Gameplay: WWI 2008

Released: WWI 2008. June 2008. The first gameplay video for Diablo 3.

Content: Introduces the Barbarian and the Witch Doctor who venture first in to the Forgotten Tombs to battle, amongst other things, Grotesque, Summoners and a Thousand Pounder. The Barbarian meets Cain from Diablo I and Diablo II and a couple of NPC. They ascend to the Leoric Highlands and fight Beast, Skeletons, meet (and kill) members of the Moon Clan and finally meet up with a female Barbarian and female Witch Doctor and face the boss Siegebreaker Assault Beast.

Behind the Scenes[edit | edit source]

Long after the movie's release in 2008, Diablo III Community Manager Bashiok shared some information about the creation of the demo video. ^[1]

It is indeed the siegebreaker's giant hand that grabs him. It was an extremely difficult and trying shot to create and capture. The way the interior and exterior sections were set up and shot it made it necessary to capture them uncut.

The hand shot just wasn't working that well, so we'd tweak it, hope that the physics would move the debris properly. Shoot, it didn't work right. Tweak it again, reshoot the entire interior run, something else might go wrong, etc. Over and over. In the end we had to settle with what would appear to most as a wall collapse simply because we didn't have time before the announcement to keep tweaking it and reshooting everything to make it more clear that it was a hand busting through the wall and grabbing him. Especially when the one we went with had some very perfect moments in it (zombie corpse landing on railing).

I'm glad that someone caught it though, a lot of work went into those animations, and unfortunately we just ran out of time to showcase them.