 Raise Skeleton, which works the same as the Sorceress' wand.

None of the characters get any armour or gold to start off with, and they all start at level zero, needing to get to Clvl one to earn their first precious skill point.

For more information on all of the characters, their skill trees, and lots of general information about them, check out our Character Section, and be ready in the next few days for gameplay reports based on our experiences playing all five characters at Blizzard North.

Cheats and Bugs

We didn't get much new information on how hacking or other programming cheats will be combated; Blizzard is keeping their actual preventative measures secret, for obvious reasons. However we did try cheating in the game, duping and other exploits, and couldn't get them to work. Likely there will be some small bugs or loopholes in the economy found at some point, but they have rewritten the game code entirely, and have assured that duping is impossible this time around.

We didn't test some of the other bugs from Diablo, such as dying while going through a town portal and losing items, or lag eating dropped items from time to time just because there isn't really any way to test that sort of thing. It just happens from time to time while playing, and after a while people begin to notice it. Possibly things like this will crop up in Diablo II, but Blizzard North is committed to keeping the game cheat-free, and surely that translates over to fixing minor bugs, as well as major hacking attempts.

People have been asking about other anti-cheating tactics, such as how the "sanity checks" for hacked items will work on Battle.net, and what sort of punishment there will be for people caught cheating, but we don't have any new information on these things at this time.

Chests and Other Containers

Three urns and two chests.

VisitChests are a very big part of the game in Diablo II. Lots of your treasure will come from them, since monsters don't seem to carry as much loot as they did in Diablo. There are locked and unlocked chests, but they look just the same (locked are identified in the hover, but the graphics are interchangeable) and we didn't notice any difference in loot from locked or normal chests. Locked chests require keys that you can buy in town, or get when monsters drop them; they are easy to come by.

One area in particular in Act Two had zero chests in it, and after doing the whole thing we noticed that we had almost no items in our inventory, and lots of keys. So it is noticeable when you don't get chests or locked chests, and when you do they sort of blend in with the monster-dropped items.

Other than chests, which come in all shapes and sizes, there are lots of urns and barrels and other things that you have to break to get into. The chests and other containers are nicely drawn to complement the environment, so clay pots in the desert, wooden chests in the cathedral, and so forth. There is some nice varied animation for opening them, where when you click on them, your character generally kicks open the barrels and urns, rather than hitting them with their weapon. The hit is more fluid also; they don't walk up and do it as mechanically as they did in Diablo, and they can usually hit five or six closely-gathered urns from the same spot, since they don't have to be in the floor tile next to them anymore.

Urns and barrels are less likely to drop items than chests are, but there are more of them, often ten or fifteen in a small area, and you just charge over and kick them all open in a hurry. The risk there is in traps. There are a lot of trapped chests and urns, and they hurt. One of us had a number of deaths from traps, though he might use as an excuse the fact his sorceress "had low hit points." In truth, he just could not seem to associate the subtle creaking noise that warns of a trap with the impending explosion. Two out of three of us suffered no trap deaths, so you figure it out.  ;-p But it's true that you should be cautious opening chests and especially urns, since they have a variety of breaking noises, and these can easily cover up the sound of a trap creaking. When you hear that sound, run, because it could be anything from an annoying dart to a deadly nova about to cover the entire visible screen in the blink of an eye.

Locked Chests and Keys

Locked chests are scattered all over the place in Diablo II. They work just like they did in the classic game Gauntlet, where a key is a magical opening device, and expires after one use. In other words, you use up a key each time you open a locked chest, but at least the key is automatically accessed from your inventory. You don't have to stop and equip it or anything.

Keys are plentiful: NPCs sell them for a low price, and monsters frequently drop them as well. Keys can fit up to 10 in a stack, and that takes up just one inventory space, so they are a nice added feature, w/o being an inconvenience or nuisance to use.

Convert

Convert is gone from Diablo II at this time, and will likely not be returning. After the initial novelty wore off, the D2 Team came to regard it as a nuisance, and they had simplified it a couple of times, partially automating the process, until it became apparent that it was pointless. So there is no more Convert as a basic skill, and no monsters drop eyes, or hearts, or jaws, or any other such reagents. They do drop quite a few healing potions, and some mana potions, and occasionally other items such as explosive or poison throwing potions, that you would have gotten in the form of odd reagents previously, and which you would have had to convert in order to obtain a usable item. The Barbarian's skill Find Heart has now been changed to 'Find Health Potion' to reflect these changes.

Convert does still exist in the game in a much modified form, related to an Act Two quest item, and using that item you can convert potions and other things to new and more useful items. Only the basic conversions are listed, it will be up you to to experiment and find if there are other things to convert that might create very special and rare goodies.

Controls

The controls for Diablo II will be immediately familiar to everyone who has played Diablo. How you move or pick things up, open windows, target monsters, and more are all done in the same way as in Diablo. Some new additions include support for the Microsoft Explorer five-button mouse, fully customisable hot keys for all keyboard functions, the "mini panel" (small row of icons to open various windows that appears over your belt), running as a default (when Caps Lock is on you run always), the Alt key to pop up all the item tags, and numerous other conveniences.

Crashes

During our play time at Blizzard North, we ran into a number of crash bugs, and even character corruption problems. These were all due to the pre-beta nature of the game, but when you lose a Clvl 19 Sorceress to a waypoint overflow bug, like Flux did, or a Clvl 18 Amazon to a corrupted character save file, as Gaile did, or several start-up Paladins due to a quirky computer system, as Elly did, it's still a bit painful.

In Diablo II over Battle.net, the characters are backed up almost perpetually, so if there is a crash on your end, you won't lose more than a few seconds. The game stays alive for a few minutes, even if there isn't anyone in it, so you can reconnect if your ISP boots you, and probably get back on in time to continue your same game. If you leave a game with your corpse still in it, the oldest remaining corpse (corpses without any items on them vanish almost instantly) will appear in town in your next new game.

For the final release, the problems will be more worrisome when they are on the server end. Such errors would of course boot everyone in a game at that time, and character save files would drop back to the last server backup, which would hopefully be just an hour or 30 minutes or so ago. Occasional technical difficulties are inevitable, this is the Internet after all, though that wouldn't be much consolation to a person who lost that great new item they found ten minutes ago, or who lost a Hardcore character to a crash or a disconnect.

Corpses

Something that did not exist at all in Diablo, corpses are a major part of the game in Diablo II. There were of course dead bodies in Diablo, but they were intangible, just visual evidence of the battles. Once a monster died it was gone forever; you couldn't highlight or hover on the corpses, nor did you have any reason to want to do so. Also, the corpses were there forever, you could play all sixteen dungeon levels, and go back to level one six hours later, and all of the Fallen, Skeletons, Zombies, Corpse Eaters, ad other monsters would still be lying there, dead on the floor.

This is very different in Diablo II.

