Diablo II Moves Ahead

What do you do when Blizzard shows up on your doorstep with a fresh build of Diablo II? You invite them in and demand a demo. And that's just what we did.

The first thing you'll notice in Diablo II is that it looks vastly superior to Diablo. We were shown several levels that had an amazing amount of detail. One level was set up to mimic the look of the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. Giant stone faces from even larger statues, fallen from old kingdoms long forgotten, litter the landscape, and the art is so good that you may forget you're playing and get killed. Another level took us to a massive palace made of stone. We noticed one feature that should make Diablo fans very happy - no more nasty loading screens.

You'll notice that the user interface is much smaller than the original. While it gives you more screen space, it also works just as well as it did before. Selecting spells is easier with larger icons to guide your way. And the spells look amazing with the new Glide 3.0 compatibility. For fire spells, we saw a wall of flame sprout up from the cobblestones to take out a legion of skeletons, single fireballs hurled from the character's hands, and a beautiful ring of fireballs was cast to take out enemies in full force. Ice spells were equally exciting, with an ice storm raining down and icy winds slowing enemies in their tracks. Electricity spells give your character flying bolts and the like.

Inventory has been replaced with the backpack. From it, you'll still be able to equip your character with all the wares you find or purchase, with the addition of new ring equip boxes. And as you equip your character, you'll see the new duds appear on the onscreen character. While the art for the backdrops are beautiful, the art for the weapons and armor is just as intricate. The best looking were a combo of heavy armor and a shield emblazoned with skulls.

Monsters are equally as impressive. In one dungeon, a machine flowed like moving flesh as it pumped out swarms of bats, and one large beast hunkered along through the dungeon with a chain-wrapped human as a makeshift club.

Moving through levels is better than ever with the addition of running and options for finding items in an area. Rather than having to squint around or click around, there's an option to turn on small text balloons to point out what's around. Fighting is also easier. You can save your mouse-clicking finger by attacking an enemy and having your character continually strike the beast until it dies.

The one thing that seems to be consistent in Diablo II is mood. You really can feel that doomful sense of dread as you're being chased by a horde of undead.

While we only had a few moments to discover some of the better parts of the game, previews editor Elliott Chin got the extended demo. We should see more information about the title in previews soon.