Inclusions and Exclusions: My Expectations

Before you take too much from this and start rumors, this is strictly from my personal expectations of Diablo 3 and have nothing to do with actual statements or information from Blizzard. I draw my information from my own personal gaming experience and the progression of games over time.

Interactive Water: No. Why? Because in video games, particularly 3D worlds, water is just an area with altered physics. Most 3D games do not work well with different physics, and there are no MMORPG's that I can think of that have used water to dramatically improve gameplay. Water should stay in Mario and Zelda style games where the coordination of your character and his movements are the key. These are games where changing physics can add a level of difficulty and interest. Blizzard, being the smart dudes they are, will not have interactive water in Diablo 3 because it won't add to the game but it would take a lot of work. "But WoW has interactive water and it's the best MMORPG ever." The water doesn't add anything to WoW, but they had to put it in there because every full world MMORPG has interactive water and WoW had to compete.

Having taken deeper thought into water and looking at some of the content provided by Blizzard, I have come to a slightly different conclusion. I believe water will have little to no effect, potentially slowing players and disabling some abilities.

Better PVP System: We have all come to love PVP and we know that the Diablo 2 PVP style is far outdated and the WoW system is inadequate for this style of game. I believe Blizzard will emphasize an extensive PVP system including instance based 1v1 and even team fights. There will likely be a PVP ladder much like a Warcraft style ladder, along with the classic highest level ladder. I fully expect a much better and extensive PVP system. What we do know is that random PK'ing will not be allowed. Blizzard intends to thwart griefers and allow everybody to play the game peacefully.

Clan System: Yes, complete with channels, tags, and hopefully even flags. Flags would make me so happy, even a simple Halo style system for creating clan flags would do. It would be cool if clan leaders could upload their own created flags, but this is a flawed system and I doubt Blizzard will waste their time on such a menial aspect of the game. I suspect there will be some new clan aspects never seen before, there often are with each new Blizzard game.

Pets/Mounts: Hopefully not, it's not that type of game. If you want pets, play a summoning char.

Again these are just my expectations of the game with no official information from Blizzard.