Diablo 3 Console Nemesis Feature
With the release of the ‘Ultimate Evil’ edition for Diablo 3 on consoles came a pretty awesome feature called the ‘Nemesis system’. Players were initially caught completely off-guard as a seemingly exceptionally strong enemy spawns in the middle of your raid or dungeon and starts attacking you. What initially confused players are now praised as one of the best features of Diablo 3. It brings back that sense of suspense, and element of surprise.
How it works
Whenever you or one of your friends is killed by a bad guy in the game, there’s a chance that your killer will turn into a gigantic super-villain known only as “your Nemesis.” If a Nemesis is created, the monster migrates to one of your PSN or Xbox Live friends’ Diablo 3 games to surprise them in turn.
He keeps killing your friends until one someone manages to stop him. Or, at least a few of them. Every time the Nemesis succeeds, he grows stronger. And when he leaves one game to go hunt his next victim down, he brings a ghostly version of the character he just killed to fight along with him. Matthew Berger, a Senior Level Designer on the game and one of the key people behind the Nemesis System, told me over the phone this week that the developers ultimately decided to cut the Nemesis off at five kills because otherwise he could become far too powerful otherwise. As much as I like the idea of insanely powerful alien-like creatures wandering around the corners of the Diablo III ecosystem, waiting to pounce on unsuspecting players, I can see what he means. The Nemesis is already designed to be very difficult to kill, after all.
What I really love about this new bad guy is that no matter how many times he’s showed up to kill me, I still jump in my seat the moment I see him drop into my game. It’s so surprising that I’ve never even gotten around to trying to capture footage of it—caught up as I am in just trying to make it out of the fight in one piece. But here’s a good video to give you an idea of what it’s like trying to take one of these guys down.
The below video shows some of the Nemesis appearances:
We hope this feature makes it to the PC version soon. Well done Blizzard!
