New Tristram
New Tristram is one of the towns in Diablo III. It’s a wretched, rotting corpse of a town, grown up on the ruins of the old Tristram that blossomed during past ages, but has now fallen back into decay.
The Layout of Tristram
As for the geography, it’s not recognizable as the same town from D1, but it’s clearly inspired by it. The whole ruined town is much larger than in previous games, but that’s understandable since it’s been 20 years and the town was destroyed and rebuilt (and is now being destroyed again). There are about 15 or 20 ruined structures clustered in the center of the map. One has a broken wooden sign that hovers as “Griswold’s Fine Weapons” if you point at it. No sign of Griswold or any other recognizable NPCs though.
The basic landmarks remain; the monastery is still to the top left of town, with a graveyard beside it (lots of zombies burrow up out of the earth if you enter and hang around there). The biggest change is that the left side of town, about where the creek was between town and Wirt, has become a deep gorge that provides an impassible boundary to that side of the level. Adria’s island and the creeks on the right side of the map aren’t there anymore. Instead there are lots of ruined houses scattered over in that direction, and to the far right you find a few lightly forested areas with wide paths through them. Two other landmarks are along the left side of town, by the gorge. The well within which the little girl’s ghost is trapped, and further north a spooky, Halloween tree out of which a bunch of zombies moaningly-emerge, if you remain in the vicinity.
It’s hard to estimate size since the path you take through the area is so winding; there aren’t any straight roads and the houses and boulders and dead trees are scattered everywhere. But I’d say the whole area is maybe 6 or 8x the size of Tristram in D2. I think it was a non-random area; possibly the ruins and other town elements change around slightly from game to game, but the overall size and shape remained the same in each game I played.
Background
Abd al-Hazir mentions the the rise and fall of New Tristram in his sixteenth entry of his Writings.
New Tristram has been in existence for several years, though the exact date of its founding is unclear. Originally simply a collection of merchants looking to profit on adventurers and travellers drawn by legends of riches within the old cathedral, it slowly set down roots and became an established town. As soon as the cathedral was looted bare, however, the adventurers and travellers stopped coming, and New Tristram found itself in decline. The town is now comprised mostly of depressing shacks; the inn is the only building that looks even the least bit habitable.
Screenshots
Numerous screens have shown New Tristram, but only the ruined, monster-infested portion of the town. The BlizzCon 2008 demo build started in a very small encampment just outside of New Tristram, but there were no NPC merchants available. It’s assumed that the New Tristram we’ll see in the final game will be larger and have various merchants and quest-giving NPCs, but this is just conjecture.
