Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Isn’t this just like Marvel? DC puts the weight of an entire movie on one hero, and Marvel fires back with six (seven, if you count Hulk twice – which you should). Then DC shows off an excellent-looking Lego beat ‘em up with 50 heroes, and Marvel rains on its superpowered parade with 8,000 of its own. That’s Marvel Heroes in a nutshell. Actually, no it’s not. Marvel Heroes in a nutshell is “Diablo II – not Diablo III – slipping into spandex and fighting crime after being bitten by a radioactive MMO.” Also, you’re not playing as some lawsuit-baiting Wolverine wannabe. Rather, you can swap between big names and lesser-known defenders of, er, whatever Squirrel Girl defends on the fly. Get it? Fly. That’s a thing superheroes do.

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And still no Diablo III on my hard-drive! It’s close though, so close we can smell it. It smells of 200 developers having sat in the same office for five years. Mmm, unmistakable. Anyway, there are interviews with Jay Wilson and Chris Metzen (as well as an “extended retrospective”) on Blizzard’s 15th anniversary site, and Wilson says that Blizzard are “almost done” with the third game. So that’s exciting. I would like to be “almost starting” to play it, now please.

More importantly, why was the first Diablo released on December 31st 1996? That seems like an odd release date. Whatever, it was still fifteen years ago, and whether or not you appreciate Diablo’s dungeon-crawler mechanics, it’s hard to deny the influence it has had on the past decade-point-five years of PC games. Also, if you are me, it makes you feel old. Formidably old, like a crotchety old wizard, or something. Ok.

It’s a love story for the ages: two of most important names in PC gaming history have finally admitted their feelings for each other, and after a whirlwind romance they have a beautiful bouncing baby. Yes, Doom and Diablo now have a child to call their own, and of course it’s as gloriously moronic as its parents.
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Look, I don’t know. I DON’T KNOW. This could all be a terrible trick, a plea for attention, and I’m very sorry for adding to the rumour mill.

But…

Fansite Blizzplanet links to a different fansite, Diablo3.com, which is currently hosting a rather noisy countdown timer. It currently reads 13 days. Until what? “until half the web links to Diablo3.com. But why???”, it says. I’d take it a lot more seriously if it wasn’t for those two offensively extraneous question marks, I have to say.

It’s a stunt that will presumably pull over traffic in droves (honestly, you don’t need to click through to it yet. I’ve just told you what’s there. Head over in 13 days instead). So there’d damn well better be a Diablo 3-shaped pot of gold at the end of this spurious rainbow. Of course, it helps that we have had other hints Blizzard’s long-awaited RPG sequel is hiding just over the horizon. In 13 days, perhaps we’ll know.

Or we’ll just be very, very angry.