Monster Corpses

Corpses are now an essential part of the game. The Necromancer and Barbarian have numerous skills that require corpses to be used, including such nice ones as Corpse Explosion, Raise Skeletal Mage, Find Health Potion, and Grim Ward. Corpses now have a decay rate as well. It's not anything as simple as a time delay; where corpses would vanish 15 or 30 minutes after they hit the floor, for example. The way it works in Diablo II is that if you keep them onscreen they will last forever. But once off screen, and especially as you get farther away, they vanish after a little while. This is largely due to technical reasons: the game has to keep track of all the corpses and what sort of monster they were, and if it's tracking hundreds and hundreds of corpses off the screen, most of which will never interacted with again anyway, that's a big system drain.

So once you go offscreen and some distance away, if you retrace your steps a while later, the area will be as clean and pure as it was when you first entered. This is somewhat of a pain for a Necromancer, as he really needs those corpses, and it's also somewhat difficult when trying to navigate the levels, since you have to rely on the mini-map only, rather than being able to see where the bodies are and knowing that you've already been there. Of course the absence of monsters would tip that off to some extent, since there is no monster repopulation anymore.

To most of the characters, corpses are as they were in Diablo. Just eye candy on the floor. The Sorceress, Amazon, and Paladin don't have any skills that require or utilise corpses. So they can't even see a name tag on a corpse when they highlight them. The Necromancer and Barbarian can, but only if they have a corpse-using skill hot-keyed. If a Necromancer has Kick and Attack as his skills, he'll see just a bunch of bodies. However if he has Raise Skeleton up, for example, every corpse will display with a tag like, "Fallen Corpse", or "Greater Mummy Corpse". Corpses have stats, they are not all the same, since skills like Revive bring back that particular dead monster to fight for the Necromancer, and Corpse Explosion blows up a monster, dealing damage to others near it based on how many hit points the dead monster had while it was alive.

Another interesting thing about corpses is that monsters killed with a cold attack, or that were cold or frozen when they die, don't leave a corpse. They shatter into tiny blue chunks of ice, (much like Stone Cursed Monsters did in Diablo) which quickly melt into the floor and vanish. This is not a big favourite of the Necromancer, but it can be useful when dealing with monsters that like to resurrect their dead, since they can not do so if the body has dissolved into the floor.

Character Corpses

Character corpses are important also, of course. When you die in Diablo II, your body drops to the ground, and you see it from above, with the text, "Hit Space to Continue" displayed. Monsters know when you are dead now, they don't continue attacking your corpse after you die, as they did in Diablo. With a click of the space bar you will appear in town, with full health and mana, but missing everything you had equipped at the time of your death. Full information on this subject can be found in the Death Section.

The Character corpse is seen on the map with a pink +, and you will of course want to clean out some of your inventory while in town, perhaps don some spare equipment from your stash, and head back to your body. The monsters that killed you will still be there, but it's easier to reclaim your equipment in Diablo II, since you can run and lead the monsters away, and also because your equipment doesn't scatter all over the ground when you die. It stays on your corpse, and can only be accessed by you, or any friendly players you have set to "Loot" in the Party System menu. And with just a click on your corpse, you will automatically equip everything you were wearing, providing that you don't have some other item in that space already. This isn't anything special, you automatically equip everything you pick up in Diablo II, if there is space for it and the item isn't an unidentified magical object, but with your corpse you are of course picking up more items at once than you will at any other time in the game.

No corpse skills, such as those used by the Necromancer or Barbarian, can be used on player or hireling or minion corpses. So you can't blow up a corpse of a player you have just defeated in battle. This was considered as a feature, but as it would only be of benefit or fun for two of the five characters, and would be an annoyance to the Paladin, Amazon, and Sorceress, it was not included.

Day-Night Cycle

There is a working daytime to night-time cycle in Diablo II, and you will notice and appreciate it while playing. It has long been said by Blizzard North that there would be somewhat different monsters around at night vs. in the day, and though we didn't play long enough to notice that, it would be a nice addition. Monsters are generated on the fly, just ahead of where your character is, rather than all of them being pre-set when the level is loaded, so changes in the monsters due to the time of day or the number of members in your party can be implemented by the game engine.

There have also been plans for including items that would have different properties at night vs. in the day. Sword of the sun or moon, for example, but we didn't see anything like this to test it, and don't know if this will still be in the game or not.

The biggest change is of course that it gets dark. Dark makes it harder to see monsters, especially on the edges of the screen, though they don't seem to have that problem with you. ;) But you spend a lot of your time in the game in subterranean dungeons anyway, so whether it is day or night while you are down there is unknown and essentially irrelevant. You will miss the sun when the dark comes though. There is an Act Two quest involving a prolonged eclipse, [Tainted Sun] and after wandering the desert in the darkness for a few hours, you'll start to definitely miss the daylight. More incentive to finish the quest there, perhaps.

Death

Click to see fullsized, with the original caption.

How death is handled in Diablo II has changed a lot from the first game. There is no way to be resurrected now, so when you die you see the view in this thumbnail shot here, which is just an option to hit space to continue. When you do your character is back in town, fully healed and full of mana, but naked, as all of your equipment remains behind on your corpse.

There was talk of implementing penalties upon death, such as a loss of experience, but after some testing the Diablo II Team decided against that feature. It was not a real issue for good players, and it ended up over-penalising the poorer players, so it was taken out. The only real penalty upon death is that you drop all of the gold you were carrying. Half of it vanishes for good, and the other half drops to the ground, where anyone can pick it up, irrelevant of party settings.

Your equipment stays on your corpse, and can't be accessed by anyone but you, or a friendly party member whom you set to "loot". And when you return to your corpse, with just a click on it you will auto-equip all of the items you were wearing before, providing you haven't put on spare equipment in the meantime. This is a real time saver. Everything in Diablo II works like this, in fact: If you pick up an item and you are not already wearing one of that type - say you have no hat and you pick up a helm of some kind - you will automatically equip it (unless it is magical and unidentified.)

Tracking down your corpse can be interesting. You must find it first, and that can be quite difficult, given the enormous size of the levels in Diablo II. Players will learn to keep a more careful note of where they are at all times after a few long and frustrating searches for their own body, which of course has all of their equipment on it. The corpse does show up on the overlay map as a pink + sign, but you need to be pretty close to it, say within two or three screens, for it to appear on the map. Players set to friendly mode can also see the pink cross representing your corpse on their mini-maps so they can help guide you back to your corpse. If that sounds like a piece of cake to you, then you've probably not yet had a chance to wander the enormous and largely trackless surface levels of Diablo II.

But even if you can't find your body, or can't defeat the monsters that killed you and will still be waiting near your corpse, (or maybe you died since your internet connection crashed on you) all is not lost. You can start a new game and your oldest corpse (that still has equipment on it) will be there waiting for you in town. So if you died earlier in the game, got your loot back and kept playing, that corpse will vanish almost immediately once you remove the equipment from it. And then you might have died an hour later, and then died four more times trying to get back to your body. The oldest of your corpses will be in town the next game, so all of your original equipment will be there for you, but anything you were wearing in your later deaths will be lost.

