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Diablo III Community Manager Bashiok has offered a few more tidbits of information about the upcoming action RPG sequel. His comments on Blizzard's forums include discussion of vanishing corpses and why Diablo III is not an MMORPG.

On enemy corpses vanishing:
The main reason for the corpses not being able to stay permanently is the potential number of them on screen at one time, and specifically that each corpse is affected by physics, allowing them to be blasted and thrown all over the place by the force of player abilities.

It's one of the trade offs when integrating new technology, you can get really awesome effects, but they do have a cost. In a 2D world, a sprite of a dead creature doesn't really cost any more (system requirement-wise) than a sprite of something that's alive. Probably less. In a 3D world where a creature dies and then needs to have physics calculations thrown onto it so it can bounce and fall and fly around, they cost substantially more.

Why Diablo III is not an MMORPG:
MMO's are generally categorized as being able to support hundreds of thousands of simultaneous players in a persistent world.

While Battle.net can certainly support that many players at one time, the lack of a persistent world and restrictions on how many players can be within each "world" (game) would keep Diablo III from being categorized as an MMO.

GameBanshee: Diablo III Forum Quotes

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