The Diablo III Announcement, Game Footage

Diablo III has been announced at the Blizzard World Wide Invitational in Paris. What we know so far, as well as some early screenshots and the gameplay trailer, can be seen below the cut.

Okay, that looks like fun. The exploding worm dude is nasty.

”Diablo III is first and foremost a co-operative game,” that's the message from Blizzard. They're not expecting you to play this on your own, so we're looking at plenty of online options for slashing our way through those dungeons. The campaign is said to be of a similar length to that of Diablo II, with NPCs and story events taking place within the game world. The campaign will apparently feature a mixture of both randomly generated and hand-made static dungeons.

Diablo III is going to be delivered in a brand new, "real-physics" 3D engine developed by Blizzard. The game is so far confirmed for PC and Mac, and Blizzard have "no plans" at present to become console developers. It's going to be supported by the revised version of Battlenet, which will go live with Starcraft II later this year.

PvP featured are "planned" but there's no information on them so far, and the same goes for trading items.

Barbarian and Witchdoctor classes have been seen so far, so that's fighter and summoner-wizard-shaman-type fantasy archetypes covered...

The release date is "when it's done", but it's traditional for announcement-to-release to be just under a year for Blizzard games, so we're looking at having it in time for Christmas 2009. The title has already been in development for four years, so that's looking like a fairly realistic guess.

EDIT: The Diablo III website has just gone up with a load of stuff.