It isn't all that difficult to get your equipment back, even if you're playing a melee type of character who lacks useful skills with which to kill monsters. You can just drop a town portal somewhat nearby, and run madly all around. Running enables you to get through spots that you could never even dream of surviving in Diablo, and since all you have to do is get to your body and click on it to automatically re-equip everything, the recovery time is much less than the old 'sort through the rings and armour' ordeal it was in Diablo.

One other issue with death is that when you are disconnected from Diablo II on Battle.net, you don't vanish from the game immediately. You linger there for 30 seconds or so (figure subject to change). So if you are in a fierce battle when the disconnect occurs, you will probably be killed. This is a feature, not an accident, since it keeps people from escaping death by other characters or monsters by just hitting Alt+F4, or unplugging their modem, or whatever. With the test server we were playing on at Blizzard North crashing from time to time, it was not uncommon to see a bunch of ghosts suddenly appear in the Battle.net chat, all dead when their game crashed on them. This is not a big problem unless you are a Hardcore character, of course. And yes, the Blizzard North employees had lost a number of high level HC chars to crashes and other bugs, so they are aware of that being a potential problem in Diablo II.

Delay

Diablo II has been delayed a number of times so far, as everyone is well aware. Blizzard North doesn't expect any more delays though, and are confident that they'll go to beta testing after the Holidays, when they return from a short vacation refreshed and ready to begin the final push. The plan is still for a relatively short beta, two months or less, and then the final release in March 2000.

Difficulty Levels

There will be a number of difficulty levels in Diablo II, but we do not know how many or what they will be called. Blizzard North did give us a quote on that when pressed, "There will be more than one and less than thirty, and they may or may not have the same names they did in Diablo." So we learned a lot from that conversation, as you can see.

One thing we did hear is that they have programmed the game so that it's quite easy to add difficulty levels or change the settings for all of the monsters, items, etc in a game, in terms of what they have to go through to actually change the programming of it. So when they do get into testing out higher difficulty levels, they can do it quickly and easily. And they are aware that most experienced Diablo players thought hell/hell was too easy, so it seems likely we'll see a top level of difficulty that will be challenging enough for anyone's taste.

Durability

Durability exists in Diablo II much like it did in Diablo. You see it listed when you hover on the item, and all items have various listed durabilities, and the higher quality items tend to have higher durability. There is currently no way to raise the durability of an item, besides getting it repaired. No oils to do this, or shrines, though it was a feature a number of Blizzard North guys were talking about putting back in, in some form.

The biggest change is that when an item's durability is completely used up, it turns red and becomes unusable, but it doesn't vanish, like they did in Diablo. It's just unusable, until you get it repaired by an NPC. Repairs were rumored to be horribly expensive, and they are a bit more than they were in Diablo, but it's not that bad. Higher quality items cost more to repair, and very good stuff costs a LOT, so this would be a problem for a young character with a really good item, since gold is much scarcer than it was in Diablo.

Items seem to take damage a bit faster than they did in Diablo, but it's hard to tell all that accurately from our few days of play time, especially as our new characters were switching weapons and armor constantly, as we found new, better stuff. Two-handed weapons are said to take some damage when you are hit, not just when you hit with them, even if you aren't blocking with that item, but we didn't get to test this out. Bows and crossbows still have durability, even though you need arrows or bolts to use them.

DVD

Blizzard is aware that everyone who has a DVD would very much like them to sell Diablo II in that format, as well as CD-ROM. However, at this time they have no plans to produce a DVD, either at the initial release, or later on. It all depends on market realities. Right now, the market for games on DVD is not large enough to justify the additional effort it would take them to programme a DVD version of it. As DVD gets more affordable, and more people gain that technology and DVD games sell more and more copies, Blizzard will of course be watching that market, and when it makes economic sense, or possibly once they have the CD-ROM and Mac versions finished and can spare some programmers, they'll get to work on it.

Economics

Gold is very scarce early on. Most monsters drop piddling amounts, about 4 to 7, and items you find early on sell for very little, just like in Diablo. However, you don't need gold for anything other than repairs and buying scrolls and new equipment. There is no gold drain for blue or red potions, or expensive books, like in Diablo. Amazons have more expenses than the other players, since they have to obtain arrows or bolts or javelins. However monsters frequently drop arrows and bolts, and these are very affordable from the NPC's anyway. Javelins are a bit more expensive, and are not dropped very frequently, but they do more damage, so that's only fair.

Later on gold was not of much use, at least judging from the Blizzard guys. Most of them had their stashes full in Act Two (100k gold max) and were carrying around 20 or 40k, all of which they would drop and half of which would vanish when they died. It appeared that they weren't really bothering to test the Guild Halls much, since there is the Steeg Stone in a Guild Hall that is always available to deposit more gold into and grow ever-closer to the next level of quality in a Guild Hall. (See Guild Halls for more information.)

Item repairs were more expensive than in Diablo, but they weren't as painful as we'd heard in the past, so it would seem that the price has been lowered. Early reports from Diablo II Team testers spoke of throwing away worn-out items, since they couldn't afford to fix them, but that is no longer the case.

Most good items to purchase were not that expensive, but were out of our attribute range. Towards the end of Act Two, more desirable items were offered to purchase, but there are also the strength and dexterity requirements to take into account, as well. This is less of a problem with one of the melee characters, who have higher strength to start with and are adding more of their attribute points to strength and dex as they go along.

However, the whole game economy is far from polished and perfected, and it was actively skewed while we were playing it in this early test mode, with the spawning of magical items still turned up a bit, to let them do more testing on items and item sets and such. So we were finding better/more expensive stuff to sell than gamers will in the final game.

Experience

The whole experience system has been rather overhauled in Diablo II, and is much more reasonable, and harder to exploit. A major addition is that you don't get experience now for killing monsters too far below your level, OR too far above it. Only the "slumming" was prevented in Diablo, where you couldn't go to the easy levels and just rip through them and gain exp for it. Now they don't allow you to kill monsters far too high for your Character level either. Why not? This prevents the exploit of a lower level character playing with a bunch of higher level friends, and tagging along down to the deeper levels and just racking up obscene experience through the shared experience in the party system. In addition, it prevents someone from using high level "hand-me-down" equipment that enables him to succeed, much less even survive, at a higher level than he would normally be able to play.

Exactly how far below or above your level a monster can be and still award experience is still being worked on, and of course it's a sliding scale or a bell curve sort of distribution. It doesn't go from full exp to nothing, it gradually declines as you face monsters that are more and more out of your range, either higher or lower.

