If you have beat Diablo II you will have noticed that while you killed Diablo himself his brother Baal was never killed and still seems to be alive and kicking. For those of you who are not aware of the story line, let me inform you.
After Baal "pretends" to be the angel Tyrael, Baal himself reclaims his Soulstone from Marius and takes off towards the Barbarian Highlans where he hoped to claim the Worldstone. The Worldstone saves the Sanctuary from both heaven itself and hell. Baal gains the knowledge that the Worldstone lies at the top of a mountain which is heavily fortified by Barbarians. Sadly for you, Baal has taken over many of those defenses and is using them in a attempt to kill you, the player.
As Blizzard has put it so far, Baal will start off at the top of the mountain and you will fight to reach him. Think reaching him will be a simple feat, try again. You as the player will start at the Barbarian Fortress of Harrogath and will have to reach Baal at the top of the mountain to end his evil plans.
I'm sure many of you are thinking, "Why am I going to pay $29.99 for one more act". Well Blizzard has promised the standard six quests per act but has said the game play will be killer. Tyler Thompson had this to say on just how good the quest will be-
He goes on further saying, "One of the biggest things we're striving for is a sense of warfare and a much larger conflict". By saying that we decided to do a little more in-depth research to see what some of these things might be and here is what we found.
Think your first quest will be easy, just to get you back into the game, think again. As you leave the town all hell breaks loose literally. Catapults fire down on you from cliffs, dead bodies and skeletons lie everywhere, and fortifications full of archers rain arrows down on you.
Helping this process is a host of new monsters to attack you. The minions, which if you recall were fairly easy to kill in the original game are back, and back in force with the ability to explode on contact with your character. It's believed Blizzard is including this feature to make a player branch out and use range weapons more than they were used in Diablo II.
Blizzard North will also be including a completely new set of enemies which you will encounter some where in stage 2 when you enter the Icy Catacombs you will encounter the "Frozen Horror" which are probably the most well animated and designed enemies in the game.
The second boss you will encounter in the game is called the Overseer. It's animation is simply brilliant. Once it is killed, it loses it's skin and its entrails, dripping in blood "fall" out. To top this off, the only remaining part, his skeleton, collapses in a gigantic heap. Definitely something you will have to see.
That wraps up the story line as we know it for this point. Did you think that was all, nope Blizzard is including two new characters in the game which I will cover in detail below.
"There is going to be a lot of variety in the quests, Some of the quests will have the player rescuing NPC's, which you can then hire once you get them back to Harrogath, We're going to make sure that a fun story still equals fun game play. Players who don't want to get bogged down in the specifics will still have the quest log, which will provide them quick access to their goals"