Blizzard has released three trailers for Diablo III to coincide with the title's announcement last night.
There's a cinematic trailer, a large gameplay trailer and an artwork trailer, all available as hi-def DivX videos now from GP Downloads. We have low-def streams of the trailers below.
Blizzard has also launched the official web site for Diablo III where you can learn more about the game, and we have some screenshots at the bottom of this page.
Diablo III is in development for PC and Mac. According to the details released so far, it will be an action RPG like its predecessors, not an MMORPG like World of Warcraft. So there'll be a single-player story to play through, but there's also going to be a focus on cooperative teamplay. Multiplayer games will be played via Blizzard's Battle.net service. It will be possible for players to drop in and out of cooperative game sessions.
Like its precursors, Diablo III will be played from an isometric overhead view, although it will now be rendered fully in 3-D. Recognising the success they have had with WoW, Blizzard wants to make the game run on as wide a range of hardware as possible, so DirectX 10 will not be required. The proprietary engine will incorporate Havok physics and destructible environments.
Two of the five player character classes have been announced; the Barbarian and the Witch Doctor. Unlike previous games in the series, the player will be able to choose whether their character will be male or female independently from the class selected.
The game will retain the random dungeon and items system which Diablo pioneered, and which gave it such a high level of replayability, but will add an "enhanced" quest system. There will be a mixture of pre-designed and randomly generated levels.
IGN has a full rundown of the details about the game which Blizzard discussed during the Diablo III design panel at the World Wide Invitational event this morning.
No release date has been given; if StarCraft II is any measure, expect it to be a couple of years away.