Sharing Experience

The formula for sharing experience in a friendly party is complicated, but also very ingenious. The actual quote Matt Householder, Diablo II Producer, gave to us reads as follows:

"The total Experience for killing a monster is divided among the members of a party. Each member's share of the total is an amount proportional to the member's character level divided by the sum of all the character levels in the party. The member delivering the killing blow also gets a small percentage of additional Experience as a bonus to his/her share.

For each party member the Experience earned (added to stats) for killing a monster is computed based on the difference between your character's level and the monster's level. If the level difference is small (the defn of "small" is adjustable), the full Experience share is added to stats. If the difference is large (again adjustable), a minimum amount of Experience is added to stats. In between these two extremes a proportional amount is added."

Simple, eh? ;)

What this means is that in a party, the experience for killing a monster is divided up so that the higher Clvl characters get more, based on how high their character level is, and also whoever deals the killing strike gets a small bonus. And this is all dependant upon the monster being in your range to get experience from in the first place, but that comes into play if you are playing solo or in a group. So basically you should try and group up with characters at about your own level, and you should all get together and play areas that are appropriate for your level, if you wish to gain the maximum experience from your playing.

As was said before, there is no max character level hard cap in Diablo II. It was capped at Clvl 50 in Diablo; this is not the case in the sequel. However, Blizzard North has told us that it will be extremely difficult to get a character to Clvl 50. This likely means that you will need tremendous amounts of experience to advance in levels at that point, and that the only monsters that will still be awarding you experience are the most powerful and deadly in the game, no doubt deep in Act Four on the highest difficulty level. So players will eventually get characters to Clvl 51 and beyond, but it will be a very long climb to those levels.

Leveling Up

When you level it up you gain five attribute points and one skill point. There are no hard caps on how many attribute points each character may have in each attribute, so you could have a sorceress with 200 strength if you wanted to, though it wouldn't exactly be the best way to play her. There are no elixirs in the game, so characters will have generally far fewer attributes than a character of the same Clvl would have in Diablo. To somewhat compensate for this, the characters gain more from each attribute point. All characters that we tested gained two mana per point in Energy, and two hit points per point in Vitality. Your Offensive Rating (to/hit) goes up quickly as well; with each level point applied to dexterity, the Amazon's dexterity total rose 4 points, and presumably the other characters have some specific, appropriate bonuses to their stats as well (such as Barbarian gaining damage more quickly, Paladin gaining more Defensive Rating, etc?) that will be revealed with more testing.

Also, as with Diablo, when your character goes up a level, they gain to their base damage, mana, and hit points, though we didn't get to experiment enough to determine exactly how much and how often. It likely varies with the character level and character type anyway.

Expansion Pack or Other Added Features

We didn't get any new information on whether Blizzard North is planning an expansion pack for Diablo II or not. While we're just guessing, it seems likely, since expansion packs are something of a tradition for Blizzard, having released them for WarCraft II, Diablo [Hellfire, developed by Sierra], and StarCraft. If Diablo II sells well and is popular, then there would seem to be every reason for Blizzard North to expand the world. They have said that Arena Games might be an added feature in a later product, so that would be something to add in an expansion-pack, and there would be other things, as there were in Hellfire. A new character or two, new levels, new spells, new items, etc. It would be interesting to see how they reworked the skill trees, if they replaced skills, or just added a fourth tree for each existing character, or what. But we'll have a long wait to find out that sort of thing, with Diablo II not released yet.

Friendly Fire

Friendly fire is completely out of the game at this point, and the D2 Team seemed pretty sure it would stay that way. They have experimented with it endlessly, trying every possible permutation, including much lower damage, area effect spells only, FF in neutral party mode, etc. But they were just not happy with how any of those worked. Diablo II is designed, by popular demand, to encourage a co-op style of play in multi-player mode. Whether we like it or not, they are sacrificing "realism" for playability.

Some of the reasons that FF doesn't work well are:

• Lack of ability to buy healing potions.
• So many area-of-effect spells would be unusable in multi-player mode.
• The game is so much faster-paced than Diablo that just being careful and not shooting others is nearly impossible.
• No resurrection scrolls make dying more inconvenient (although this is largely cancelled out by the lack of looting and the ease of re-equipping your items).
• It is more fun to not have to worry about or deal with it.
• It discriminates among characters, with the Sorceress becoming nearly impossible to play in a friendly MP game, and the Necromancer not being real well-suited for it either.

None of these reasons will convince some people, but what it really seems to come down to is "The Fun Factor." The game is much more fun if you can just play and not worry constantly about killing others, and with the mass-destruction spells the Sorceress and Necromancer can wield, they would simply be unable to play effectively in a friendly party game.

The lack of friendly fire comes into play with melee weapons also, since you cannot hit your party members. Since some weapons have a greater range, it is a nice strategy to stand behind the "tank" character and shoot arrows or spells through him at the monsters, or even use a weapon with more range, like a spear, long sword, polearm, or bow and arrow. Safe behind your friend, you can hit the monsters just as well as if you had a direct shot. This seems a possible exploit, one that Blizzard have worked hard to counteract with the distribution of not allowing the sharing of Experience points between characters of vastly different Clvls. If a lower level character is able to hide behind a higher level character whilst fighting monsters, safe in the assurance that the higher character will act as a 'human shield', protecting him against the monsters attacks, he could rake up a bucket-load of Experience points very quickly with very little risk to his own safety.

Before sounding the death knell of Friendly Fire, remember that it has been in and out of the game numerous times, and it's not guaranteed to never make a comeback. This is too hotly-contested a feature to die quietly. The Battle.net Game Creation Screen

Game Creation Options

Game Creation is somewhat enhanced from how it was in Diablo, and sports a few added options. You can see what the game creation screen looks like here, or click the thumbnail to the right. In addition to the standard options for game name, and password, there are added options to enter a game description (don't have to try and do this with the game name anymore), maximum number of players, and the character level restriction. This is a useful addition if you don't want some big character jumping in and and trying to PK everyone in sight, but also with how the party system works now, playing with characters far above or below your level will have a big effect on the experience you gain from killing monsters.

Guild Halls

Guild Halls are much changed since last check. They are now free to found, but will require the founding character to have played through the entire game before he can create one. It is not decided if all members must have finished the game as well, or if they can join in before then, if invited. Once you are eligible to create a guild hall, you select "Guild" and then "Found Guild" from the Battle.net interface, enter your name and abbreviation, and that's that, you have a guild. At that time you set the name of the Guild Hall, your three letter abbreviation to appear after your name on Battle.net, and also your guild hall colours and insignia.

You can then select "Guild" from the "Join Game" window in Battle.net, and you type in the name of your Guild Hall, and the password, and if you are on the list of allowed members, you are in. The Guild Hall screen starts off with your character standing in a grassy area with cliffs on each side. It's an Act One setting, and looks a lot like the ground and cliff in this screenshot, though obviously without the monsters. You move the only direction you can, which is to your right, and the narrow cul-de-sac opens up into a larger grassy area with some trees, where your guild hall stands in a clearing. Theoretically, every player who finishes the game could create a guild hall and it's possible there could be some issues here with solo-guild halls [those created purely for the extra storage space for that player], being abandoned when they stop playing or move onto a new character and a new hall. Probably housekeeping will be performed much like it is with accounts on Battle.net, whereby after a certain period of inactivity the account is assumed not required and deleted.

