Tristram

Dark and infested.

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 into decay.

Start at the Beginning

The WWI 2008: D3 Lore and Environmental Art Panel Q&A session revealed that New Tristram is the starting town of Diablo III.

Q: Will we see how the cities have changed in the last 20 years?

A: I can tell you that the game starts in new Tristram.

Tristram can be seen in the official world map.
Numerous screenshots of battles in the fog-shrouded ruins of Tristram have been released.

Blizzcon 2008

New Tristram starting point.

Tristram was the starting point for the playable demo at Blizzcon, in October 2008. There was no town to speak of; just a very small camp with only two NPCs, and no merchants. From there players proceeded into the fog-shrouded ruins of Tristram, battling undead every step of the way. The setting was described in some detail in a gameplay report by Flux.

The mood continued as soon as a player moved out into the ruins of Tristram. The scenery was dark and oppressive, and no, the screenshots don’t at all do it justice. The floating, partially transparent mist looks so much better in the game than in the screenshots, where it just makes things look smudged and blurry. The black, gnarled trees, clusters of crows that flew away when the player got close enough to trigger them, dozens of ruined, blasted houses you could run through, bodies lying here and there, and small bunches of zombies to rout gave the area a great, creepy, doomed mood.

There were a number of nice set pieces elsewhere in Tristram that added to the mood. A human hand is seen at one point, clawing at the earth, before being yanked down into a dark cellar from which come horrible screams and a fountain of blood. Ghosts wander the streets, sobbing quietly and pathetically. Zombies are seen gnawing on corpses, and their moans and groans are very horror movie appropriate.

Tristram's Layout

This was also addressed by Flux in a comment on his Blizzcon gameplay report:

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.

Lore

There is a New Tristram lore entry in the official page. The following quotation summarizes the rise and fall of New Tristram:

"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 travelers 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 travelers 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.

A few sample screens. There are many more in the image gallery.

Concept Art

There's a lot of concept art of Tristram, but it's not clear how much was just for background information or reference. The New Tristram so far seen in the game has been a zombie-infested ruins; if there's more of a town waiting to be discovered in the final game, we've not seen in-game evidence of it yet.

New Tristram at night.
Inside Tristram Cathedral.

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