Diablo 2 Community News

We will be resetting the Diablo II ladder on March 23 with the release of patch 1.13. We anticipate all Diablo II realms to be down for approximately six hours during the reset. More specific information on realm availability on the day of the reset will be posted in the Battle.net Status forum. When the ladder is reset, all existing ladder characters will be converted to non-ladder. All characters and items being converted to non-ladder will remain intact, but once converted these characters will no longer have access to ladder content such as creating ladder-only rune words. For more information on ladder characters please visit the Arreat Summit Realm Character Types page at http://classic.battle.net/diablo2exp/basics/charactertypes.shtml

I don’t think we’ve ever put that forward as the main excuse, but… well, it is the main excuse. It’s not bogus though it’s absolutely a true and real situation. Animation takes time. There are schedules and we have to try to set realistic goals for what we can achieve so we can try to get this game out sometime before we die of old age.

You’re dismissively downplaying the amount of work needed to animate every weapon type. It’s important to note that we aren’t going to just slap on animations. We’ll do it right or we won’t do it. There is some overlap in weapon animations, but generally every weapon needs a full range of adaptation to the character. We can’t animate a 1h sword and then equip a 1h axe and be happy with it being wielded in the same manner. In addition we don’t want weapons disappearing whenever the hero does anything but a basic attack, so they have to be animated into emotes, idles, and a lot of skills and abilities. Every weapon. Some people noticed weapons disappear during some of the monk abilities. We don’t like that. Most of that was due to time constraints to get that demo finished. Again there is some overlap – staves share a lot of the same animation with the other 2h weapons, but to dismiss it as “just animate it and slap it on and it works!” is seriously oversimplifying our processes. Maybe some other games do it that way.

Read more

Spells, auras, abilities that buff, help, directly or indirectly heal yourself and party members, these are all good mechanics to helping cooperation in multiplayer games. And we’ll certainly have some of them.

What we don’t want though is a situation where you’d say “Ok just sit back and keep us healed.” Everyone should be fighting, everyone should be DPS, and the buffs and bonuses that come from certain classes should simply be situational and/or beneficial “icing on the cake”.

The portals to the dungeons were a bit wacky in the demo. Only the timed dungeons, as far as I remember, wouldn’t let you port back out from where you came in. And after you entered the portal base would actually shatter and the sand effects would stop and all sorts of neat stuff. That was the point of those dungeons though, find the exit in 3 minutes or you die. But I believe some of the non-timed dungeons were slightly buggy in that exiting from the entrance you came in from would sometimes put you at the other exit, and some fun stuff like that.

I wouldn’t take the dungeon entrance/exit design used for one dungeon in a demo as an indication of how they’ll work anyway. Also that dungeon had magical portals because it’s the type of dungeon that would have magical portals. It wouldn’t have magical portals if it was a normal cave.

In general though for entrances/exits, yeah clearing a dungeon just to back track the whole thing is kinda lamesauce, so we probably won’t do that. Maybe in some specific cases where it makes sense.

Diablo: Visit Diablo3.com for a close up view of the male wizard’s in-game model, then check out two screenshots also added. http://cot.ag/Tzp4F

Male Wizard