The beginning guild is a small wooden Act One building, a single room that doesn't even have a chest in it. The only existing screenshot of a Guild Hall is here, and this is at least the first upgraded model, since it has two rooms and a chest, though we don't know if the chest shown here is public or private.

The Steeg Stone.

Inside your Guild Hall is the Steeg Stone (named for game designer Steig Hedlund), the pillar with the smoke around it in this image. This is an attractive way to symbolise the guild treasury. You click on the Steeg Stone and an option screen pops up telling you how much gold you have (both on you and in your stash) and asking how much you would like to deposit. It also displays (at least to the Guild Master, we didn't test it with just a regular guild member) how much gold there is in the guild now, and how much more is needed to get to the next Guild Hall upgrade. The first one is at 35,000, but unfortunately we didn't get that much gold to see what it would have added. Probably just a chest, since 35,000 gold isn't really that much, we had that much between the three of us by mid-Act Two, we just didn't get together and deposit it. And in the current pre-beta test mode, you only need to finish Act One to qualify for a Guild Hall, rather than the entire game, after which you'd certainly have enough gold to afford at least the first level of a Guild Hall upgrade.

Further upgrades to a Guild Hall will add more features. Blizzard didn't disclose them all to us, but we got the impression that as you added in more money, more features would come into play, and the look and size of the Guild Hall would change. Rather than having an option to spend, say, 500,000 to add a larger storage chest, you would know that you needed to deposit up to 350,000 gold, and at that point your Guild Hall would automatically add another room and expand the storage chest from 4x6 to 4x8. We don't know the features, just speculating here.

Also the appearance of the Guild Hall will change, not just the size. Probably higher levels of it will be in different architectural styles, maybe Act Two, and then at a higher level a stone temple sort of design from Act Three, and then at the highest level, perhaps some sort of structure that you'd see in Act Four? It is unknown how much choice or control you'll have over these changes, and Guild Halls are still a new innovation to the game, so much change is still possible. Suggestions are always welcome.

How many characters can belong to the same Guild Hall? The Diablo II Development Team weren't decided on that yet, but it will be a lot. Possibly the number will be limited only by the RAM on your computer, but they said maybe 128 members would require around 128MB RAM to play at a reasonable frame rate. So guild halls are not at all the province of only the very rich, as they were originally planned to be. The bonus for the rich is to have special-looking guild Halls with tons of storage space, and maybe even direct access from within a game, as one of the very highest bonus features.

There won't be any way to have PvP combat or even sparring in the Guild Hall, for technical reasons. With so many characters allowed in a small area, if there were spell animations and other effects to show, and hit points and spell damage and other information coming from that many computers, the frame rate would drop to a crawl, and it would put a lot of stress on the server. So stand around and chat, hold meetings, trade items, but don't expect to be able to duel.

To add members to the Guild Hall is simple. If you are the Guild Master, you can just select the names in Battle.net chat, and with a right click you'll have options, one of them being to add them to your guild hall. They are given the option to accept, and upon doing that, you would tell them the password and rules of the Guild Hall; the process is easy. The method for booting members, collecting rent, possibly voting out a bad Guild Master, and other various issues are not finalised yet. Guild Halls will be tested out extensively during the beta test, and since they are a feature that was added by popular demand, it seems likely that Blizzard will be willing to listen and make changes if the majority wish them.

It was said by Bill Roper in a recent Fansite Interview that open characters would not be eligible to have Guild Halls. This is only logical, since in offline and open character play there will no doubt be gold and character hacks, so qualifying for a guild hall could be cheated, and then adding enough gold to get a nicer one could be cheated as well. Also, Guild Halls are mainly meant to be something for Battle.net play with friends, and the prestige of a guild tag on your character would be meaningless when playing off of Battle.net.

Hardcore

The rumours were not true, Hardcore is still in the game. Hardcore characters will have their own ladders, their own system of titles (awarded for beating certain bosses, possibly just the End of Act Bosses such as Andariel) and their own economy. Guild Halls will exist for Hardcore characters, possibly at some sort of reduced requirement or cost, but possibly the same. Since Guild Halls are free, just requiring you to beat the game once to get one, one HC char will do it and then probably have 80 people wanting to be in their guild and donate to the Steeg Stone.

Once dead as a Hardcore character, your body is gone and untouchable. This may change, to allow friendly looting, but that is not decided yet. You may log on to Battle.net after you die, but you appear as a ghost, a character in the chat interface with a brown hooded robe, your name in red like all HC chars are. Seeing ghosts on Battle.net at Blizzard North was not uncommon, since if the server crashed, lots of characters in games would die each time. After a server crash often there would appear 10 or 12 ghost characters in the chat, most of them non-Hardcore, but sometimes a few unfortunate souls.

The Blizzard North guys are quite heartless about Hardcore death, while we were playing often someone would come running into the room with news that "So-and-so just lost his Clvl 21 Hardcore Paladin!" and all the other Blizzard North guys would laugh and clap. It was a camaraderie, of sorts, since they all knew the pain of losing one. But I think we can look forward to some nicely miserable chatting on Battle.net when a guy logs on with a Clvl 28 or 30 Hardcore ghost, and everyone wants to hear his hard luck story.

Interface

The interface for Diablo II is great. Much improved in many ways, easier to use, showing off more information, and better looking. You really have to play it to appreciate all of the changes, both subtle and overt, but here are a few in a quick run down:

One great one is that to leave any shopping or conversation pop up screen, you can just left click anywhere on the screen outside of the window. No need to hit the Esc key several times any more. However, the Esc key still works, and you can also use the space bar. A typical weapon info display

A larger addition is the sheer amount of information displayed when you hover the cursor over any item in the game. You can see an item display here, and a skill display here. Much info, and it's a bit overwhelming when you are trying to take it all in at a glance while playing. Also, rather than the information fitting into the little text box at the bottom of the interface, as it did in Diablo, the info now pops up right where you are hovering, and at first you sort of recoil in alarm. Of course there isn't any box on the belt for text now, since the belt is redesigned and much smaller in Diablo II. This frees up more space for the action to take place in, which is a good thing. It's just a new look, and you will probably need a couple of games to get used to it.

Pretty much everything in the game has a hover tag on it: All items, even on the ground, other characters, monsters, and even town portals, which now say where they will take you, rather than just the name of whoever cast them.

The Belt

Belt levels are improved. Only blue and red potions are auto-placed in the belt (you can stick in stamina or other drinkable potions if you wish), they auto-stack in the proper column, and they drop down as you drink them.

