By Richard Cobbett on June 15th, 2012.
Why, hello there! Diablo here. What? No. No, Diablo 3. Diablo 2 was my father. Those miserable fleshlings at Rock Paper Shotgun have asked me to cast my expert eye over you scumbags’ failed attempts at murdering me IN MY OWN ****ING HOUSE. Why? The correct assumption I might rather enjoy witnessing hours upon hours of Hardcore adventuring going straight down the crapper. In exchange for a chance to plug my favourite book, I of course agreed…
By Craig Pearson on April 24th, 2012.
Were you looking the other way when the Diablo 3 open beta launched last weekend? I’m sorry. If reports are to be believed, the servers wobbled like a gyroscope at the end of a good spin, so you if you missed out you probably saved yourself from being teased by the title screen. There is some comfort to be had in the Witch Doctor overview video Blizzard have just released: it’s his life story and shows how he’ll turn NPCs against each other and launch flame-engulfed bats into the faces of those that cross him. Judging by the video beneath, that seems to be everyone.
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By John Walker on March 29th, 2012.
EA have issued a clarification to Gamespy that while you will have to have an internet connection to launch SimCity, it will not boot you off if your connection goes down. Which is to say, it’s not as egregious as others’ “always-on” DRM, but we maintain is still an unnecessary and game-crippling mistake, which we really hope they will reverse before release. That the game won’t stop working if your connection goes down sounds great, but it makes no useful difference to those who wish to play the ostensibly single-player game without an internet connection, whatever the cause. As we’ve said before, the online features sound like they’ll superbly enhance your single-player experience, but enforcing them is cruel and stupid, and renders the game broken for enormous numbers of players. We desperately hope to see EA backing down from this position before release. Just as we expect to see Blizzard come to their senses and not release a self-sabotaged version of Diablo 3. The reality is, unofficial versions of the games will appear very soon after release, offering useful features that the publishers’ versions of the games will not. That’s simply crazy. We’ve contacted EA to ask if we can talk to them about this all.
By Craig Pearson on February 27th, 2012.
I must confess that I’m immune to whatever charms Blizzard’s games possess. If I am a waterdrop then Blizzard are a water lily pad, scattering me across their surface – I just want to be absorbed by the gaming nymphaeaceae, but I can’t. But while my fingers don’t quite click with their games, my eyes do. So I got excited when they decided now was the time to release a load of skills videos for Diablo 3. The 20 skills on show are mostly new, so if you have the beta you won’t have encountered most of them. They’re unencumbered by the alteration runes, so this is raw rarr! I love the dancing voodoo doll that distracts enemies enough for the players to mash their face, and if I played it I’d use that all the time.
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By Richard Cobbett on February 13th, 2012.
In a somewhat fatalistic move, Blizzard has announced that you – you personally – will die. At some point, by accident or dreadful confluence of events, your body will cease to function, collapse, or possibly be run over by a train in a moment best described by taking a tube of toothpaste and squeezing it with the cap still on. Your friends and family will, hopefully, mourn you, as the carcass that was your vehicle through this cynical world is lowered into the ground, burned to ashes, or eaten by Welsh cannibals. Truly, we should take a moment to-
Oh, wait, they’re talking about Diablo 3′s difficulty modes.
By Richard Cobbett on February 10th, 2012.
Looking forward to hacking your way through the armies of Hell? Blizzivision (a subsidiary of Activard) has finally announced Diablo 3′s final, definitely final, absolutely no-kidding final release date… ish. It’s due to land in Q2 this year, unless they decide to rewrite the entire thing and turn it into one of those point and click adventures that are currently taking the world by storm.
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Why Blizzard Must Reconsider
By John Walker on September 22nd, 2011.
Diablo III‘s ‘always-on’ DRM is obviously a matter of much controversy, albeit a more nuanced one than that of Ubisoft. Where Ubisoft implemented the grotesque system purely as a claimed measure to fight piracy, Blizzard’s logic at least has some elements that offer benefits to the player. Battle.net, online ranking, drop-in-drop-out co-op, the auction house, and constant live monitoring of your progress, and monitoring to prevent cheating, can all be argued to be in the players’ favour, in a way that Settlers VII crashing its single player because the internet blipped does not. But it doesn’t make the problem go away, and I want to strongly argue that Blizzard reconsider their decision, in the face of its simply breaking their game. Because no matter how perfect your connection, it will affect you.
By John Walker on February 9th, 2011.
Activision, despite closing down studios as fast as they can, are at least planning on releasing some games. 2012, they promise, will feature two Blizzard titles. That’s if neither of them appear this year, anyway. Which they expect they won’t. But they still might. But they probably won’t. The two games in question most likely being the next portion of StarCraft II, Heart Of The Swarm, and of course Diablo 3. Which they’ll probably only release once they’ve got over 3 million followers on Twitter, or something equally inane.
By Jim Rossignol on October 10th, 2008.
Ooh, excitement! I’ve posted Blizzard’s splendid Wizard class trailer after the jump. Annoyingly, we weren’t able to get out to Blizzcon, but plenty of our journalistic brethren were and Shacknews have come up with the Diablo 3 goods. There’s some hands-on impressions here, and two length videos of the action from the newly-unveiled Wizard-class here. Blizzard’s info page on the spell-chucker is here. My thoughts? We are totally going to kill some demons and/or zombie lords. Yes.
By Alec Meer on June 24th, 2008.
There’s a large part of me that never wants to write or read anything along the lines of “Diablo 3 announcement coming?” ever again. However, we are approaching something of a critical mass, so one more time… The Blizzard Worldwide Invitational hits Paris at the weekend (I’ll be there, trying not to stare at girls dressed as elves), and tradition dictates there’ll be an unveiling of a new game there. Well, we already know about Starcraft 2 and WoW: Anger of the Zombie Monarch, so everyone’s inevitably shouting Diablo III. There are, though, a ton of alternatives – Warcraft IV, Starcraft: Ghost, World of Starcraft or, heaven forfend, A New IP.
So what’s it gonna be? Blizzard have been openly teasing fans for the last couple of days. The basts.
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By John Walker on June 4th, 2008.
Those vague rumours and wispy mistruths that spread across the internet every day… well, they’re the great, aren’t they? Today’s whispered perhapsment: New Diablo 3 under development rumblings.
The reason I like this rumour so much is because it’s so impossibly vague, and yet here I am writing it to fan the flames. Why? Because I believe that once a consensus is reached it’s very hard to stop it from being true. I mean, Clinton’s not resigned, Obama claims victory, and the media goes along with it before the votes are counted. So it’s true, isn’t it? Let’s all keep stating that Diablo 3 is definitely being developed, and one day Blizzard will just discover they’ve been unwittingly making the game for months. This is Science, people. The rumour’s source:
