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Diablo 3 open beta weekend

Published April 20th, 2012 in Blizzard, Diablo 3 gameplay, Diablo 3 in the media and Diablo 3 News. 1 Comment

Diablo 3 has an open beta weekend this weekend! The only requirement is to have an active Battle.net account, so go ahead and join us in the Diablo 3 beta.

For more info head over to the Diablo 3 website, or you can start downloading now!

Update: Blizzard have stated that a Battle.net account is no longer required, i.e. you can register for one for free.

Update 2: The EU servers seem to be up and running, but it seems that battle.net login servers are too busy to process all the login requests. A lot of people are getting various login errors. Here’s the breaking news though, the servers are UP!

Diablo 3 Beta – secret areas

Published March 22nd, 2012 in Blizzard, Diablo 3 gameplay, Diablo 3 in the media, Diablo 3 News, Diablo 3 rumors and Diablo 3 videos. 2 Comments

Thanks to a “benevolent” bug in the beta, you are now able to explore 3 additional areas: Festering Woods, the Fields of Misery and the Drowned Temple.

The areas will be available in the retail version that launches May 15th, but this is a good way to judge if the other content is on the same level as the areas provided in the beta.

We all remember Age of Conan which had amazing 1-20 leveling in Tortage, which then transitioned into a lackluster trek across almost barren areas. Of course, with something like 5 years of development (or 10 depending on counting), Diablo 3 will have no excuse when it comes to barren areas.

Blizzard fires 600

Published March 5th, 2012 in Blizzard, Diablo 3 gameplay, Diablo 3 in the media and Diablo 3 News. 1 Comment

In the midst of all the Diablo 3 news, Blizzard has stunned the media with a grim announcement: Blizzard has fired 600 people.

The reason for the layoff is unclear but Blizzard stated that the World of Warcraft team will not be affected. I think they meant that the live (development) team will not be affected, because it’s pretty obvious where the cuts will be the deepest – WoW’s customer support and community services.

Considering that Blizzard had added 5000 people to handle WoW’s unprecedented success in terms of customer support, it stands to good reason that now that their subscription numbers are suffering (2 million lost), they will reduce the support staff accordingly.

The real question is whether this will delay Diablo 3 even further. Mike Morhaime was quick to state the company is “continuing to develop, iterate, and polish Blizzard DOTA, Diablo 3, StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm, World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria, as well as other, unannounced projects.”

I guess he listed them in order of release. The DOTA (custom Starcraft 2 map) will probably come out in April-May with Diablo hopefully following in June. It remains to be seen if this is more smoke and mirrors from Mike – after all, he said they are doing EVERYTHING they can to release Diablo 3 in 2011. Obviously, “everything” was not enough.

Diablo 3 real money

Published February 26th, 2012 in Blizzard, Diablo 3 gameplay, Diablo 3 in the media and Diablo 3 News. 0 Comments

You are probably aware that Diablo 3 is going to have a special Auction House that works with real money. Players who have found a rare item will be able to offer it for real money at this Auction House, instead of eBay.

(Btw, the real-money transactions are the main reason Diablo 3 had problems getting the blessing of Korea’s game board. Blizzard had to remove the feature for Korean audiences, thus delaying the game further.)

It was always clear that the real-money auction house (RMAH from now on) was a way for Blizzard to get additional money from power players. The interesting bit is HOW MUCH!

Tobold’s blog reveals that the minimum price of any one item at RMAH is $1.50. So in a way it is similar to Apple’s iTunes (or AppStore) where the most common price is $0.99. Apple takes a 30% cut off your App revenue.

It looks like Blizzard is a lot GREEDIER than Apple. If you post an item for $1.50 and you sell it, Blizzard gets $1.25. Yes, that’s right. You get 25 cents and they get the remaining … 83%!

Of course, Blizzard fanboys would argue that the percentage is much lower on a $150 item but whoa… who wants to pay $150 for a Diablo 3 item? With competition as intense (millions playing), you could bet that MOST items will have to be priced at the minimum in order to find a buyer.

Note: The Diablo 3 beta has tested the RMAH, however, instead of real money, players were give 50 “fake” beta bucks. Of course, prices of items during the beta don’t allow us to make predictions about the real game. There are very few items in the beta worth money, the money is not real, and there only a few thousand players playing.

Diablo 3 moved to June

Published February 13th, 2012 in Blizzard, Diablo 3 gameplay, Diablo 3 in the media and Diablo 3 News. 3 Comments

When Mike Morhaime officially moved Diablo 3′s release date to 2012, he said there’s still hope for a 2011 release but more realistically, it will come in early 2012.

Everyone was excited that at least Blizzard had moved from the SOON (which is of course shorthand for “as soon as it’s ready) to something more specific. Most looked for precedents of Blizzard missing a holiday season only to launch the game in February. Well, that’s certainly not going to happen this time.

During the latest investor conference call, Mike Morhaime said:

“Given the popularity of the action RPG genre, and the keen interest in Diablo III, we expect this launch to be a big opportunity for Blizzard. We can also confirm that we are targeting a Q2 launch for Diablo III”.

So there it is, brace yourselves for a May-June release. Remember to be wary of any retailer who claims Diablo 3 will release on April 1. It’s definitely a joke.

Diablo 3 – more delays

Published January 28th, 2012 in Blizzard, Diablo 3 gameplay, Diablo 3 in the media, Diablo 3 News and Diablo 3 screenshots. 9 Comments

If anyone was hoping for a February or even March release date, think again. Jay Wilson, Diablo 3′s game director and soon to be out-of-work bum, says some of the game’s systems need a revamp.

Update: Jay losing his job? No, it’s the senior producer of Diablo who just left Blizzard after 5 years of Diablo 3 (source: his Twitter!).

While working on Diablo III we’ve been called out for messing around with systems too much, that the game is good as-is and we should just release it. I think that’s a fair argument to make, but I also think it’s incorrect. Our job isn’t just to put out a game, it’s to release the next Diablo game. No one will remember if the game is late, only if it’s great. We trust in our ability to put out a great game, but we’re not quite there yet. In addition to finishing and polishing the content of the game we’re continuing to iterate on some of the core game systems.

Now, the post is quite long but there’s the highlights for you:

Scrolls of Identification are no longer in the game – you click, wait for a progress bar and you get the item identified.

Dedicated potion button – the fifth slot becomes a potion button, although chugging potions isn’t as easy as in Diablo 2

Removing the Mystic artisan – couldn’t make the enchantments good enough, so scrapping the whole concept

Town portal back in the game – remove the Cauldron of Jordan and Nephalem Cube (proxies for crafting and selling to vendor).

Attributes cleanup – dropping Defense, Attack, and Precision as attributes, Armor is taking over for what Defense used to provide, +Physical Resist will take over for Armor, and +Chance to Crit will fill in for Precision

In conclusion, Jay says that’s not all:

There’s a lot of work left to be done, though. We’re constantly tuning and making balance changes; it’s a massive task. Some of these changes can be seen in the beta, like changes to item rarity, the levels at which we introduce affixes, and how many affixes enemies can roll up. Some you can’t see in the beta, like balancing the difficulty of the entire game for four different difficulty levels, adding tons of new affixes, creating legendary items, filling out crafting recipes and itemization, working on achievements, and implementing Battle.net features. We’re also working on a number of other large systems changes — specifically with the skill and rune systems. We’re not quite ready to share what those are just yet, but we look forward to being able to do so in the near future.