This morning’s announcement of Diablo III is certainly a big one; Diablo and Diablo II were both mega-hits, and Diablo III will, in all likelihood, follow suit. There’s no doubt many of us will find ourselves wasting precious hours of our lives slaughtering hordes of enemies on the dark planet of Sanctuary.

Is this man the future of MMO gaming?

The big question for Wandering Goblin readers, however, is this: Is Diablo III an MMO, or a single player game like Diablo II? Finding the answer to this question required a bit of analysis, so read on.

Right now, Blizzard is marketing DIII as an action RPG, like Diablo and DII. Both previous Diablo games were essentially single-player games. They had multiplayer capability, but (speaking purely from our staffs’ personal experience) it was pretty darned challenging for the average player to use. What’s more, Diablo was launched in the era before MMOs became popular, and DII at the dawn of the MMO era, and other types of internet-based multiplayer gaming were still in their infancy.

Diablo III will feature many challenging monsters for players to fight. You know, like these traditional buffalo-orangutan-undead hybrid things.

So….is Diablo III going to be an MMO? Will it be a single player game with some multiplayer features? Or will it be something else? While all the facts aren’t in yet – the game is still early in development, and Blizzard is a notoriously slow-moving developer, so it will be some time before we know everything – the following items will shed some light on DIII’s potential as an MMOPRG.

The demos of DIII that were shown feature a lot of single-player action, and the faq that Blizzard released indicates that the entire game can be played solo, just like DIII’s predecessors.

The demos also show a substantial amount of multiplayer – at one point, 4 players form a party to take down a boss.

In all the coverage so far, Blizzard avoids going into any substantial detail regarding multiplayer. We can only assume they are being intentionally vague, as details haven’t been worked out yet.

The game offers the traditional isometric views of the other Diablo games, though we are given glimpses of the more traditional, over-the-shoulder MMO view, too. This is actually important, as the recent development of Mythos has shown.

There will be five character classes, and each will be heavily customizable.

The play-style of the game isn’t at all like other MMOs on the market. The style of play is heavily oriented toward slaughtering huge masses of enemies, and not on the more controlled combat that takes place in most conventional MMOs.

Group members won’t have the traditional roles that they do in conventional MMORPGs. There doesn’t appear to be the Tank-Healer-DPS-Crowd Control teamwork that we are all used to. In fact, pure DPS by every class seems to be the norm (at least from what we can see at this point).

Blizzard mentions several times that finding friends, finding groups, and locating buddies to play online with with be very, very easy to do. From the demos, this doesn’t appear to happen in the traditional MMO sense – either finding people in an open world to group with (like WoW), or entering multiplayer hubs to group up (like Guild Wars or Hellgate). It’s implied that groups may be formed outside of the game, via Blizzard’s free Battlenet service.

“Ok, dudes, I’ll pull the mobs at the bottom of these stairs and…hey, where is everyone? Am I the only person in here?”

The bottom line is that we don’t have enough information to call DIII a traditional MMO at this point. However, as other games are increasingly blurring the line between multiplayer games and MMOs (this is particularly common in FPS games now), Diablo III appears on track to blur that line beyond all recognition. It’s certainly an RPG in which groups can be formed, it takes place in a persistent world, it allows for players to meet and interact, and character customization and personalization is a huge part of the game. And yet there are differences. The persistent world doesn’t seem to be persistent in the same way as most MMORPGs. The gameplay, as well as the manner in which players encounter one another, connect interpersonally, and form groups, is decidedly different from most MMOs.

There will be a lot of quibbling about this topic, even as more information becomes available. As things stand now, Wandering Goblin is going to call Diablo III an unconventional, non-traditional MMO, but it’s still got enough qualities to be called an MMO nonetheless.

Of course, we’ll be providing updates to this article as more information becomes available.

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