Rock, Paper, Shotgun

BlizzCon has revealed the Monk as another class for Diablo III, as well as revealing new environments with the borderlands, an evil-infested desert zone. The Monk, needless to say, has miraculous punching and teleporting abilities, for the slapping of evil. Multiple trailers below, along with the traditional scene-setting cinematic.

There’s some crazy rumours flying around about Diablo III coming out this year, with the original story being that it won’t hit in 2010. Obviously we’ll be keeping an eye on that.
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Taking a good old crack at making an exciting upcoming videogame game as unexciting as possible is this short, strangely detached look at one of the classic baddies returning in Blizzard’s upcoming Diablo sequel. The Fallen Ones are coming back, as proven by a new video that is, to my mind, very much trying to reassure crazy fans that their treasured murky colour palette isn’t entirely replaced by – oh grud don’t make me say the bad words – ‘WoW gayness’.

More casual Diablo fans will remember the Fallen Ones as the little impy guys who resurrect themselves in huge numbers unless you nobble the Shaman lurking at the back. New (I think) to their first 3D iteration is the splendid Lunatic – a toad-chested chap who, at a guess, stabs himself in the fiery belly to wreak high-temperature havoc on anyone close enough. The video beneath the cut shows concept art and some brief in-engine animations of the various Fallenses – it’s frankly a dull piece of footage, but it’s there to excite the fans, not to sell the game to a new crowd. Two more screenshots to pore over too, which also seem deliberately dark.
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Asking around the RPS Castle chambers if anyone had anything to add to the news that there were some new Diablo III screenshots (click on the pics), Jim Rossignol immediately ran to the projection whiteboard and thoughtwrote, “there are two Diablo games, but now there is three of it.” This is the reason you visit RPS, and not other sites that apparently persist with existing. But look again, gentles, the inventory system has had a bit of an overhaul.

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Oh, this is just lovely. We saw on Offworld that following on from the Diablo III: The Rainbow Islands furore last year, the Blizzard chaps are snickering behind the hand. With doctored screens and their own internal T-shirts (Grab via MTV). Which is the design at the top. But, most relevantly, you can now order for your very-ownsome via Nerdy-Ts.

As a note to developers, I’d be all over a Rainbow Islands Versus Diablo game. Just for the record.

EDIT: Just in comments thread, there’s a 20% off code – “NerdyFriend2009″ – which works until Monday.

Blizzard have released another video showing off some of the wizard-class powers. Blink spells, chain lightning, and a nifty fiery disintegrate-beam thing. I think it’s safe to say that we’re looking forward to Diablo III. 2009 is going to be an interesting year.
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It’s a funny thing, Diablo III. On the one hand, we know practically everything we need to know about it, based on confirmation that’s it sticking closely to what’s gone before. On the other, we have very little HARD FACT about it. We only know what two of the character classes are, for instance, while multiplayer system Battle.net 2 remains largely under wraps. For now, all a fanbase that can’t wait to hack and slash and slash and hack gets is hints – and oddly antagonistic ones at that.
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Annoyingly we’re not at this year’s Leipzig Games Convention, because we’re a) stupid b) poor c) lazy and d) unfit for public consumption. We did intend to be, but things fall apart, the centre of PC game blogging cannot hold.

But let’s pretend. Imagine we are actually there, and the list of links below is actually stuff we’ve seen and written ourselves. It’ll be fun!
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You’ll be aware on the ongoing growls of Diablo fans that claim the corpse-exploding action of the Diablo III screens are too WoW-esque and kidified. MTV’s Multiplayer blog has done something neat, and got DIII’s Designer, Jay Wilson, to comment on the community’s altered screens . For example: “More rain? It’s funny because if watch later on in the [debut gameplay] video, we have more rain. It is much stronger than that. I’m sure they got rid of the rainbow. Yeah, rainbow — gone. I think our artist just put [the rainbow] in there because they knew that’d be controversial. And I’m sure they were like, “Well we’ll see how far we can push it.” Beneath the fun, it’s an interesting look in the reasoning behind decisions. I’d love to see more of this kind of directors-commentary stuff. Until then, go read.

High-scores are adaptive creatures. They diminished in importance for a while, back when arcades were dwindling but home consoles/computers were isolated, offline devices, but with the rise and rise of broadband reinstating gaming’s social heritage, folks’ odd obsession with proving themselves more skilled than friends and strangers has come back with a vengeance.

So it’s no surprise that Blizzard, who are either the Apple or Microsoft of gaming depending on how you look at it, would get in on gamerscore mania.
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Oh, I wish it really were called that. I miss the days when game names were ritually suffixed with ‘3D’. I might start doing it anyway. “Next week, we’ll be posting about Fallout 3 3D, Spore 3D, Warhammer Online 3D and Peggle…”

There doesn’t seem to be a huge amount of buzz around Raven’s upcoming occultist-Nazi shooter just yet, at least not compared to id’s own Rage 3D, but maybe I’m just not looking in the right places. Here’s what was shown at Quakecon, anyway. It’s possibly a little more subtle than the E3 footage – but it’s nevertheless certainly not subtle. I think/hope it’s pushing for deliberately silly, and it could be a lot of Serious Sam-y fun if so.
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