Belts this large (16 slots) are something you wouldn't find before maybe Clvl 20 or so, and you'd probably not have enough strength to wear one at that point anyway, unless you were a warrior-type character. In this quick chart, red or blue are normal potions, and RED and BLUE are full recharge potions, which are much rarer, at least early in the game. The way the belt now works is very clever. The visible level is what you see in your belt when you are not hovering over it. These slots are numbered 1-4, and correspond to the number keys, just like the belt did in Diablo. The clever part is that things drop down as you drink them.

So if you hit "1" in this belt set up, the "red" on the Second Row in Column One would drop down to the visible level, and be ready if you hit "1" again. And things auto-stack (when you pick up potions without your inventory open) from left to right. So if you picked up a full RED, it would go to the top of Column Three, and if you picked up two "reds", they would both go into Column One. This works the same for all belts with two or more rows, and is very convenient in keeping things in their proper rows.

You can always move things around, and a new trick is that if you hover on the belt and get all the rows to display, you can hit the tilde "~" key (top left corner of the keyboard) and keep the belt displaying all the rows even when you are not hovering. This is useful for stocking it more quickly, though it's easy to hit that key by accident since you are using Tab and 1 all the time, and it's a bit of a surprise if you first get it in the heat of combat.

Customizable Hotkeys

All of the keyboard keys are fully customisable in Diablo II. The way this worked when we were testing it was that you just hit "Esc" and got several text options, pretty much like they were in Diablo. You could adjust the sound, music, gamma and more from that, save (in single-player), exit the game, etc. And another one of the options was "Controls", and you clicked it and got a long text list in very small type of what every key was currently doing. It was a simple matter to click on the one you wanted to change, and then just hit whatever key you wanted to perform that function. The game then remembered them next time, saved to that character, which was convenient.

We did try them out, and liked them a lot. Flux was using a Sorceress, and by around Clvl 18 had eight skills in regular use, so was using all eight skill hot keys, (default for these was F1-F8) and since his machine had a ergonomic keyboard, F7 and F8 were far out of easy reach. He set them to "5" and "6", since those keys were in reach, and only 1-4 drink from the belt in Diablo II, and it was quite nice to have all eight hotkeys accessible without even moving one's hand. Gaile, with her Bow Amazon, was fairly unconcerned about re-keying the spells. Because she had chosen to concentrate her spell selection somewhat, and since she was comfortable with the Diablo set-up (from excessive use ;-p), she simply kept her most-used skills as F-5 through F-8, where instinct took her.

We are looking forward to actually playing the game, and setting everything to custom. For now most hotkeys are somewhat logical: "T" for Skill Trees, "C" for Character window, "I" for Inventory, etc. But it seems likely that once players get used to the game and the interface, people will be setting everything to the left side of the keyboard [unless they are left-handed], for quicker access, and just memorising where all the keys are. Most of the windows can be opened with one click on the "Mini Panel", (see it here) the small strip of icons just above your belt, so if you are uncomfortable with hot keys you can use that instead.

A requested inventory feature that will unfortunately not be in the game is some sort of weapon switch hot key. That would make it possible to switch instantly from bow and arrows to sword and shield, for instance. Blizzard North tested this out during the development cycle, but the issues of the different items taking up different amounts of space in inventory, and being dropped accidentally when switching were too much of a pain to put into the final game.

One thing that has long been a popular request is a yes/no prompt on quitting a game. Anyone who has ever accidentally hit "Esc" and then clicked on "New Game" in Diablo knows this problem. This feature is not implemented into Diablo II (yet) but it's less of an issue this time, since you don't have to use the Esc key to get out of all conversations and trade interactions with NPC's. You can just click elsewhere on the screen, or hit the space bar. So less chance of accidentally, leaving a game, but at the same time, adding a yes/no prompt would be such an easy thing to do, and it has no downside, so let's all feel free to continue asking about it.

Inventory

Your character's inventory is the same size as it was in Diablo, 4x10 spaces. There is no bonus in size for a stronger character in terms of inventory space. The only bonus added strength allows is meeting the requirements to wear a belt with more slots in it for potions, which is definitely a plus. The basic belt is a default item, with four spaces for potions. There are a couple of types of belts that you can wear, such as certain types of "sashes," that add armour or other bonuses, but still have only four potion shots. Other belts or sashes allow 8, 12, or 16 slots, and the strength requirements increase as you go up. These items aren't all that rare though; we saw numerous 12-slot belts just in Act One and early Act Two.

There was talk that there might be some sort of packs or bags of holding that you could put into your inventory to hold more stuff at once, or perhaps some sort of quest item later in the game that would expand your inventory somewhat, but this issue is still under debate.

For related topics, see Belt and Stash.

Items

Completely covering all information about items in Diablo II would be a website in itself. There are probably five or ten times as many items as there were in Diablo. More types of weapons and armour, new things like gems, lots of new types of potions, dozens of new prefixes and suffixes, etc. So rather than try to cover them all here, we will instead give a short run down on a few of the new items, and save the more thorough descriptions for our upcoming Items Section.

Books and Scrolls

Books exist in Diablo II, but in much different form than they were in Diablo. Books are now just scroll-holders, basically. There are two types of books, Town Portal books, which are blue, and Identify books, which are red. These are both 1x2 items in the inventory, and what they do is hold scrolls. Any ID or TP scrolls you pick up will auto-stack in it when you have a book of that type. Books hold up to twenty scrolls/charges of a spell, and each time you cast that spell the number of charges declines by one.

Scrolls are for sale in very large quantities, and are cheap (80 gold for Town Portal, 100 for Identify). Also, monsters frequently drop scrolls, or even books with 2-5 charges, which also stack into your existing book, if there is room. Once you rescue Cain from the Rogue Encampment, and get him identifying items for free, you'll most likely never run short on scrolls again, at least up through Act Three.

Town Portal and Identify are the only scrolls in the game. Blizzard North has given some consideration to putting Resurrect back in, perhaps as a very rare or high-level scroll, but it was not in the game at the time of our testing.

Gems

Gems are used with the three types of socketable items: weapons, helms, and shields. There are at least four types of gems, fire, lightning, poison, and cold, and five levels of gem quality. The names are subject to change, but in best to worst, they are:

• Perfect
• Flawless
• Normal (Just called by the gem type: "sapphire" or "diamond" for example.)
• Flawed
• Chipped

The only gems we saw for sale from NPCs were Chipped or Flawed. Lower quality ones. Possibly later in the game you can get the better quality gems for sale, or find them from monsters. Higher quality gems imbue the item they are socketed into with better bonuses, so it is worth it to use better gems. Besides hoping to find them, you can carry around a gem, and hope to encounter a Gem Shrine. These shrines have a very cool function. If you have no gems in your inventory when you find one, they will spit out one random gem of low quality. But if you have a loose gem in your inventory, the Gem Shrine will upgrade it one level in quality. So over time, you can assemble some perfect gems, which are extremely useful in socketed items.

