Boy, I didn’t see that coming.

All the Blizzard sites were running a spash screen with ice, runes and glowing eyes. I figured it had to do with the new death knight class in World of Warcraft, who have glowing eyes and cast ice spells with runes. Nope.

Blizzard is putting out a third installment in their hugely successful Diablo series, the last installment of which came eight years ago.

The Diablo series is built on the same Blizzard model as their other games: Take an existing genre, in this case, dungeon crawl hack-n-slashes. Strip out all of the unnecessary baloney that makes it less fun and make it easy to get into. Profit. Diablo games are all about clicking on things until they die and collecting loot, and they’re very good at that.

There’s a gameplay trailer up on the official site, and I’ve gotta say, it looks awesome. As a barbarian chops his way through an army of ghouls, their ragdoll bodies and limbs spill over the sides of a bridge into an abyss. Ragdoll physics make everything better.

There’ll be the usual criticism from certain quarters that this new game is either not enough like Diablo II or too much like it, but I’m pretty sure I’m going to play the hell out of this thing.

I was initially surprised that this is another fairly stand-alone game, as opposed to the massively multiplayer World of Warcraft. With WoW bringing in Iron Man level money every month, wouldn’t Blizzard ditch single player games altogether and roll out World of Starcraft and World of Diablo in short order?

In retrospect, it makes perfect sense. Anyone who’s going to be playing a massively multiplayer game is already playing World of Warcraft. Why split the customer base and have two or three massive virtual worlds to maintain and update if you’re not going to draw new people? Better to put out some games based on proven concepts that are more limited in scope.

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