It's a rare Saturday that brings news this big. Of course, it's not really news to anyone who followed Blizzard's deliberate splash-screen tease act over the last week.

You can see a meaty – literally – gameplay trailer here. It shows off the wet, squishy, gibby action of the barbarian class. Then it introduces the witch doctor, a sort of jungle-themed necromancer. You can see the two of them in the image above, looking a little lonely as they hang fire and wait on Blizzard to announce the other three classes. Also on display in the trailer are lots and lots of Havoc physics, which are pretty much de rigueur these days.

If you played Titan Quest, watching the trailer might cause a mild case of déjà vu. Titan Quest was a fancy 3D version of Diablo. And now Diablo III looks like a fancy 3D version of Diablo. But there's a reason everyone talks about the degree of "polish" in a Blizzard game. It's almost an article of faith. You can take any given feature list, and even if every single feature has been done elsewhere, Blizzard's name gives the whole package that extra bit of, well, je-ne-sais-quoi. (Ha ha, I just used three French phrases and won a bet!)

Some important unanswered questions at this point:

1) How on earth are graphics like that going to fit into randomized levels? It's possible we're looking at very big hand-built areas, or "tiles", and the reference to "random level generator" might just be a way of shuffling the order in which you encounter the areas. The official Blizzard line is as follows:

Diablo III builds on the random environments of the previous Diablo games by introducing a host of new ways to create random scripted events throughout the game.

A cynical fella might suspect Blizzard is randomly peppering large pre-set chunks of terrain with scripted events. And there's nothing quite so confusing as calling something "random scripted". Hello, George Orwell, have you heard this one?

2) No word of a release date, but that doesn't mean it's not easy to figure out. Starcraft II and the World of Warcraft expansion are already in the pipeline, almost certainly in that order. Given the way Blizzard traditionally staggers their releases, you're not likely to be playing Diablo III until 2010. And given the way Blizzard takes their sweet time, it might not even be early 2010.

3) Diablo III will be a part of battle.net, their free match-making service. So you might figure it's safe to assume there won't be any subscription fees or additional charges. Au contraire*! The talk of "enhancements" to battle.net could be ominous. There's no guarantee battle.net will remain a free service. Just because Blizzard's World of Warcraft lucre allowed them to remain steadfastly generous with battle.net over the years doesn't mean they'll continue to do so. They are, in effect, leaving money on the table.

* I just made an extra ten bucks!