Page about multiplayer on the internet.
Multiplayer Mayhem
One of the things that made the original Diablo so successful was
its revolutionary multiplay. One-click Internet play was an
oft-cited mission of games in that time (just a few years ago),
but it took Diablo to show us how it should really be done.
The chat screen. |
Diablo II's multiplay isn't that revolutionary, but its evolutionary features show much promise. The entire game will be playable in multiplay, and the team promises that unlike in Diablo, every quest will appear in multiplayer games.
In battle.net, your character will now appear in the chat along the bottom of the screen. This means your in-game avatar will now be represented in chat, and others will be able to gauge your level and strength by your appearance. It's also just cool to see yourself in the chat and see others as well.
Diablo II multiplay will support more than four players. |
Guilds are also being added to the game, although they will cost an exorbitant amount of money. Blizzard North wants you to only be able to buy a guild by pooling your resources with others. You'll need to petition Blizzard to start a guild, although Blizzard still has yet to discuss what the criteria, if any, will be for guild consideration, aside from needing lots of gold to buy a guild house. At the guild, you'll be able to store items and also meet with your guild buddies.
During actual gameplay, you'll be able to form parties with others. There are three states to all characters and NPCs in the game: friendly, neutral, and hostile. They will appear as different colors on the minimap, so you can see at a glance who is out to get you (you can easily identify player killers this way), or you can call up a character screen to see all players listed in the game. Anytime someone changes his status with respect to you, you'll get a message, such as, "Gunthrok is hostile towards you." Hostile characters can be targeted by you with weapons and spells, neutral characters can be hurt by an accidental swing (such as with a shift-attack command), while friendly characters can be neither hurt nor targeted. However, area-of-effect spells will still hurt those in the blast.
When you form a party with others, you share experience and gold and also can give permission to your party members to collect your lost equipment. That means no more indiscriminate looting of corpses; the dead one must give permission first.