#3 - The Witch Doctor looks badass

We’ve only seen two of Diablo III’s five character classes so far; an upgraded version of the Barbarian and the brand new Witch Doctor. And with no disrespect to Skullcrush McBigsword, we can’t get our hands on the latter of those two soon enough.

Abilities like healing magic, offensive magic, monster summons and telepathic control sound cooler than an Arctic milkshake from the very off, but once you get a feel for how well balanced and complimenting of each other the Doc’s skills really are, you’ll start to appreciate just how carefully Blizzard has thought about all of this.

His fireball attack has a massive blast radius but a slow initiation time, so why not use a Confuse spell to make the enemy hordes attack each other, and then throw flame into the preoccupied melee at your leisure? Too many monsters and too little time to safely summon a beastie? Then use the Horrify skill to briefly scare them off and buy yourself some time. And not only can he throw an organically spreading plague of locusts into the fight in order to strip the flesh off a small army, he can also - and we can’t emphasise this last one strongly enough - summon a wall of zombies to block off and devour enemies in an environmental bottleneck. A wall made of zombies, people. A zombie wall!

#4 - You can smash up monsters using the environment

Why environmental interaction isn’t done more often in RPGs, we simply do not understand. It’s always seemed at odds with the genre’s philosophy of immersive, living game-worlds that the physicality of everything bar monsters usually seems completely oblivious to your presence.

Not so in Diablo III. Environmental damage will apparently play a big part as you use your character’s attacks to shatter and manipulate the world to your advantage in battle. You can smash the crap out of scenery to clear a path to your prey, and we’ve already seen a Barbarian tear down a wall to flatten a bunch of zombies. More of this sort of thing please!