Some of the most interesting updates that we are getting from Gamescom this year are the ones pertaining to Blizzard’s Diablo III. I mean, it’s Diablo! Who isn’t excited? This time around we were given an in-depth walkthrough of the game’s “artisan” system. You see, unlike Diablo I and II, Diablo III doesn’t just hand you shopkeepers and blacksmiths. Instead, a bunch of artisans roam the world, and you can recruit them as your allies. Once they trust you, they set up shop at base camp and you get to benefit from it.

Every artisan has a couple functions. First of all, they all run a plain old shop, from which you can purchase items, equipment, accessories, and so forth, depending on the artisan of course. In addition, each Artisan can create new items as well. Each item in the game is formed via a recipe and a fusion of several basic materials, all of which take up very little space in your inventory and which can be found from defeated enemies. In addition, you can scavenge materials by breaking down your old equipment into its basic components. This provides an alternative to making frequent trips to the vendor to sell all your goods.

Each item that is made has a certain degree of randomness attributed to its statistics. When you go to create an item you get to see its basic abilities, strengths, and weaknesses, but extra abilities or stats can be forged onto an item randomly. No two items will be the same, even if they were made with the same materials. In addition you can still socket gems and runes into your weapons and armor to give them even more abilities, making the game’s equipment system more customizable than ever.

Each artisan also has special abilities that you can take advantage of. For example, the blacksmith, which was detailed in the Gamescom video, can repair your items and equipment. The blacksmith can also insert sockets into items that didn’t originally have them, allowing you to increase the power of already powerful weapons and armor. Sockets are totally independent of item rarity in Diablo III, so you can put sockets into a sword or shield that already has extremely powerful latent abilities.

Each artisan can also level up alongside you in your quest. When you find enough materials, the artisan can practice with them, raising his experience. When you raise an artisan’s experience high enough to make him raise a level, the appearance of his whole shop changed. He will also learn new recipes and special abilities which will get more powerful as he levels up. However, the most powerful recipes in the game can be found as enemy drops. These recipes, like other recipes that an artisan knows, will get more powerful and yield better weapons as the artisan levels up,

The system was designed to streamline the item creation process. While Blizzard wanted gamers to have a say in creating their own equipment, they wanted them to spend most of their time out questing, rather than sitting inside a room hammering away at a forge. As a result, they created a system which was quick but complex. We have been told that this is not the total extent of the crafting system either so we will be keeping our eyes peeled for new details coming down the pipe.

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