Death

Death comes to us all, especially in Diablo III. The D3 Team wants to make the game more challenging and involving than Diablo II, and they've incorporated numerous design ideas to create this.

While you may die in Diablo III, the penalties are not steep. Dead players respawn at the last checkpoint they reached, with all of their equipment still on; there is no corpse to retrieve in Diablo III, as there was in Diablo II. The only penalty (for non-hardcore characters) is a loss of durability to the equipment, which may result in expensive repairs.

Death and Difficulty

The D3 Team has talked about balancing D3 to make it a more steady struggle, than was D2. The design goal with D3 is to make the game consistently challenging, rather than very easy most of the time, with spikes of super hard boss monsters, Iron Maiden curses, Cursed Stygian Dolls, etc. To that end, potion use will be greatly curtailed, life leech will be very rare, healing skills are uncommon, and there are no town portals.

These changes make healing from health globes the primary way to stay alive, and monsters will be balanced to drop health globes just often enough for players to survive, but not so much that they litter the screen after every skirmish.

Death Penalties

The "Death Penalty" is the term used to describe the negative consequences imparted to the player when they are killed by monsters or other players. The stated penalties have varied during Diablo III's development, and may not yet be written in stone. The most recent information came from Jay Wilson in August 2010[1], when he said that death now results in durability losses to equipped items, which may result in expensive repairs.

An earlier comment came from Bashiok in September 2008[2]. At that point there was no death penalty at all, other than the loss of pride and some time spent to return to the sight of your failure.

...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.

Bashiok also said this, regarding death in the BlizzCon 2008 demo:[3]

We had a checkpoint system in the BlizzCon demo we showed, where you would die and pop back up at the last chekpoint you came across. Some of that was for the convenience of the demo, but we do like the checkpoint system and intend to carry that forward in the same or similar form. We're not looking toward corpse retrieval currently.

Any death system we do have needs to allow players to get back into the action quickly, but not be so meaningless that you’re just flinging your corpse against a wall of monsters over and over until you finally get through.

It's not known if there will be more substantial penalties on higher difficulty levels; presumably characters will be wearing equipment that is more expensive to repair, thus letting the team scale up the costs accordingly. It's unlikely that more harsh penalties will be imposed, since that runs counter to one of the team's main design goals. [4]

"We have not actually decided on the final death mechanic. I can guarantee that you will not lose experience. We are not urging to big penalties for death. But we want enough of a penalty to be there, so that death has meaning! Like to lose a little bit time, some kind of detriment... We do not currently have a durability loss (to equipment), but some kind of ... a gold cost is actually not so bad. And having the player to waste some time, that is certainly an element. Generally we kind of rely on the effect that players do not want to die. You know, you just do not want to. So there is no real reason to add a further "ding" to them for something happening that was already unfavorable to them. But we have not got our final mechanics on that, yet.

Hardcore characters, naturally, still suffer the ultimate penalty upon death.

Special Death Animations

Diablo III will have special animations for different types of deaths for almost every monster, as well as for characters.

Monster death animations vary according to the type of damage they die from, as well as whether or not a critical hit finishes them off. Boss monsters also have extra juicy death animations.

• Read much more about this in the in the Monsters article.

As for player deaths...

Fatalities

Siegebreaker chomps.

Besides the normal death animations, there are plans to include semi-random death animations that are keyed to special bosses, such as the amazing decapitation death Siegebreaker inflicted upon one of the Barbarians in the WWI Gameplay movie. D3 Community Manager Bashiok answered a question about this in a forum post.

Will there be more boss-specific fatalities like the Barbarian head bite by Siegebreaker?

That's what we would like to do. We'd like it that when a player dies to a boss we may have a special/random event or death animation specific to that boss. So if you're going to die or have died to a boss, there's a random chance that you'll see something other than a normal death. That's the dream any way.

The Lead Developer Jay Wilson also made a good reply on this in BlizzCast Episode 6:

Well what we want to do with that, especially for particular bosses is have when essentially when the player is very low on health and they're about to die the boss essentially checks like when it attacks you, did I just do enough damage to kill you? And if so then instead of just doing his normal attack he'd actually play some kind of special I pick you up and eat you or I throw you up in the air and knock you around like a baseball or something like that. It's a system that really our announcement video we tested it for the first time, mainly just to see – can we actually do this kind of animation interaction between the characters but the actual system itself is still not in there but we do plan to do that and that's primarily where. We might do some other things, we've talked about physics based deaths we've talked about having the characters if they like die to a cold monster he might completely freeze solid into a statue and then shatter or things like that but we haven't decided at this point if that's exactly what we're going to do.

Hardcore players might want to try out some softcore, just to run around and die in interesting ways.

This information also creates more questions, though. How many such special animations are there? Do all the bosses have some special fatality move they only show when they kill a character in a special way? Do any regular monsters have such talents? Do players die in as wide a variety of ways as monsters? Shattering when frozen, falling down and burning to a cinder from flame, charring to a skeleton from lightning, etc?

Hardcore Mode

The inclusion of a Hardcore option was confirmed in August, 2010. [5]

Just as in Diablo 2, when a Hardcore character dies in Diablo 3, they stay dead. Permanently. There will be some additional bells and whistles added to HC characters on Battle.net, since the team wants a HC player to be instantly noticeable in the chat channels.