ANAHEIM, Cailfornia -- What's the fifth character class for Diablo III?
Blizzard Entertainment's popular dark fantasy action role-playing series hasn't had a sequel since 2000, but the franchise has sold 18.5 million copies worldwide. And that equals 18.5 million different fan complaints about the sequel. Diehard Diablo players didn't want to see the color scheme of the series changed, much less the character classes they've come to play countless times over the years.
When *Diablo III *was revealed last year in Paris, fans were in an uproar because the Barbarian warrior is the only playable character from the previous games. With the simultaneous announcement of the Witch Doctor, fans knew that meant that the similar Necromancer class was gone.
Soon after, the spell-casting Wizard replaced the Sorceress. And the newly-announced Monk class is meant to replace the Assassin (with a bit of Warcraft's Rogue thrown in).
That just leaves one mysterious class left. How will fans react to this one?
In the past, game director Jay Wilson has said that the class selection was contentious even among the *Diablo *team.
Wilson said at Blizzcon that his team doesn't yet have a final concept for the fifth class, and that they recently changed their minds about it.
But he's quick to add that doesn't mean that they've changed the character completely.
"We changed gears," he said.
"We changed our high-level idea of the class because it was actually one of the first classes that we picked, years and years ago."
The fact that the class was chosen first, he said, was part of the reason why it needs to be re-tooled.
"We've had this class for four years, and it's not as exciting to us as it used to be," he said. "It had actually become a chain around our necks."
The new class isn't a "complete departure" from the first concept, Wilson said. "Most of the skills can transfer over, but (the changes) definitely freed up our art staff to be a lot more imaginative."
Since the announcement of Diablo III last year, Blizzard has teased fans with a slow rollout of the game's characters. The Barbarian was announced with the unveiling of the game, but it was supposed to be accompanied by the Wizard, not the controversial Witch Doctor.
That changed, said Wilson, at a company show-and-tell event where the new character went over very well with the rest of the company. "A lot of the senior people at the company actually came to us and asked us to show the Witch Doctor at the announcement instead of the Wizard," Wilson said.
"If you look back at BlizzCon (2008), and if you played the Wizard and the Witch Doctor, you'd have noticed that the Wizard actually had a lot more skills ... because the Wizard had been in development for a lot longer," Wilson said.
As for the recently-announced Monk, Wilson says he isn't perfect just yet. "He's actually way too powerful right now. He doesn't feel that way when you first start playing him, but once you learn to play him, he's really, really powerful," he said.
Previous Diablo games didn't let you choose the gender of your character, but you can in the sequel. Wilson says Blizzard has a greater commitment to ethnic and cultural diversity this time around, while still "appealing to 20 to 25 percent of the audience -- which is roughly how much I think a character class like this has to appeal to," he added.
"More is fine, but hopefully you're catching about that amount."
Screenshots: Blizzard Entertainment
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