Diablo 3 Xbox 360 first look

The towering Colossus is a Protoss robot design dating back to the bloody conflicts of the Kalath Intercession. It strides across the battlefield on four tall, slender legs that allow it to cross steep elevations with ease. The Colossus’ heavily armored hull carries two powerful Thermal Lances, with one on each side of its body.

The trick to creating a real blinder of a role-playing game isn't to load the plate down with esoteric skills, weapons, magic and what-have-you. It's to do so while communicating all these tactical options easily and naturally to the player. Blizzard is a past master of the art, having crafted some of gaming's greatest dungeon-crawling franchises, and that's nowhere more apparent than in Diablo 3 gold.

The robot’s beam attack cuts a broad swath across its targets, making the Colossus an ideal anti-infantry weapon. Unlike most other Protoss robots, the Colossus was created purely for destruction. Manufacturing Colossi has been outlawed for centuries, but the increasingly desperate war against the Zerg has forced the Protoss to revive the line.

"We’re excited for console players to get their hands on 'Diablo III,' but we don’t have any further platform announcements to share at this time," a representative from Blizzard told NBC News when asked about any additional console ports to, say, the Xbox One or the Wii U.

Details about the console versions of "Diablo III" have been relatively scarce, with gamers expressing excitement and trepidation in equal parts at the idea of bringing one of those most important PC games of recent history to an entirely new gaming platform. As one of the games that pioneered pointing at things with a mouse and clicking to kill them, how would the core "Diablo III" experience transfer to a gamepad?

The inventory is also a triumph of intuitiveness, making it possible to get on board with the game's labyrinthine levelling options in seconds. The console versions benefit from some controller-friendly tweaks: in place of the old lists and grids, weapons, armour and items are arranged in a circle and tabbed out by pulling the analogue stick.

Want to know whether something's worth equipping, without wading through steaming pools of jargon? Look out for a colour-coded arrow. If you'd rather skip the inventory entirely - perhaps because you're playing local multiplayer, and don't want to interrupt things for other players - you can quick-equip things via a D-pad shortcut. It's accessible in a way a trek through hell has no right to be.

The game's skills are as they were on PC, but the implementation is more elaborate - the Barbarian's savage long-range pounce can be extended by holding the button, for instance. The item drop system has been tweaked, in acknowledgement of the fact that not everybody has the time to farm for rare loot. "On console, you get fewer drops that are higher quality, and more targeted to your class. If we were playing local co-op with two Monk characters, we would see more items with higher dexterity, and more Monk uniques."