Shrine
Shrines are not yet confirmed in Diablo III. The D3 Team has mentioned them, and said they're tossing around ideas about how to implement them, but nothing is set yet. They want shrines to return in Diablo III, but they want to improve them, and make them more useful and important than they were in Diablo II, where most shrines were ignored, or else provided a random, generally inconsequential bonus.
The D3 Team Speaks
Jay Wilson has addressed the issue of shrines in a couple of interviews. And given essentially the same answer both times.
Blizzcon 2008
Jay Wilson addressed the issue of Shrines at a press conference at Blizzcon, in October 2008. [1]
- Question: Will there be shrines in Diablo 3?
- Jay Wilson: We have not decided about it. We have ideas for shrines. The things is that only two shrines were actually interesting to the player: Experience Shrines and Monster Shrines. Other shrines where like “nah”. We want to bring some system in with this functionality. This is where the combo exp bonus comes from. It’s not replacing shrines, but it’s playing in to it.
Blizzcast #8
The question came up again six months later, in April 2009. Jay's answer indicates that the team hasn't done any work on the issue since last October. The questions were submitted by fans, and relayed to Jay by Blizzard Community Manager, Bornakk. [2]
- Bornakk:Will shrines be making a return to the world of Sanctuary in Diablo 3?
- Jay Wilson: Well there are some aspects of shrines that we liked, experience shrines I think are probably the prime example everyone uses. They're fun because they drive the player forward. Monster shrines are sometimes fun because they bring out a rare that you didn’t know or weren’t expecting that could come from any direction and that’s cool. But for the most part, the pure mechanic of shrines, a random powerup that just appears in the world for no reason, we don’t really want to litteraly bring that back. What we are going to try to do is integrate a lot of the best things of shrines into our quest and event systems so that when you encounter a random quest or random event that has a story context within the game it either rewards you like a shrine would reward you or something that is actually built into the gameplay of the quest. So while technically no shrines are not coming back verbatim, we are trying to bring back kind of the best things of them in a different form.
- Bornakk: So you'll still have the randomness and spontaneity of it.
- Jay Wilson: Exactly, and really they are kind of there to change up the gameplay and add a little factor of randomness, but we felt that very few of the shrines actually did that – accomplish that goal...
- Bornakk: Stamina shrine?
- Jay Wilson: Yeah, stamina shrine lets you run a long time. Skill shrine made you a little bit more powerful. We feel like we can take the best and put them within actual events that are a lot more fun and have a lot more gameplay to them.
Shrines in D1 and D2
Read about how shrines were implemented in Diablo 1 and Diablo 2:
