Diablo is purely combat and multiplayer driven. That's what the crowd out there will be expecting. Larian are far more interested in creating a deep RPG than a strategic combat game. As soon as the reviewers see it – and it will be reviewers who loved Diablo 1 and 2 – they will be very disappointed to see their action interrupted by stories and talking and NPC interaction (other than selling loot). I say let Larian do Divinity and leave Blizard North with Diablo.
1. I don't mean to suggest that Larian should or would ever do Diablo; I rather doubt it in fact. I simply thought it would be interesting to speculate and conjure up creative imagination.
2. There is an active SP community at diabloii.net. I played D2 for 2 years single player only--I used to have a slow dial up and a slow computer which made MP unenjoyable. Nonetheless Larian should be quite capable of doing a multiplayer game, and in fact will be as I understand it.
3. Most definitely D2 is a combat game. NWN had too much dialogue for me, and I didn't care for Verdistis at 1st. It does have RPG elements. Blending them appears to be a strength of Larian.
4. One strength of D2 imo lies in its character and skill system--there are still builds in D2 I haven't made yet that I may yet return and tinker with. A merging of Divinity with a D2 skill type of system would be awesome.
5. Another strength of D2 is the way that even after beating the game with a character you can go back and keep playing him in a quest to get your guy to lvl 99, or get all the hot elite items, or complete certain or all sets. These features could be implemented in a Divinity type of D3. If Divinity had for instance another map, accesible after beating the game, with random placement of items and perhaps random monsters or even random subquests which could be infinitely replayed that would be cool.
Cleglaw
