As we (hopefully) near the release date for Blizzard's Diablo 3, fanatical fans have compared all the key features within the series' three titles and 15-year history.

Ahh, fresh meat. Gamers worldwide are eagerly awaiting the announcement of the release date for Blizzard's Diablo 3a weekly ritual that has no doubt given community managers like Blizzard's Bashiok a permanent eye twitch.

And these eager, demon-fighting beavers have had little to digest in the meantime: Some have surely worn out their wrists re-rolling characters and clicking furiously within the game's 3D-isometric predecessor, Diablo II. Others have no doubt taken to cuddling their recently purchased Book of Cain encyclopedias as if they were a new kind of stuffed animal. And a few have likely faced their Diablo III withdrawal "cold turkey": A grin-and-bear it technique where one views no previews and reads no interviews in an attempt to not get worked up over a game that's scheduled to come out someday.

The archivists over at Diablo Fanatic seem to taking the first and second approaches head on, as they've crafted a lovely, quasi-infographic that shows all the changes that have come to the Diablo world since the series' first game launched in 1996. It's interesting to see all the similarities and differences within Diablo's across the series' 15-year history, especially when it comes to the games' hardware requirements. When Diablo 4 comes out, perhaps we'll all be sporting a terabyte of RAM in our common gaming systemsto fight one million cows simultaneously on our 5120-by-3200-resolution monitors.

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