So there are some tantalizing new rumours out there about Diablo III being announced at Blizzard’s WWI in Europe this weekend.
Since others have already tackled this much quicker then I, I would suggest you check out SC2Pod. Pretty good job of explaining the Splash Screens, as well as the hidden images. They’ve also considered the image may not be landscape, but rather portrait, which is something I hadn’t considered myself until I saw it.
So what does this mean? A brief history of past game announcements from Blizzard have almost always accompanied cryptic splash screens. It seems that this time it’s even more complex, with hidden images, and even a numeric code. The last time they did something like this was for World of Warcraft!
Because it is highly unlikely that this is related to Wrath of the Lich King, WoW’s expansion, we can assume this is related to whatever the final team at Blizzard is working on. You may be tempted to say, “Hey wait though… WotLK takes place on an Icey continent… and this splash is Icy”, and you’re right! But many have thought this could indicate a “Hell has frozen over, Diablo III!” sort of announcement. Another take is that the Ice will break revealing each universe until WWI and Diablo.
The other clue this is related to Diablo is that some of the designs you can see in the splash screen match up with the Hel Rune, and another possibly with the Shael Rune!
Starcraft.org, ORG Network’s Starcraft site, is also covering this! What could it be?
Hey everyone! As we still cling desperately to the rumors surrounding Diablo III’s announcement, Blizzard has at least thrown us a bone to chew on.
The current ladder season will be ending on June 17th, as posted by Nebu…
We will be performing a Diablo II ladder reset on June 17 beginning at approximately 9:00 a.m. PDT. The reset is anticipated to require approximately six hours of downtime to complete, and during that time all Diablo II Battle.net realms will be unavailable for play. When the reset occurs all existing ladder characters will be moved to non-ladder. This provides a fresh start and new competition for leveling supremacy on the ladder realm.
Remember that this only means your current Ladder characters will just be bumped down into the pool of Non-Ladder characters (which includes characters from previous ladder seasons, and those characters from earlier versions of Diablo II).
The last time the Ladder reset, we saw a fierce competition for the first 99 character, I’m sure this time will be no different! What are your guesses as to how long it will be until we see the new, first, 99 character on the reset ladder?
And lastly, I’d like to apologize for the recent spammy comments we were inundated with, for some reason our plugins went wacky. In the course of fixing the issue, some user accounts were lost in the process, but on the upside, we’re now using reCAPTCHA, and for the time being we’ll be allowing anyone to comment without needing to register first.
Well it turns there is some news today after all!
The past couple of weeks both Blizzplanet and Diablo3.com have been running this countdown. At first I thought, as did others, it was just a publicity stunt. Although I also had a thought it was something else entirely, though I’m sure we’ll see that from Blizzard soon.
Anyway it turns out that Diablo3.com had agreed to transfer ownership of the domain to Blizzard itself. You can read all the info on it at their new location www.diablofans.com. Blizzard has been snatching up a great many Diablo3 related domains, however the .com one, the main one, eluded their grasp, so to say.
Over the years, Diablo3.com had turned into a community fansite surrounding the Diablo Series, so Blizzard couldn’t really just pickup the domain that easily.
No worries though. To me this is just one more sign that Diablo III is on the horizon, if not at WWI, then soon. To bad that Blizzard specifically said that this should be no indication that Diablo III has been announced or anything, but it gives me hope, after all why bother acquiring a domain to a game you’re not interested in pursuing?
I know d2p seems pretty slow, but there just is so little Diablo News we can report on here, and as people move on to newer, more addictive games, people lose interest in Diablo. However I’m sure we’ll see a D3 soon, at least in Blizzard’s definition of the term.
While d2p strives to provide you with a wiki with current diablo II related info and help, it seems the mega fansite Diabloii.net has created the ultimate Diablo III Wiki. This website includes the major timeline surrounding Diablo, rumours, speculation, and even inside info about D3.
Will we ever see it released? Perhaps. While there isn’t anything new on this page, it is a wonderful collection of all the hype and rumour surruonding Diablo III. It also includes the last thing we fans have to cling to… Those official quotes from Blizzard themselves:
Diablo … well, it is obviously a very important franchise to us. And I would say, that as with Starcraft and Warcraft, we will certainly get back to it at some point. We are focusing currently on World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King and content associated with World of Warcraft and Starcraft II. We do have some other things in development, and we are not ready to talking about it yet, but what I can say is that we do love that franchise. And its something that we will get to revisit at some point.
[poll=5]
As you can see the past poll indicated that, unsurprisingly, many of you use the Act II Mercenaries. With the addition of such useful runewords as Insight, or Infinity, and others it has made using Act II Mercenaries not only a good idea, but almost required. Many people rely on a Combat Prayer Mercenary coupled with an Insight in the early life of their character. Lightning-Based Javazons use Infinity Mercenaries to be even deadlier!
I invite you to comment on the new poll and share with everyone how you use the Act II Mercenary!
