Death

Death comes to us all, especially in Diablo III. The exact mechanism of death, corpse recovery, death penalties, and other related features have not yet been finalized, and likely will not be until the game is nearing release. We do, at least, have some information on those issues.

Death and Difficulty

The D3 Team has talked about balancing the game more evenly than was Diablo II. The design goal with D3 is to make the game more 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, regular healing will come from health globes, and more monsters will be difficult, but not overpowered-impossible.

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 most current info came from D3 CM Bashiok, on September 29, 2008. According to him, there will be no actual death penalty in D3. Just a few seconds of downtime while a player runs from the respawn point back to the scene of the crime:

...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.

It's not known if this non-penalty will be increased to something with some more teeth on higher difficulty levels, or if any of the "staying alive bonuses" players have proposed will be implemented as well, to reward players for not dying, since the game isn't going to punish them for the failure that is death. One thing we do know is that there won't be any substantial death penalties (outside of Hardcore mode), since that's something D3 Lead Jay Wilson has stressed on several occasions.[1]

"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.

This is the penalty for death in standard, "softcore" character mode. If there is a Hardcore mode, it will come with permanent death, as was the case in Diablo II.

Special Death Animations

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."

Hardcore Mode

The inclusion of a Hardcore character option is not yet confirmed, but the D3 Team has said they don't see any reason not to include it. Hardcore characters are exactly the same as regular characters, except that they are mortal. When they die, they stay dead. Forever. No restarting in town; no restarting anywhere. Dead hardcore characters were able to log back onto the Battle.net chat channels in D2, but they could not join of create games. It's not known how that feature might be handled in D3, if there's a more interactive chat room experience.

From the Diablo 3 Design Fundamentals panel, at the 2008 WWI event:

Q: Will there be Hardcore mode?

A: We haven't decided yet, but I don't see why we wouldn't. It’s not a decision we need to make yet. We probably will, though.