One of them most annoying parts about Diablo II was the death mechanic - every time you died, you had to run all the way back from town. Fortunately for players, things are going to be a little different for Diablo III.

On Monday a Blizzard employee revealed on the Battle.net forums that Diablo III will use a checkpoint system. "Throughout your adventures, and generally at the ends of each "floor" of a dungeon your character is saved to a checkpoint. When you die you're dropped back at the last checkpoint with a small amount of health, and the rest regenerates slowly. It's obviously a very forgiving system as it is. It's just too early to put a ton of thought in to what penalties there should be, if any, added on top of it."

The forum post also states that, "Leaving the safety of a town should not be a decision you take lightly. We don't want to remove the sense of suspense and danger by making town something you're always going back to pretty much whenever you like." So a checkpoint death system, and no more town portal scrolls? Or maybe you just won't be able to buy the scrolls by the truckload anymore.

I'm guessing some Diablo purists will be up in arms about these changes but neither are worth shedding tears over. How much fun was running back from town to retrieve your gear off your corpse? Maybe the old death mechanic gave the game bigger stakes and more of a challenge but most people just quit their game and reloaded when they died rather than making the run. The town portal scrolls just made boss fights a joke; you'd hit the boss a couple times, use a town portal, heal up in town, jump back through the portal to the boss and repeat the process. You might not agree with the specific solutions Blizzard has chosen but clearly something needed to be changed.