Diablo 2 Community News

1UP.com “How Diablo Saved the RPG”

Written on January 23, 2012 at 5:58 pm, by admin

“While this new Diablo project intrigued Blizzard executives — the basic idea of descending a dungeon to hit skeletons and demons had its appeal — they suggested one significant alteration. Bolstered by the reception to Warcraft, Blizzard advised changing Diablo’s combat system from a turn-based one to a real-time one.”

Check out the rest of the article: How Diablo Saved the Computer RPG

Activision Blizzard Q4 Call

Written on January 21, 2012 at 5:55 pm, by admin

Blizzard’s Q4 Conference call will be taking place on Feb. 9th, 2012 at 1:30 PST. See the details here.

D3 Twitter Posts from Bashiok

Written on January 20, 2012 at 7:50 am, by admin

will d3 beta patch 10 have all the changes that Jay mentioned in his post today?
Yes! All of them. –Bashiok

are the changes that are being implemented set in stone? Or they subject to change depending on beta feed back?
Nothing is set in stone. –Bashiok

It looks like these changes have been in the works for awhile now. Will the upcoming patch reflect these changes?
Yes, all of these changes are complete and will be present in beta Patch 10. –Bashiok

But white items still cost gold? Wont that make them worth something, making me to fill my inventory and later sell them in town
They’ll sell for very little. It will quickly become apparent they’re not worth the inventory space. –Bashiok

Any idea when the 4 acts on the game guide will be released?
When the game is released. –Bashiok

Why have items that are useless?
To make seeing a good item drop that much rarer/exciting. –Bashiok

So assuming they will still drop on f.e. inferno difficulty, why there are there? No disenchant, no use, no selling…
Because the game is about fountains of loot exploding out of demons. –Bashiok

Will the new Salvage method be included in the new patch?
Yup! –Bashiok

What about “upgrading” gems? since u removed the mystic, its not implemented anymore?
That’s the Jeweler.  –Bashiok

Jay’s article says strength affects barbarian damage and dexterity, DH’s etc… That’s just core, rite? Weapons still add most?
Well there’s the basic weapon damage, then if it has +Strength on it you *probably* wouldn’t want that item as a wizard. –Bashiok

What if per chance the weapon damage is vastly superior? wouldn’t that make sense to take it for secondary attribute?
Very possible! It won’t always be an absolute “It has X I don’t want it.” You’ll still need to evaluate. –Bashiok

Town Portal: Instant or cast?
It’s the same as the Stone of Recall, just in a different spot with a new (old?) name. It’s a 2 second cast I believe. –Bashiok

what? was just getting excited about stone of recall! U guys had me convinced that scrolls suck, and stones rock (no pun intended)
It’s the same thing, we just moved it and renamed it. –Bashiok

Zarhym Sets the Record Straight

Written on January 14, 2012 at 2:04 pm, by admin

Zarhym posted on Twitter a few days ago about a big meeting that caused an uproar in the Diablo community, he comes to set the record straight:

If you’re looking to our personal Twitter accounts for any hints of information that might help you ascertain a release date of Diablo III, you’re going to be disappointed.

I’m assuming you’re referring to my tweet about a “big meeting.” I have several meetings a day and just felt like being silly on my personal feed on a Monday morning. Was it really enlightening or informative? No. Was there ANY indication that meeting had anything to do with Diablo III development or release? No. (Because it didn’t.) Do I sometimes tweet about the weather, cute cats, rocks on the ground, and other random stuff that won’t bring you any closer to your copy of the game? Totally.

If you guys don’t have anything of importance to say please do us a favor and don’t say anything.
Since everything you mentioned in your OP was taken from Twitter, I’m assuming you’re asking that we not use our personal social media accounts to communicate with anyone until our company announces a release date for Diablo III.

The unfortunate fact is we’re human beings. We use social media to communicate with others about day-to-day affairs, whether or not what we’re saying pertains to our jobs.

If you want to follow what we’re saying, awesome. But if you feel like any post we make that has anything to do with our careers, yet isn’t breaking news about the status of Diablo III, is just a huge tease or attempt to bait you… well, you’re crazy… and almost as excited for this game as we are.

Nope, I’m not demanding anything. I’m suggesting that when it comes to a product release date they shouldn’t announce a buisness meeting specifically regarding that project and through offical channels without having some actual information to present to the community.
After reading this post I’m quite confused. Do you have a link to an announcement made via one of our official channels where we said we were having a business meeting about a product release?

