Town portals and corpse runs are two of the things that made Diablo and Diablo 2 quite unique. Now, they’re being “revisited” by the game design team.
Town portals will be removed in Diablo 3. Instead players will be using waypoints for quick transportation. I.e. if you’re close to a waypoint, you can go back to town.
Dying will similarly be based on the waypoints system. When you die, you don’t go back to town with all your equipment lying in some dungeon. You simply get teleported to the closest waypoint with minimal health (10%?). It’s your choice if you want to go back to town or you want to gulp a potion and continue hacking.
Here’s the “official” Blizz post at the Battle.net forums:
We want to separate being in town and being out on a quest/adventure/dungeon as much as possible. Leaving the safety of a town should not be a decision you take lightly. We don’t want to remove the sense of suspense and danger by making town something you’re always going back to pretty much whenever you like. The intent is to create a greater separation from being in town, and not, and to make your time away from town a lot more tense.
On that same note we also don’t want to remove the player from the action. Throwing them back to town for every death really breaks up the action, and not in a fun, interesting, or necessary way.
So, with these things in mind we’ve found that a check point system works really well. Throughout your adventures, and generally at the ends of each “floor” of a dungeon your character is saved to a checkpoint. When you die you’re dropped back at the last checkpoint with a small amount of health, and the rest regenerates slowly. It’s obviously a very forgiving system as it is. It’s just too early to put a ton of thought in to what penalties there should be, if any, added on top of it.
Regardless, potential penalties aside, this is the death mechanic we’re currently using and it’s working really well so far.



That so bad you cant do the portal tactic when fighting a boss.
I agree, and now you cant go back to town when you need to get up and go to the toilet after playing for hours on end…. Theres always the ESC button lolz..
They should just put the town portal aspect on a timer like in WoW…problem solved, risk involved in using it.
Yeah, I totally agree about the portal when fighting Duriel as a an Ice Sorceress. I died SOOOO many times and if it wasnt for town portal, it would’ve been game over for me.
Man, i forgot about fighing Duriel as a Ice Sorceress, town portals was a must heheh….
I like George’s idea, having them on a timer, if you use it and not go through it for 2 mins or so, it disappears…
They talked in an interview about how in Diablo 2 the potion mechanic meant that you were dealing with a player that had infinite health. Because of this the only way they could even kill the player was if they 1 or 2 hit him. In Diablo 3 they stated they were changing that mechanic and they had removed potions from the game thus meaning they could balance the game and challenge the player in other ways than just 1 hitting them. So you shouldn’t ever encounter fights like that where you are dying 50 times. I think this is a good change. Before people were given too much freedom with town portals. They were nice… but now the fighting will be more intense. I like not being able to just leave back to town whenever you feel like it. You are are more invested in your fights and you will have to approach them with caution.
True, it will bring a greater sence of stratagy to the game, you will have to pick your fights wisely.
I am seaching for some idea to write in my blog… somehow come to your blog. best of luck. Eugene
i think this is gonna kick ass they’ll put plenty of wps so its not gonna be hard to get back to your corpsy
Diablo 1 and 2 were good still. But, Diablo 3 will be better yet. New classes, remade Barbarian, fully destructable environments. It’s all good. Too many easy get offs in the 1st 2, and too many glitches, so hopefully the 3rd wont have any of that
hey i stoped playing d2 because my account got hacked lost all my lvl 99s. i wana start agian and was woundering if neone had a pretty good account to get me on my feet.
i think that the tp timer is a good idea but that would be really bad if u were on a rush or something and u=you opened up 1 for a friends and i disappered and they wernt able to come back. also all the wps would be weird bc u can just do wp teleing and pop up in some rando spot in a duel and kill the person urr fighting
Heres an idea. How about on top of putting town portals there like normal diablo 1 and 2 they add a new code.. A code where if you go afk for over 30 minutes Town gets over ran by demons and npcs start getting killed by the demons.IF you come back from AFK you get to save the town ,the npcs respawn and you continue your game as normal.Seems like after 25 to 30 years of gaming someone would have thought of this.
Will anything be dropped after a PvP duel (like the ears in Diablo 2)?
I like Brewen’s idea about towns getting invaded. Towns are always too safe, it’s annoying.
this feature sucks, and this is one of the things that can get me to not wanna buy the game. i do want to play a sequel game, but not all the good things need to be removed from the game. wth is Blizz thinking? they had too much fun with d2 and with d3 we want tthem to have less fun but instead off 10 years they need to do that in 20 years?
if more features of the game are changed drastically like this one i will not even think about buying it. stupid GM’s…..