Ok so i have questions about the story of the last two games?

1. Who are the leaders of the angels and demons and are these leaders the strongest of there races?

2.What is PC motivation for getting involved?

3.am i better playing the last two before playing the third?

ask here http://www.giantbomb.com/diablo-iii/61-20803/scrubs-ask-vets-answer/35-544228/#138

1. some angel and then diablo and his bros ... want more details check out wikipedia or diablo.wikia ...they have all the info you might want

2. PC`? you mean player character? it's simple: evil dudes are evil. must kill evil dudes. this is not about story, or at least not about characters and motivations and deep stuff like that. it's the basic most simple good vs evil story there is. well, of course there are twists and turns and stuff like that but that's not really what you play these games for. d3 seems to have the most sophisticated approach to story and narrative in a diablo game yet.

the first one was just "hey, this town gets attacked by monster coming out of the church, go in there and kill all teh monstaz" ... player goes in, kills diablo at the end, picks up soulstone, rams it into his head and becomes the wanderer in the second game who wants to free his brothers. the player then goes and kills them. yada yada yada.

3. weird grammar aside, not for the story, no. if you haven't played them until now there's no reason you should do so now. they won't give you anything you can't get in d3 so there's really no point in your case.

Regardless of the last two answers, (they're on the right track) Just play the first two. Guaranteed they're better than the half-assed attempt of any story Diablo III can ever hope for.

@Z3RO180:

1. For angels the leaders are the council, but up until now only Tyrael has been seen in the games. For demons there are 7 evils, 3 of them are prime evils, the brothers Diablo, Mephisto, Baal, all presumed killed/defeated/banished at the end of D2 and it's expansion. There are also 4 lesser evils, again 2 of which were defeated in the last game, only 2 lesser evils remain one of whom is shown in the CG trailer. Yes they are effectively the most powerful of their races that we know of. If you want further details check out the wiki.
2. All 5 characters have their own back story for getting involved, but meh it's really just fluff/excuse. They are bad dudes who are there to fuck shit up. If you want the fluff the official D3 site has that http://eu.battle.net/d3/en/class/barbarian/.
3. Hell no, the games are not really about story anyway, it would take you quite a while to slog through them for the first time and story exposition in them is a tiny insignificant portion. Just go to the wiki and read up on the back story. In fact a huge amount of lore has only recently been added and consolidated by Blizzard. (just stay away from D3 spoiler sections and speculation)

In concern with lore; not many Diablo players care or know much of the lore. For a vast majority, the lore is a very distant and forgettable part of the game - but if you do want to really delve into it, here is an over-hour long lecture on YouTube that goes into it.

Diablo Lore

You will be fine if you jump into Diablo 3 without having played the first 2. You will miss out on a lot of nods and minor references to past events but the major parts will be covered through the story-telling devices in the game (cinematics, cut-scenes, quest dialogue, lore books, etc.).

Blizzard has an official retrospective which you can check out here: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/media/videos/?keywords=&view#/extended-retrospective

I haven't watched it for a long time so I don't recall what all is in it, but I am pretty sure the basic story is outlined and a primer for the D3 storyline is in there too.

Regardless of the last two answers, (they're on the right track) Just play the first two. Guaranteed they're better than the half-assed attempt of any story Diablo III can ever hope for.

The story is, you kill Diablo. The end.

You're not missing out on anything if you've not played the previous two.

IGN has a halfway decent Diablo in 5 minutes that covers most of the important stuff and it should answer your questions.

@blueduck said:

I would also ask how you "guarantee" anything since nothing has been leaked about its story?

In fact, a few huge spoilers have been leaked about Diablo 3 already, moreso confirmed within the last day or two here. Things have been known about its story for a few months, if not hinted at greatly.

@Hunkulese said:

IGN has a halfway decent Diablo in 5 minutes that covers most of the important stuff and it should answer your questions.

Here is the video he is referring to.

@Tennmuerti: ihave read on the wiki about the council and i have a question about them. Are they all roughly on the same power level or is the imperiais dude the most powerful?

@Z3RO180 said:

@Tennmuerti: ihave read on the wiki about the council and i have a question about them. Are they all roughly on the same power level or is the imperiais dude the most powerful?

We don't really know.

But probably about the same.

@Z3RO180: If you want to catch up on the story (and you'll actually read dialog) then you can get the entire thing from just playing Diablo 2 and watching the cut scenes. Everything's laid out for you - but basically

@Kandycane2029 said:

Regardless of the last two answers, (they're on the right track) Just play the first two. Guaranteed they're better than the half-assed attempt of any story Diablo III can ever hope for.

Someone feels betrayed by Blizzard.

Diablo 1: Stay awhile and listen.

Diablo 2: Always to the east.

First Diablo game is fun & having recently installed it again on this pc (Win7 64 bit) there is a slight glitch that might pop up with the colors, also in the game Sanitarium with both being fixed for me by opening the display properties window (not sure why it works but it does). Diablo2 works out much better though still constrained by lower resolution options. Between the expansion & the rather cheap battle chest (either with or without Diablo 1), it's well worth the price as the guide plus the game for those new to this franchise is helpful at answering a lot of questions with the first two games on what's going on as well as being fun as hell. Story is pretty much as deep as Torchlight so anyone picking up Diablo 2 or 3 should be able to get along without missing much.

PS best thing to do after getting the Diablo Battle chest is to just go online to battlenet & register them then download the latest versions and as they are cd format discs the download of Diablo2 & the expansion do not take that long compared to the games fitting on a dvd downloading through steam.

1) has mostly been answered. The council and the evils. If you really, really want a lot of detail on these guys, if the wiki doesn't have it all, The Book of Cain has all kinds of info on this stuff (but I bet the wiki has all of that info plugged into it, so you're probably good, and I'm just too lazy to go look at the wiki.)

2) character motivation is mostly "I don't want our world falling into absolute chaos and becoming just another part of hell as a result of the evils taking over and heaven being too lazy and/or unable to find our plane of existence."

3) maaaaaaybe? The Book of Cain actually covers just about everything you could possibly want to know about the stories, I think. If you actually think you would enjoy playing the games though, I would say yes. It would give you a good idea of where the genre has come from and how far it's come, and there certainly is story to be told and gotten from the first two games.

The series has a whole has a whole fuck ton of story to it though, some of it wasn't really revealed or made completely known until Blizzard put out the Book of Cain which gave all kinds of extra info, most of which, if I had to guess, will have some kind of importance in D3.

Mostly it comes down to how deep down the Diablo hole you want to go. Do you want to completely engross yourself in the story? Do you want to know everything there is to know about the story? Or is the story just something you couldn't care less about and only need to be told "stronger dudes are off that way that will probably drop better loot" as motivation? Or is a middle of the road get some story but don't care about the deeper parts of it your thing? If you really don't care, just play Diablo 3. If you want to go all the way, play Diablo 1 (if you can get a copy), Diablo 2, read the Book of Cain, and play Diablo 3, and maybe even read the novels that were put out. If you want a middle of the road where you don't care that much, I'd say either read the wiki, read The Book of Cain, or play Diablo 2 and then play Diablo 3. That should get you by on a "middle of the road" path for caring about the story.

Gamestop also has a decent recap video here.

@Toxeia: Only because the original team isn't working on the game and the entire game feels like a lame conversion to the WoW system. Flame away, and yes, yes I do.