June 28, 2008 - Live from Blizzard's Diablo 3 design fundamentals panel.

2:38 PM in Paris, France -- Awaiting the start of the panel. Things are still being cleaned up from a World of Warcraft class panel that just ended a few minutes ago.

2:44 -- Jay Wilson, lead designer on Diablo 3, takes the stage. Starting with a history of Diablo.

2:45 -- Saying the first Diablo was one of the first to do the random items, random dungeon kind of gameplay for a mainstream game. Diablo 2 added a much bigger world, larger environments and focused on more unique character classes with barbarians, necromancers, and amazons, says Jay. He stressed the skill tree system as being a key for its success.

2:48 -- For D3, Wilson wants to keep the focus on action, expand the role playing elements, and staying true to the original concepts. Says there'll be some major reveals of features and the like over the coming months.

2:50 -- Focuses are making D3 replayable, making the combat feel epic, making it accessible and keeping a focus on co-operative play. There will be random environments in the game, random dungeons.

2:51 -- Random items, random monsters, and random adventures, which is a new feature. It allows Blizzard to place random scripted events almost anywhere.

2:52 -- Blizzard wants to make characters that players want to be. This means large scale combat and having lots of enemies onscreen and giving the characters the skills to deal with these kinds of large scale encounters. They want to make strong, unique archetypes, something Blizzard feels they did successfully with their new witch doctor class.

2:53 -- Overhead isometric view is key for Diablo. "If you can click a mouse, you can play Diablo," says Wilson. He says the game must have a smooth difficulty curve, like in Diablo 2. Blizzard wants to attract casual users to the game.

2:54 -- Being able to play cooperatively is key to Diablo. All the new features the updated version of battle.net that will show up alongside StarCraft 2 will be taken advantage of with Diablo 3. They're not ready to talk in depth about multiplayer yet.

2:56 -- Blizzard wants to ensure players have entertaining skills to use. "Less spam and more depth," says Wilson. The hotbar is important, says Wilson, because it promotes skills over potions. He says his team didn't feel like spamming potions should be a focus here. Also emphasizing easier controls to quickly swap through skills as making the game more action-focused.

2:58 -- Potions are still in the game, they're just not as core an element. So there's a new health system here. Wilson says he actually tried a Halo-style shield system with regenerative health, but didn't put that in because it encouraged players to leave combat. Didn't want to implement a WoW-style health which encourages players to drink and creates downtime when out of combat. Wilson wants the health system to ensure combat, which is health globes were implemented.

3:02 -- In cooperative play, when one player picks up a health globe, all players benefit from its restorative effects.

3:04 -- Some monsters will miss players and get their weapons stuck in the ground.

3:05 -- Moving on to what they're calling better role-playing elements. Says the story isn't going to be forced in front of your face, but it'll be there for anyone that wants to dig into it. Says there'll be better quests and more in-depth NPC interaction.

3:06 -- Citing their adventures feature, where scripted events can occur at random so as you go through the game multiple times you don't see the same thing. Talking about the conversation system. Character classes will have a voice, which Blizzard believes gives them more personality.

3:07 -- Wilson is opening up the floor for questions for the fans in attendance.

3:08 -- Question asked about group size. Wilson wouldn't say anything specific, but did say "once you get more than four or five people onscreen, things get kind of chaotic." Sounds like it'll be around four or five limit.

3:09 -- Question about inventory size -- Wilson says a lot of improvements are going to be made like with trading and such, but no final inventory size settled upon. No grid inventory being used in this one.

3:12 -- Somebody asked a question that didn't make any sense.

3:13 -- Question about classes. "We're doing a fresh start on classes," says Wilson. Says he hasn't figured out how many classes will be in yet, but they're not necessarily trying to mirror what was in Diablo 2. They're trying to do things a little differently.

3:14 -- Another question about what classes there are aside from the barbarian and witch doctor. Basically the same response as above.

3:15 -- Hardcore mode may or may not be included in the game.

3:18 -- While nothing was confirmed, Wilson made it sound like you'll probably be able to respec your character skills.

3:19 -- Wilson says the witch doctor is not the evolved version of Diablo II's necromancer.

3:20 -- Question about how "gear system" is different from Diablo 2. Not quite sure what that means. Wilson says there'll be new ways to make items better, but won't provide any specifics.

3:22 -- Question about how Blizzard is trying to prevent cheating over battle.net. Wilson says it's a big focus and the new version of battle.net should have features that work to stop cheaters.

3:24 -- There is no plan currently to have items that drop for groups only. Any item that drops for a group can drop for individual players.

3:27 -- The team wants the game to be able to run on as broad a range of systems as possible. The game will not require DX10 to run.

3:29 -- Wilson talking about how because of Diablo's random nature, it's difficult to provide support for mods / map editors.

3:31 -- And that's it. I'm off to try and transcribe an interview.