I’m going to split up the impressions of the games I played at Blizzcon so  first up I’ll talk about the game I had the briefest amount of time playing, Diablo 3.

Last year left a pretty sour taste in my mouth. The game interface was (and still is) totally different from Diablo 2, the level of power for the class I played was far far weaker than I expected, and the game in general felt slow paced due to dumping out my mana on just one enemy. This year, I’m a little more prepared for what’s going to happen so the interface differences weren’t as jarring as they were last year. For the wizard, 1-3 were bound to non targettable spells (things like self buffs or aoe spells) and you had some health pots on 5 I think. The left mouse button was attack and the right one was your main nuke which you could press tab to swap out with a secondary nuke. The tab thing is really weird, but since I hadn’t played Diablo 2 recently, I wasn’t as annoyed as last year when I kept trying to open the minimap.

I again chose the wizard. I recall being able to cast an ice armor ability, a mirror image ability, and an aoe freezing ability. Her attack was weak and shouldn’t have been bound to left click, and her opening nuke was a very slow moving arcane orb that exploded on the target doing aoe damage on impact.

The main thing about this year that was different was that I didn’t run out of mana after killing one dude. It really was a great kill fest for the 4 of us that were partied together and I only ran out of mana when I was spamming abilities like crazy. The pace was picked up this year and felt really good. 3 of us picked wizards and we had one monk for this play through.

We were running across this desert area. It was very Act 2 Diablo 2, but had a much more claustrophobic atmosphere. Instead of wide open spaces, it felt more like you had a few open areas and a few valleys and canyons that you’d have to traverse. I really like walking over gold to pick it up, but one part of the item system that seems silly is the need to identify everything. Here’s something that might be cooler, items should be identifiable by the class that can use it, but require identifying if you the item isn’t really meant for you. Playing with a diverse group of friends would be really beneficial then.

There’s a lot of stop and go gameplay due to items needing to be identified and then the decisions of “Is this better than what I have? Will I mule it or give it to a friend?” We’re running around and one person is totally stopped due to leveling up and pouring over his talent choices while the rest of us are getting a serious beatdown. I’m not sure if this will be addressed, but I kind of hope it does. The rate at which items drop may be the real problem since everything tends to drop something and you are constantly faced with these decisions.

Speaking of leveling up, I did it once, and the choices for new spells was dreary. There were a lot of defensive or passive looking abilities and only maybe 2 or so new spells. I got a lightning spell that when it crits stuns the enemy which was fun.

There was a cave with a sort of interesting quest element. Basically this guy wants help and says he wants you to go into this cave beside him. You go in and the cave starts collapsing and you are given a timer that shows when you’ll basically die in there due to collapse. It’s funny because we died in there a few times, and when I went back in, the entrance is not an exit. The area is far too large to explore the whole thing before it collapses and I couldn’t find an exit. So we all just died and resurrected outside. It’s strange to me that you have this kind of event and it’s ok to just fail and move on.

We didn’t run into any big boss monster like last year’s campaign. It just sort of timed out and had big words “THANKS FOR PLAYING” on the screen. Overall I came away wanting to play just a little bit more, if anything to try out the monk maybe or play as the other classes. This year there’s more Diablo in Diablo 3, last year it felt like “Let’s show you this thing that has Diablo in the name!” I’m looking forward to it now, but I wouldn’t expect this game out anytime soon much to the anticipation of D2 fans everywhere. I believe they said it’s not in the 2010 timetable so maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaybe 2011.