Swords, spells and Academy Awards?

Within the Blizzard ranks, there is a sense of anticipation about the new possibilities. "With every [cinematic sequence] we do we're getting more and more to the level of a full motion feature," sound designer Tracy Bush confided after the screening of "Diablo: The Calling." "We've definitely kicked around the idea of a full-length picture -- as long as we're working with the right company."

Blizzard's public relations director Susan Wooley echoed the sentiment. "We have volumes of backstory, stuff that our designers come up with that never gets into the games. We have a lot to work with. [Movies] would be a natural extension of what we do, but we'd want it to be really good."

But not everyone at Blizzard sees a trajectory from games to movies. Matt Samia, the producer in charge of Blizzard's cinematics department, takes a more conservative view. As a programmer with a background in film, he saw the direction the game industry was headed early on. But when it comes to a feature-length production from Blizzard, he says, "There are no concrete plans for that." He wants his team to stay focused on creating the most outrageous cinematics possible for the games. "It's a challenge to see how far we can push it every time."

The first Diablo was one of the surprise hits of 1997, with more than 3 million copies in play. Moreover, Diablo reignited a gaming genre; role playing games (RPG) had become moribund, far less interesting than the various Quake-style action shooters or the real-time strategy games that were then coming into vogue. Diablo's success helped pave the way for the success role-playing games enjoy in 1999, when even Microsoft has gotten into the business with Asheron's Call.

Earlier computer RPGs had tried, with greater or lesser degrees of success, to replicate the experience of paper-and-dice role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons. Some, like the Infocom text adventures, became minor classics; most, including even the official D&D adaptations, were best forgotten. Diablo took the elements from RPGs that seemed to grab players the most -- the control over character skills and "stats" (strength, willpower, etc), the ability to become more powerful as you move up "levels," the sense that each character could be individualized -- and combined them with a rapidly moving slash-and-blast format that left wrists sore and keyboards broken. Like many a rabid Diablo player, I more than once found myself unable to pull away from the game until I was too bleary-eyed to go on.

From the Diablo II preview I was given, I should stock up now on coffee, seat cushions and extra keyboards.

"The goal with Diablo II is to create a 'definitive title,'" says Bill Roper, Diablo II's producer. "We want to make it so that people can't think of this genre without thinking of this game."

Blizzard certainly seems to be putting in the effort to achieve this goal. Although clearly related to the original Diablo, Diablo II shows a clear progression not just in the technology, but in the gameplay. Diablo II seems to contain every element the Blizzard team wishes it could have put into the original. It could easily become the definitive computer role-playing game.

Or it could become the greatest victory of yesterday's war. While the Diablo series allows people to play together over the Internet, games are relatively brief, and only a limited number of people can play together -- Diablo II makes room for eight players, a step up from the original's four. Contrast this to EverQuest from Sony or Asheron's Call from Microsoft: in these "massively multiplayer" games, thousands of people can be online at the same time, in the same virtual world. The games themselves are "persistent," meaning that the game world continues to exist and grow even after individual players shut off their machines. Although games played over the Internet one-on-one or in small groups remain popular, gamer -- and industry -- attention has clearly shifted to the massively multiplayer systems.

A bigger problem may be meeting the expectations of fans. Daniel Lee, who works at the fan site DiabloII.com, says, "People have been waiting for this for two years. The anticipation is huge. The die-hard fans want it now." Mirroring the buzz about "Star Wars: The Phantom Menace" or the upcoming "Lord of the Rings" film, Diablo II fan sites pore over every preliminary design shot, dissect every producer comment and occasionally make flat demands about what must and must not appear in the game.

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