One of the biggest surprises during our recent hands-on with Diablo III was the changes that had been made to the game's skill system. In Diablo II, each character class had several skill trees, and players activated – then strengthened – their abilities by allocating points as they levelled up. No more. Instead, a new active skill is unlocked automatically with almost every level gained until players hit the high 20s. Players are free to try all the skills out, with the restriction being the number they can have hot-keyed at once. At the start of the game only two skills can be used, then a new hotkey opens up at level 6, 12, 18 and 24, so that players eventually have access to six skills simultaneously. Each skill can be modified with one of five runestones, and three passive skill slots also open up as players level, letting them choose from a number of additional perks.

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It's a massive overhaul and – as much as we liked the old system - hugely promising. We asked Jay Wilson, Diablo III's "One of the pieces of feedback we got during the internal alpha was that skill points as an element of our skill system didn't really suit the game," he told us. "It created a lot of conflict in terms of what the players would choose to do. So what we had is this system that has these six – it used to be seven, now six – slots, that implies that you should have six skills, but a system with skill points? Well, you really want to dump every single point into one skill."We also have a system based on progression, so unlike a game like World of Warcraft, [where] if you get fireball at level one, you're likely using fireball at level 85… Diablo's not like that. You get Magic Missile at level 1, and certainly, we have ways that we've tried to make Magic Missile viable in the end game, but that's not the reaction players have. They get a higher level skill and they replace that [old] skill, so what we were finding was that people were re-speccing massive amounts of points out of early skills into later skills, and that felt really terrible. So we decided to ask ourselves how much we really felt skill points added, and in surveying a lot of the people who played the game most of them didn't feel like they added very much..."I feel that in a lot of ways the current system has more choice involved in it because that finite limit of how many skills you can take versus the number that you have means that you have to make a very restrictive choice, so we focused a lot more on restricting the number of skills you have and having that be the interesting choice, as opposed to skill points, which are really commitments before you even know what you're committing to."So exactly how do the skills level up? Did the team consider having the skills level up in line with how much the player used them? "They do level up with you, so as you level up they get more powerful," he told us. "They don't level up just purely through use. Having a system where they level up through use is kind of taking the 'power choice' and changing it from the one choice – one big powerful choice: 'I want this skill,' and turning it into eight million tiny little choices, of 'I want this skill, I want this skill, I want this skill' every time I use it. And really, what we've found from a design standpoint is, the general instinct is that players always want more, but more choices just dilutes the quality of those choices, so we really wanted to focus on - okay, let's get the right number of choices, so that those choices feel really significant and powerful."The alternative, as he sees it, is more likely to only offer an illusion of choice. "What you probably did," he says, "was go up on a website and find out what the optimal build was, because there's just too much math involved for you to really get involved in it. A small number of players will go in and do the math… but the majority of players will go 'I don't know, I guess I'll just put it in whatever I already have'."The game design is all about the balance between having an array of options at the same time as "hardcore restrictions," like the six active skill/three passive skill limits. A good example of what that means for the player is in the battle mage build that Wilson ran through during the presentation component of our time at Blizzard."When I was building the battle mage," he explained, "I'm not kidding when I say I rejected, like, seven other skills that would have been viable. And not just those seven skills, but all the rune choices for those skills, which is another 35 choices on top of that, and then also the rune choices I rejected for the ones that I took. There's a lot of restrictions within the system, but those restrictions are not a 'I'm going to commit to this and I'm committed forever' [choice] because really, that's just a penalty. To us that was not the way we wanted to go. What we wanted to say is - you can play around as much as you want, but we're going to give you really really dense systems. Yes, they're simple on the surface – that's the point though, they're supposed to be simple on the surface - but when you dig into them there's a lot more depth. We really feel that when you combine those skill slot restrictions with runes… the in-game process of making builds will be far more engaging than it was in the previous games."Are you a hardcore Diablo fan? What do you think about the new gameplay systems? Let us know in the comments below.

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