Diablo Watch

like it’s 1999. Remember the Prince song? Who would’ve thought that 1999 would come and it will be not be remembered as THE big party.

Blizzard has confessed they’ve designed Diablo 3 around the specs of a 2008 PC.

Blizzard games are intended to be accessible, and that’s seen through game design as well as system spec requirements. It’s not going to be pushing too many people’s systems to the limits, which is the intent.

We also tend to spend time on a visual style that we believe will be timeless. While the cutting edge FPS’ of a few years ago quickly fall to the glitz of newer technologies, our intent is to create a beautiful game that doesn’t age because it’s not attempting to be a representation of reality. Good thing too, because we expect people to be playing it for a long time to come.

Now, I don’t want to harp on about “Blizzard selling out”, because I always get the same two types of comments:

Type 1: I am a hardcore player and I feel Blizzard have been dumbing down their RPGs.
Type 2: My girlfriend plays WoW and she’s crazy about pandas. She says Diablo is cute too.
i.e. Blizzard have always had an incredibly broad appeal, ever since their first game, WoW.

Another interesting thing that I came across on the forums is that Blizzard has sent Diablo 3 beta keys to European gamers (like myself):

Beta keys are given out in the EU, they are distributed and given on as fair a basis as we can, as well as for the needs that we have for testing purposes. Please do note that not everyone in the US receives Beta keys for DIII, they are limited in the number they give out as well.

They claim they did, I say none of my friends got one. Well, my friends are playing SWTOR now, so they care none.

Update: I just read Tobold’s blog and hit this post about a comparison between SWTOR and WoW when it comes to system requirements. He says WoW runs at 80 FPS on his 2-year old laptop, while SWTOR runs at 10 FPS.

Although I read that the GFX optimizations for SWTOR haven’t really made it to the release version, it seems to be another testament of how broad Blizzard target is.