Diablo III

In Diablo, nothing must come between you and the ceaseless slaughter and looting, so Boyarsky's job is to create a deep well of story and character for the game and then hide it – or at least, resist any temptation to force it on the player. A good example is the quest log, which will offer your character's take on events in their voice, but which you never have to open thanks to clear on-screen objective tracking and fluid vocal delivery of the salient points.

The BlizzCon demo takes us into a haunted dungeon where a King once cruelly executed his own Queen. There are no cut-scenes or reams of text to explain this. Find and click on a lore book and the King's voice will narrate his dark suspicions to you as you mow through crowds of monsters; enter one room just off the beaten path and you'll see the decapitation played out for you by a theatre troupe of ghosts. It's beautifully seamless. "It's kind of an opt-in thing," says Boyarsky, using a favourite Blizzard term. "It's not like you're sitting listening to someone telling you the story, it's like you're seeing something play out."

Either way, your Demon Hunter, just like the other classes, will be defined by her skills, not her motivation (there will be a male model, by the way, and the silhouette on the login screen suggests he'll be similarly svelte and sexy, like a World of Warcraft Blood Elf). The Demon Hunter shows all the flair for dramatic and engaging skill design we've already come to expect from Diablo III, with greater emphasis on timing, positioning and physicality than the previous games. Bola Shot wraps itself around an enemy and blows up after a short delay, and can be used with skill for multiple takedowns. Multi-shot sprays out a cone of arrows, turning your Demon Hunter into a strafing attack ship from a Treasure shmup.

The Grenades skill defines the Diablo III difference; it unleashes three bombs which bounce past your click-point with momentum appropriate to how far they've been thrown, fanning out and bounding off walls and other objects, then exploding after a delay of a second or so. They seem random at first, but can be used with timing, skill and inventivess to absolutely murder crowds of demons at doors, corners and other choke points.

It's as crisply-tuned, involving, tactile and satisfying to use as a skill in any console shooter or action adventure. Despite its mouse interface, Diablo III tears down the traditional barrier between RPG character and player.

Blizzard cheekily grabbed headlines during BlizzCon with the assertion that there are 97 billion possible builds per character class, not counting equipment or the new passive Traits. A silly piece of performance maths this may be, but the point is, there are many skills, they are all viable, you do have to choose between them, and you can customise them. A lot.

The interface is disarmingly simple. Skill trees are gone; you simply pick skills from a list on the right and plug them into slots on the left which unlock as you level up. Skill points awarded every level are spent on purchasing new skills or ranking up existing ones.

"We've put a lot of effort into making sure that every one of those skills aren't throwaway skills," says Love. "Diablo II has a design where the skills are intentionally built for you to use them and move on, throw them away. None of ours are designed with that in mind. We try to make them viable throughout the whole game in some way.

"So just by the nature of the large number set and the fact that so many of them are useful, I think you're just inherently going to have, compared to past games or any other action RPG, a ginormous number of builds, which kind of gets us an out from the cookie-cutter syndrome. If you're a player who really wants to set themselves apart, not look like everybody else and not be like everybody else, I think you'll be able to do it in this game."

Further customisation comes from Skill Runes, which come in five flavours and seven ranks within each, and change the effect of your skills. These aren't always mere bonuses to damage or speed; each rune has a hand-crafted, often visual effect for each skill. The Witch Doctor's Plague of Toads can be altered so that the amphibians are on fire, rain from the sky, or take the form of one giant toad that eats your enemy and spits out loot.