I’m pretty sure what you’re referring to doesn’t exist. It actually seems you, or someone who told you this, filled in a lot of blanks incorrectly.

So saying “WE HAVE A BIG MEETING AND YES ITS ABOUT DIABLO 3!!!1″ on twitter isnt a tease? when everyones been tearing their hair out to find out when the games released? (4 months after saying the game was in a polishing stage)
First of all, that’s quite a bit of paraphrasing what was actually said. Second, I’m a community manager. I don’t think you understand how many meetings I have about Diablo III which have absolutely nothing to do with a release date. We do what we can to plan out announcements and generate website content based on the timeline given to us by other departments.

There are quite a few people who work at Blizzard, many of whom do not work on Diablo III. Just the same, there are many people (like me) who do work on Diablo III in some capacity, but aren’t working on things you’re necessarily dying to know more about right now.

Since my post about being in a meeting seems to have been such a mean tease, I’ll tell you more about it. There were six people in a room and we were discussing the functionality and layout of a few web pages, as well as what text still needed to be filled in and what the best way is to get localized versions of each piece of text generated for the site.

Please contain your excitement.

Spoiler alert: we also have a meeting tomorrow with Jay Wilson and other lead Diablo III developers (as we do every Thursday). One question which will almost certainly not be brought up is: so when are we releasing the game? Instead, we’ll be asking about all of the cool things they’re working on now to make the game even better.

We want the game out just as badly as you do, but we’re not going to sacrifice quality or implement systems that don’t feel fleshed out just to get the game in your hands. It has to be a game worthy of being in your hands.

This is what everyone is referring to. As to how legitimate of a site this is. I dunno. diablo.incgamers.com/blog/comments/release-date-decided
I speculate that such blind speculation yielded a lot of page views.

So zarhym is this to mean we shouldn’t expect any news in the coming weeks for diablo 3?
No, we have a post from Jay Wilson in the works that does a good job of explaining what his team is currently working on. We want to give you all a status update on the design of some of the systems we either haven’t fully fleshed out yet, or are still scrutinizing. It’ll likely be followed by an update to the beta servers and you can expect the post probably late next week.

You do understand that everything you guys post on twitter ends up as a thread on here right?
If you KNOW people are going to take every little bits you give them and run with it then why are you giving it to them at all?
I don’t report on Twitter. I post about random things in my life and pretend people care. If I mention I’m in a meeting and confirm it has something to do with Diablo III, I’m not backing down just because a couple of bloggers decided to drum that up with crazy speculation and assumptions. THAT can more aptly be referred to as “nothing to report of importance.”

If you think Bashiok deciding to shave one day is some cosmic sign Diablo III is being delayed beyond some date we never confirmed in the first place, you’re in for heartache. We don’t live, eat, and breathe Diablo III milestones. Sometimes we do things in life — and post about those things — even when they don’t fit into a master puzzle which must be completed in order for you to possess a copy of the game.

Fair enough, but why is the topic of a release date “certainly not (going to be) brought up?” I mean, if it’s never brought up because no one wants to rush anyone else, how can it be decided?
Believe me, there are plenty of folks within the company discussing development schedules, product release projections, and all that jazz.

It’s not the community team’s role to work with the developers to determine a release date. Our meetings are to talk about gameplay, systems, features, story, etc.

Actually, in this tweet we have a confirmation that what was discussed during that meeting WAS related to Diablo III (and therefore in some way related to the development of Diablo III)
No, a meeting related to Diablo III is not therefore related to Diablo III game development. We have websites and all sorts of other things surrounding the Diablo brand which we talk about in meetings.

We understand you have many meetings, in some cases more than one per day, but you have never gone out of your way before to communicate to fans about them before (aside from major meetings / quarterly reports). Which made us think that this meeting was special in some way.
I have spoken about being meetings many times before on my Twitter feed. Sometimes I’ve posted pictures from those meetings. The fact that people chose to care so much about these few tweets from Bashiok and me, because a couple bloggers tied them together in a pretty package to stir up hype, is ridiculous.

And as much as some people hung on every word of said tweets, they sure misinterpreted them.

Right now I see May, maybe April as being the earliest it will be released. As much as that sucks.
Just stop. Please don’t take that two and put it with the other two. They don’t need to be mashed together in a downward spiral where everything said is between the lines. It’s not. I’m not using a language you need to decode. I’m trying to get you to stop thinking there are secret implications behind our words. Read what is being said and think about it for a least a few minutes before deciding how it is/isn’t a sign of when the game will be released.