Keys

Keys are used to open locked chests, which you can read more about here. Keys can stack up to ten high in one inventory space, though at the time of our testing there was but one graphic for them, so you had to hover over them to see how many you had. Each time you click on a locked chest one key is automatically expended to open it. Keys are dropped occasionally by monsters, and also can be purchased in town for a very low price. There has been discussion at Blizzard North of including locked doors as well as chests, but the consensus is that it would be a nuisance if you got stuck at a door and didn't have a key, and had to go back to town to get some more. So we probably won't see locked doors in Diablo II.

Weapons, Armour, Potions and Other Items

We have extensive information on weapons, armour, potions, and other items, but these sections will be very large and detailed, with many images for illustrative purposes, and as such don't fit into this report. They will be premiering in our Items Section, which is currently under construction.

Kick

Kick is still in the game, and it works just as it did when we first tested it out. You select kick with whichever mouse button you wish, and when you click it your character kicks out, with very good accuracy. Any monsters you strike will be knocked sliding backwards a few steps, which gives you some nice spacing to use a skill or run. The kick either does very low or zero damage, so it's not really an offensive weapon, but a way to give yourself space. But it proved useful enough for pushing back a couple of monsters and then hotkeying back to another skill to deal with the rest left surrounding you. And of course it costs no mana to use.

The original idea of kick was that bows and some other ranged weapons were going to be less or not at all effective at point blank range, so you would have need to kick things back to hit them properly. However that concept was scrapped for various reasons, but kick remains, not of great use, but not actively annoying enough to be removed completely, like Convert.

Ladders (Character Ranking System)

One of the most anticipated features of Diablo II for the competitive player is the ladder system, a promised world-wide character ranking system, whose placement would be based on a large number of factors. Just the idea of it gave players hope for a more meaningful appraisal of another character than merely class and Clvl.

The Ladder system will be in the game, but just what it will measure is still being determined, and Blizzard North wouldn't give us any new news about it. What we do know is that the ladders will apparently measure a combination of PvP and PvM play, for each character. There were going to be strictly PvP ladders, tied in with the Arena, but since the Arena has been scrapped, or at least postponed, the PvP ladders are out. A solely-PvP ladder based on regular game play is an impossibility, there are just too many variables and ways to exploit it.

So the ranking will be largely based on PvM play, and a large component of the ranking will be actual Clvl, or experience of a character. But at the same time, Blizzard North recognises that Clvl alone is not a true measure of playing skill, or else the ladders would be just a listing of the characters with the most experience. For example, a person who was sloppy, died a lot, and wasn't very good at Diablo II, but who played for eight hours a day with one character, would get a very high level character, just through persistence. Would this player deserve a higher ranking than another player who might not have that much time to play, but who dies much less, moves faster, and is generally far more skillful?

The ladder is a fun way to compete adn measure your character against other players from around the world. But it's also a way to help you select playing partners, and therefore the players with higher rankings should be better players, ones who die less and won't drag down the rest of the party. Hopefully these variables will be factored in, and some nearly magical system will emerge that works perfectly and that everyone is happy with. Or at least is better than nothing. ;)

Mac Version

The port from PC to Mac is still a definite priority for Blizzard North. They are working on it while still working on Diablo II, and fully expect to have the Mac version out just a few months after the PC version. There will not be a public beta test of the Mac version, since it's the same game, they just need to get out all the bugs that might appear as a result of converting it from PC to Mac programming. A few month wait is no fun, but it's still a much faster PC to Mac turn around time than most computer games manage, and less of a wait than there was for past Blizzard games.

Mana Regeneration

All characters in Diablo II regenerate mana at a pretty good rate. About one point per second, and if you keep alternating magical attacks with weapon attacks, or just pace yourself, you will hardly ever come up dry. Only when there is a sizeable pack of monsters, or an emergency situation, will you find the blue bulb drained. Monsters drop blue potions less frequently than they drop red, but since you don't need to drink blue at all, (it's just a convenience) you generally have a few on hand for emergencies.

Mana is needed more by the Sorceress and Necromancer than the other characters, and especially the Sorceress, since she doesn't have minions fighting it out for her, and she will generally have weaker melee fighting ability than the Necromancer. Of course that's fully customisable, there is nothing to stop a player from loading up their Sorceress with strength and dexterity and good equipment.

But generally speaking, the Sorceress will have more mana than anyone else, and go through it faster than anyone else. Her great skill is Warmth, which ups her mana regeneration rate 25% at level one, and 35% at level two. In our testing this made a big difference. Yes, it's mostly just a convenience, since you could just be more patient, but it is a lot more fun to play and shoot off spells, rather than stand around and wait for your mana to recharge.

For instant mana refills, there are "wells" scattered around the maps, and these offer a full mana and health refill with one click. They do recharge themselves, but it takes a few minutes, so you can't just run back to one every time you get beaten on. Also, there is an NPC in town in each of the first three Acts (possibly in Act Four also, but we don't know) that will provide you with an automatic full heal and full mana recharge. Akara, the Rogue Priestess, provides this service in Act One.

Map

Overlay Map

The overlay map is quite similar in function to the one in Diablo: you see a miniature version of the level around you superimposed over the screen. But the one in Diablo II is much improved in detail. The map is now generated by actually condensing the full game world each new game, and then displaying the key features in miniature, and partially transparent. Not at all just the gold line blueprint of the dungeons you saw in the first game, you now see houses, wagons, cliffs, walls, doorways, and more in great detail. Adding to the display, key features have little icons. Doorways are sort of a pinkish red on most maps, though the colour scheme changes from level to level. Characters show as differently coloured "+" signs: Your character's sign is blue, friendly characters are green, NPC's are white, your corpses are pink, and hirelings or minions are teal.

Other displayed features include ankhs for shrines; stairways, cave openings, wells, buildings, and other such important features are clearly visible from a distance, with various accurate representations in miniature on the map.

How far various things can be off of your screen and still show up on the map varies. Hard features such as houses, walls, tents, etc. show up forever, even if you are far far away and have to scroll the overlay map back to see them. (And you can scroll the map a long way. You will not believe how far, with the massive size of the levels in Diablo II.) Monsters don't show up at all on the map, or it would be just dotted with them, obscuring everything else. Shrines and wells show up for a long distance, but not forever, you have to be within a few screens of them to find them. Friendly players and your minions show up just about as far as shrines. Only important NPC's show up on the overlay map, and they have a smaller range than friendly players. You have to be within a couple of screens of them, and from one end of the Rogue Encampment you can't see the NPC's at the other end. In this map Akara is just to the right of the two NPCs (Warriv and Kashya) in the middle near the red camp fire, but her + doesn't show up at this point. Your own corpse has about the same range as an NPC, and town portals, which show up as golden +'s, are only visible at close range as well.

Mini Belt Map

Belt map. Full screenshot here.

