There were plenty of story-oriented questions throughout the panel, but of course, this is one of the several things Blizzard is being extremely tight-lipped about. The first of these questions surrounded the possible appearance of character classes, specifically the paladin and the necromancer. For the paladin, Blizzard said that they want to show what has happened with classes from previous games, even going so far as to say that specific characters from those games would appear in Diablo III.

A similar answer was given for the necromancer, whose existence as NPCs was revealed during a demo of Diablo III at the show. And naturally, there was one question about the fate of Tyrael, the archangel who destroys the world stone at the end of Diablo II. Blizzard wouldn't say much about this fan-favorite character, but they did say that those in the High Heavens aren't pleased with his actions.

Just heard that Diablo isn't going to come out before 2011. Wow. That kind of makes me want to ignore any DIII news from now on until a loooong time.

1) The game requires a constant internet connection. It cannot be played offline.
2) Mods are “expressly prohibited.”
3) Items in the auction house are bought and sold for real-life money.

1) “One of the things that we felt was really important was that if you did play offline, if we allowed for that experience, you’d start a character, you’d get him all the way to level 20 or level 30 or level 40 or what have you, and then at that point you might decide to want to venture onto Battle.net. But you’d have to start a character from scratch, because there’d be no way for us to guarantee no cheats were involved, if we let you play on the client and then take that character online.” Also, piracy.

2) “For a variety of gameplay and security reasons, we will not be supporting bots or mods in Diablo III, and they’ll be expressly prohibited by our terms of use for the game.”

3) “We think it’s really going to add a lot of depth to the game. If I have more money than time I can purchase items, or if I’m leet in the game I can get benefits out of it. The players really want it. This is something that we know people are going to do either way. We can provide them a really safe, awesome, fun experience, or they’ll find ways of doing it elsewhere.” Blizzard will take a small cut, but they’re not expecting to make too much of a profit out of it themselves. They also say there’ll be level caps on items, so you can’t immediately shortcut to a high-level sword with a level-1 character, not matter how rich you are, plus there will also be an additional auction house that uses in-game gold. So this element of the game can, at least, be dodged entirely.

Diablo 3 will also require a persistent Internet connection, and Blizzard's Rob Pardo agrees that it's kind of a pain in the butt. "I want to play Diablo 3 on my laptop in a plane, but, well, there are other games to play for times like that," he told 1up.

Just so we're clear, when you're bored on a plane, and you have your laptop, and you want to play the game you bought in order to fight boredom, Blizzard's official recommendation is that you play someone else's game. That's pride, right there.