so you can beat me upside the head with your light saber?

:spock:





:D

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/3552...9_23_2011#blog

“Soon” Was Too Soon -- Diablo III to Arrive in Early 2012


by Mike Morhaime Sep 23, 2011 5:30 AM PDT 1058
We commonly use the term “soon” when referring to Blizzard releases, because we know that no matter how hard we’re working to reach a target, we’re not going to compromise and launch a game before it’s ready. For Diablo III, we were aiming to launch by the end of 2011. As we’re announcing globally today, our new target for the game is early 2012.

While this news might not be a complete surprise, I know that many of you were hopeful that Diablo III would ship this year. We were too. However, this week we pulled together people from all of the teams involved with the game to decide whether we felt it would be ready before the end of December, and we grudgingly came to the conclusion that it would not. Ultimately, we feel that to deliver an awesome Diablo sequel that lives up to our expectations and yours as well, we should take a little more time and add further polish to a few different elements of the game.

The upside of today’s announcement is that we will be running the beta test longer than we initially planned, which will allow us to invite more of you who have opted in.

For those taking on the Diableard challenge, we salute you -- and now fear for your well-being and personal hygiene. We hereby issue an official reprieve to all Diableard participants, including Blizzard employees, if you want to trim or otherwise manage the lower half of your face. We’d still love to see your beardly achievements, and we look forward to seeing more of your efforts as we move into 2012, but not to the detriment of your workplaces and significant others.

Thank you everyone for your support and anticipation for Diablo III. We’re still moving ahead at full pace, and we’ll be keeping you fully informed of any news and developments here at Diablo3.com, including the specific release date when the time comes, so stay tuned.

-Mike Morhaime

I was wondering the same thing. What are the major differences?

Completely different genres.

Diablo is mostly is a single player hack and slash "RPG" (very limited RPG elements). You can play it with up to 3 friends if that's your thing. You play the game over and over and over constantly leveling your character up and getting better loot as you go on.

WoW is a Massively Multiplayer Online RPG (MMORPG). There's a huge persistent world, intricately designed with it's own transportation networks, dungeons, battlegrounds (an organized way to fight the rival faction of players), cities, towns and villages. You have thousands of people exploring/fighting in that world at the same time who you can communicate with in a myriad different chat channels. This will cost you a monthly fee on top of the usual $50 for the game.

I knew most of that, but but the 4 player limit on Diablo multiplayer was something I wasn't aware of. It makes sense though. Thanks.

Is the Diablo game the same whether you play solo or with 4 players? If so, how does it remain balanced?

It scaled the difficulty up when you added more people in Diablo 2. It was still much easier with a group of people, though. And I guess it was actually 7 people you could play with for a total of 8. My bad.

Diablo 2 was 8. Diablo 3 will be 4 people.

Thanks guys.

You can watch Day[9] (Starcraft 2 guy) play the beta as a Witch Doctor here if you're interested:

Part 1

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/thGq2G2aGXo" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

I'm definitely picking this up when it comes out.

BTW, Day[9] is a pro gamer who grew up in Leawood, KS (KC suburb). He mentions Kansas in one of these videos when the game lighting turns green (like the sky before a tornado).

Ya, Leawood is nice. Extremely affluent. Are you going to be playing this, patteeu? TOR?

I think I'll give Diablo a try. I can't afford to get sucked into an MMORPG or my wife would probably divorce me.

Bah! Tell her to get back in the kitchen when she starts mouthing off.

Holy crap. I've been playing a little Diablo 2 lately. My god the spammers have ruined that game. Every public game is literally crushed by ****ing spammers. Takes ALOT away from that game.

I can barely see in some games because of the wall of text that gets insta-spammed onto the screen.