I didn’t say the company isn’t discussing release dates. I…

Too many people, it would seem. It’s great you guys strive to make such a polished and satisfying games, but I get the feeling there is/are a lot of second-guessing/conflicting ideas…..
I understand what you said, but I want you to know you took what I said and then ran into a huge tangent. Your statements aren’t really based on information I gave you, nor are they accurate. Having more staff in the company, particularly for customer support and community development, shouldn’t be used as evidence to argue there are too many cooks in the kitchen.

Compared to the rest of the gaming industry, you’d probably be surprised by how small the Diablo III development team is. And the reason it’s relatively small is because we do want it to be a family of highly talented individuals who have a certain synergy to challenge one another — developers who know what they like and don’t like, but at the end of the day can come together and agree on a design vision.

I just caution you not to assume that our company’s growth has diluted the development teams into bland groups of programmers plugging away for a paycheck. Our weekly meetings with the Diablo III developers are amazing because of how passionate they are about their game. They know what they’re doing and aren’t being blocked by bureaucracy, as you seem to be suggesting.

Also, with all of these extra people with jobs like community manager and whatnot, it would be pretty great if somebody could find the time to actually tell the community what in the hell is happening.
Isn’t this thread sort of about the opposite? We’re being told not to saying anything unless it’s really important and directly related to the release of the game.

We told you at the end of last year we wouldn’t be shipping the game until 2012. That didn’t mean we’d have the final details ready to announce by January of this year. We’ll share with you whatever information we can whenever we can.

This is slightly unfair, because the OP’s topic came from the misguided point of view that you were indeed tweeting about a realse date meeting (because of a certain fan sites spin).
Fair enough. Looking back, it’s pretty unfortunate that a few unrelated postings here and there on the internet were tied together into what seemed like the start of the biggest Diablo news of the year. :\

So what really happened? I had a typical Monday meeting and Bashiok shaved.

WE ARE HAVING A BIG MEETING…

Diablo III Game Status and Release

Written on January 11, 2012 at 6:09 pm, by admin

Twitter updates today from Zarhym talked about Diablo 3’s Status and release:

Twitter Source

Diablo’s 15th Anniversary

Written on January 5, 2012 at 8:03 am, by admin

Check out the video interviews from Jay Wilson and Chris Metzen as well as as Extended Diablo Retrospective. Diablo 15 Year Anniversary

Happy Holidays!

Written on December 24, 2011 at 1:48 pm, by admin

Blizzard’s Holiday Wishes and Vacation

Blizzard’s Leonard Boyarsky on Diablo

Written on December 19, 2011 at 9:13 pm, by admin

It’s nearly 15 years since the original Diablo launched onto PC screens the world over, evolving the RPG genre and providing endless hours of grim dungeon crawling. Gameplanet speaks with Diablo III’s Senior World Designer Leonard Boyarsky about his role in honouring franchise traditions.

Gameplanet: What do you see as the original Diablo’s contribution to gaming?

Leonard Boyarsky: It totally reinvigorated the action RPG genre, there’s really nothing like it on the PC for the most part, it really took the world by storm. It was a breath of fresh air. The original, especially, just had this great horror vibe to it that you really didn’t get from fantasy RPGs a lot. It was a really different take on the genre.

Gameplanet: How has Diablo influenced you as a developer?

Boyarsky: For the past five years it’s been a major influence in my life! [laughs] I have to admit that coming in here, I did not realise the depth that the lore went to in these games. I came in and they handed me this world bible that was fairly thick, and I’m like “wow, I didn’t get this from playing the game!”. So immediately we set our sights to really flesh this out, and make sure this information gets to the player.

I was on a different career path before coming over to work on Diablo III, which is more action-RPG than stuff I’ve done in the past. But even some of the games I worked on, I think at certain times we said that maybe we should veer a little more towards the action, seeing as how successful Diablo has been.

See the rest of the interview here: Gameplanet Interview

Opening Cinematic for Diablo III

Written on December 11, 2011 at 9:07 pm, by admin

The opening cinematic for Diablo 3 was revealed in it’s entirety on Spike TV’s video game awards, you can see it below:

Battle.net Balance

Written on December 9, 2011 at 9:27 am, by admin

Important information below from blizzard:

FAQ’s