Well it’s official, the week of nonsense splash screens has finally ended and Diablo 3 has been announced. Not only was it announced but there is tons of screenshots, art, and information on the game over at the official Diablo 3 website. If you haven’t checked it out yet I would highly suggest doing so now, there is also a cinematic and 20 (yes.. 20) minutes of gameplay footage that you can either stream or download. The game appears to be pretty solid right now so it’s possible that we could see a release date as early as 2009, though Blizzard has and will always stick with the “it’s done when it’s done”.
Many more clues from the splash page are hinting towards the new Diablo game.
After further inspection of the splash screen image, we are now able to confirm its something related to the diablo universe. If you look close enough you will notice that there are 2 rune images, one on the right and one on the left. On the right, we have the Hel rune from diablo 2 and on the left we now have the Shael rune.
For the web savvy, they have hidden clues within the CSS file for the splash page. For those that don’t know, CSS stands for cascading style sheet and with it you are able to define the style for everything within your webpage (images, fonts, colors, etc). Each day they seem to be adding a commented out image to the css and naming the classes tundra and cavern so far. You can see the images they are linking to here:
For those of you who haven’t noticed yet, Blizzard has started their splash screen shenanigans again. Every website they own has been showing a cracking ice image before you continue to the page, and every day its getting bigger. Here is what the image looks like on the second day.
The Blizzard World Wide Invitational event is being held this weekend in Paris so many are expecting a new game announcement by this Saturday if not earlier. Personally, I think we are finally going to see our new Diablo game announcement. What do you think it means?
There was a blue post a couple days ago by Nethaera about their possible plans for the arthas encounter.
We currently have no plans to add a 40-player dungeon into Wrath of the Lich King. We fully anticipate making the 10 and 25-player dungeons and raids challenging as a part of their progression.
You can say what you like about whether or not a 10-player dungeon is truly challenging if you wish, but they take coordination and require each player to play their role to their best ability to succeed.
When it comes to whether or not Arthas will be epic enough, we are working to maintain the epic feel of the encounter and have been discussing ways of doing this that should be appropriate. One idea that has been talked about was whether or not it would require a 25-player group to defeat Arthas before it ever opens up to 10-player groups.
What we end up with is yet to be decided.
I think it would suck to have to wait until a 25 raid beat the encounter before those of us who can only field 10 even get a chance to see it. But after being part of an uberguild I can see where they are coming from, having 10 people walk up and kill arthas doesn’t seem too epic. What do you think about limiting the 10 player raids in WOTLK?
June 28, 2008 
Posted in Diablo III 
No Comments »