A totally new addition to the interface of Diablo II is the mini belt map. It appears on your belt where the Stamina and Level Up gauges usually are, pushing them to the right and shrinking them. You can see it here, or in the thumbnail to the right. This is a brand new feature, added into the game just before our trip to Blizzard North. It was still a work in progress, not at all finalised in function or appearance, and is being seen here for the first time.

Some of us liked it very much; one left it up and used it constantly the entire period of gameplay. Another never looked at it. So it may well not be for everyone, but if you want a thumbnail navigation system, and don't want the overlay map always covering up the screen, then this is the new goodie for you. Since it's such a new feature, expect there to be some changes, and it might be removed from the game entirely, if it doesn't seem useful to the Diablo II Team as they play test it. Such is the life of new features in Diablo II.

Monsters

A full report on the monsters of Diablo II will require much more space than we have to spare here. A few quick comments and changes for monsters in the game: Monster health display

The new health bar that displays behind the name of the monster is very useful. The name, like "Burning Dead Archer" appears, with a red background. And then as the monster takes damage, the red bar declines, from right to left. This thumbnail shows a Slime Prince, an Act Three monster (that spits firebolts) with full hit points. One good hit and the red behind the name would probably be down around the "P" in "Prince", indicating that the monster had half its hit points remaining.

Monster stats do not display in Diablo II. You don't get a kill counter, or a listing of their resistance and hit points, no matter how many of them you kill. The only information you learn is by observation of how difficult they are to kill, and how much damage they seem to take from various types of magical attack. There is some more info on some monsters, like the "Spits Firebolts" displayed in the thumbnail here, but that's only shown for monsters with special attacks, such as "Fire Damage Hits," "Defends with Sparks," or "Magic Resistant." All boss monsters have this sort of info displayed, though it's far from complete. A boss that has extra hit points, extra speed, a fire attack, and blows up with a nova when killed might just say, "Extra Strong, Extra Fast." It will be up to you, the player, to observe what the monsters do when they die and how they fight in Diablo II, and experience with a given type of monster will be very useful when facing them again.

There is no respawning of monsters in previously-cleared areas. The Diablo II Team had planned on this all along, but it was having some technical difficulties, in terms of giving the computer too much to keep track of, and it was sort of wasted, since characters weren't revisiting already-cleared areas that much anyway. So this feature has been removed.

Monster Generators are still in the game, and we saw several types in Act One and Two. They are weird, semi-organic things, that have substantial hit points, and can move around, and spit out new monsters pretty rapidly, in a very "giving birth" sort of fashion. It's not a mechanical thing, where more monsters just appear around the generator, they are pushed out of the mother. Monster Generators aren't fast though, and they can't fight back, and they only have a limited output, after around eight or ten monsters they collapse on themselves and become inert and untargetable.

Death animations are frequently spectacular in Diablo II. Quest and level bosses especially, they die and fireworks commence. Swirls of lightning and fire, vast poison clouds, explosions, and often great rewards, such as rains of gold or other treasures, appear upon their deaths. Blood Raven, the Countess in the Forgotten Tower Quest, Andariel, and some others in Act One have spectacular visual displays upon their deaths.

In addition to these quick tidbits, we have tons more information on Monsters collected, and it will be appearing in updates on our hosted monster speciality site, Darkness. Check it all out there in the days to come, and there will be a new, fully-updated monster section appearing on DiabloII.net in a few weeks.

Music

The music of Diablo II is even more pleasing than that of Diablo. While the score carries many Diablo-like driving, or suspenseful, or haunting themes, by sheer quantity of musical images, the variety prevents monotony, even when you are in the same area for some time. The loops are more varied, more complex, and more frequently changing as well, and in each new area you visit, you are treated to completely new tunes, written with attention to the terrain or the setting. It is a wonderful score. At times you are tempted to linger a bit in a certain area, since you are so enjoying the music that plays whilst you are there.

NPCs

The NPCs in Diablo II behave and move around in much more interesting fashion than the "stand still and gesture" ones in Diablo. The important shopkeeper ones move around some, but they do have confined ranges. You won't have to go out and search for them, they'll be near their shops, just not in the exact same spot every time. For example Charsi, the Blacksmith in Act One, walks around her forge area, and occasionally bangs on the anvil or sharpens a sword. The others pace around their area as well, in rather realistic fashion. You almost feel like you are interrupting them at times.

Besides the important NPC's there are many others just walking around the towns. You can't interact with them, and they don't show up on the map or have a name tag when you hang the cursor over them. They are just decoration, but they work well for that purpose.

When an NPC has something important to tell you, usually wanting to give you a quest, or crucial information for a quest you are already on, they appear with an exclamation point over their heads, a few will give a verbal clue, such as Akara's "I have news for you," and some will walk right up to you and start talking, not even waiting to be clicked on.

Also, the NPC's often have different speeches for each character, customised to your class, if not to the extremes of liking or disliking, they at least say your class and a bit of background info, rather than just, "Welcome my friend, it is good you have returned."We didn't notice them charging different prices or anything, but Charsi has a fascination with Barbarians, Gheed dislikes Necromancers, and there are a few other such personality-enhancing quirks you will see in the game.

The voice acting of the NPC characters is quite well done. Each has a distinctive style of speech, from Charsi's outgoing friendliness to Warriv's soothing tones to Akara's stately vocals. Some of the voicing was not yet in place, and we are eager to hear Andariel's voice at the end of Act One, and any of the NPC's after Act One, since Acts Two and Three had no vocal tracks yet working in the game.

Mercenaries

Another new feature with NPCs in Diablo II is the ability to hire mercenaries to accompany you on your adventures. Their AI isn't the best, but they will run to keep up with you, and they can take some punishment. There are a variety of randomly-generated NPC's with varying stats and skills and prices, and lots of weird names. (One Act Three mage NPC was named "Jarulf".)

None of the mercenaries last all that long, since you can't heal them (unless you are a Paladin using Prayer), or get them to drink potions. They do heal on their own, but slowly, and you won't usually want to wait on them.

Act One mercs are rogues. They all wield bows, and are very good shots, though their firing rate isn't that great, nor is their damage. They last a little while, since they are ranged attackers, and if you stay in front they won't get attacked by many monsters. Ice Arrow ones are the most useful, since they can slow down the monsters with their shots.

Act Two mercs are Town Guards. Big fellows with polearms, you can see one here. They are pretty tough, and have decent armour, but they run right into the thick of the battle, and without healing potions they don't last very long.

Act Three mercs are the first ones that are really worth the money. (Though the Act One and Two mercs might be improved to make them a worthwhile feature.) You can see one here, in the red. They are NPC sorcerers, just like the character from Diablo, though they don't have quite the same spells. They have better ones in some cases, and can cast some of the higher level spells in Diablo II, but only one per mage. Cold spells are again the most useful here.

Nothing is known about Act Four yet, in terms of hirable NPC's. What they might look like, how much they would cost, what their abilities would be, or if there will even be any at all, for that matter.