March 6, 2015
Yesterday morning Diablo III Game Director Josh Mosqueira gave an hour-long presentation on Diablo III and Reaper of Souls at the annual Game Developers’ Conference. You can watch the whole thing on video, but if you don’t have an hour for that, here’s our transcript, with numerous screen captures to show the key visuals.
October 4, 2013
This issue came up both of the Diablo 3 console podcasts we’ve posted thus far, where the players were avoiding public games since there were already so many hacked items. That was within the first week or two of release. Now that it’s been a month the hacked and duped items have spread that much further, and fans are posting similar words in the Battle.net forums.
September 19, 2013
When Blizzard announced that the Auction House was to close the online-only detractors began to stir, encouraged by this surprising news, hoping it heralded a radical shift if attitude by Blizzard. Could it mean they will reconsider Online-only too? Erm, no. Not gonna happen. Blizzard recently had this to say when questioned:
May 28, 2013
The Diablo 3 Expansion is the perpetual topic of interest for everyone in the Diablo community, and since IGN coughed up an article focused on it today, we might as well have at it. The article gives some summary of the Diablo 3 plot and basic game features and suggests what we might see in the Expansion plot, but it’s not one of those, “my top ten expansion wish list features” forum posts.
March 9, 2013
As everyone who was around last year remembers, Diablo 3 had a very rough launch, in large part because of the online-only requirement. As happens with most game launches there was a rush of fans sufficient to clog the online play options, but unlike when the same thing happened with Diablo 2 back in 2000, there was no offline mode for Diablo 3. This focused the rage of everyone who couldn’t play, and gave the hordes of people who hate any type of DRM extra ammunition for their attacks.
February 21, 2013
Yesterday’s announcement that a Diablo 3 Console was coming (soon?) to the Playstation 3 and the future Playstation 4 was big news, but not surprising news. After all, Blizzard has repeatedly confirmed that they were “exploring a Diablo-related concept for consoles,” and at Blizzcon 2010 and again in 2011 they announced that the project was scaling up, being led by Josh Mosqueira, and that help was wanted. They even hired a PS3 specialist last June. They were thinking about a Diablo 3 console game long before then, though, as this October 2008 quote from Jay Wilson makes clear:
August 3, 2012
More hotfixes have made their way into the game today. Today’s hotfixes focus on one of the many banes of the online-only aspect of the game – desynch, or “rubberbanding.” It’s always good to see that the teams are looking for ways to reduce what many hardcore players equate to death. I find it interesting, though, that the hotfix is focused on those that already have extremely high latency. It seems that the issue persists even when latency is in the green.
June 28, 2012
A rather long and uncannily accurate article has popped up giving voice and perspective on the rampant Diablo 3 nerdrage seen in recent weeks. The author nails the heart of it, starting with the definition of the term and how it relates to each individual gripe. The tone is possibly the most objective I’ve read as of late, so if you’re looking for a piece of relatively unbiased material on the matter of D3 nerdrage, this piece is the one for you.
We recently reported that the French consumer group UFC-Que Choisir were on Blizzard’s case regarding Diablo 3 connectivity issues in France. The sought a response from Blizzard within 15 days at that time and asked that gamers be awarded compensation of some sort for the problems. The fifteen days are now up and Blizzard has responded to the UFC-Que Choisir.
June 27, 2012
On June 8th, Blizzard abruptly locked the language options in some versions of Diablo III. This mainly affected the Russian and Brazilian markets, where Diablo III was not available until June 7th (3 weeks after the rest of the word), and where many eager players had bought international versions of the game which they were playing in English.
June 25, 2012
Rock paper Shotgun posted an interview with Marcin Iwinski, the CEO of Polish gaming studio CD Projekt, in which he talks about their upcoming projects and Diablo III’s approach to online security. It’s an interesting situation, since CD Project is handling the hosting and internet support for Diablo III in the Polish market, and they’re also a game developer in their own right. The bulk of the interview is about their upcoming game, Cyberpunk, inspired by/based on the neo-futuristic computer hacker “hi-tech, low-life” fictional world.
We posted news a few days ago about new buyers of the digital version of Diablo III being assigned to the trial version and stuck at level 13 for up to three days, while Blizzard verified that their payment was legit. Reader comments on that post were fairly scathing, as Blizzard didn’t make any effort to explain the financial or technical reasons behind their decision.
June 24, 2012
An article from The Atlantic (which is a literary and political magazine; not a gaming publication) discusses recent video game innovations such as Real Money Trading, and how any company that incorporates that feature into their game, as D3 has, requires a strong DRM and EULA to control the system.
June 15, 2012
June 13, 2012
As we saw previously in news from Korea about Blizzard’s offices being investigated and threats of class action lawsuits, we’re now hearing similar news from from France. The original article is in French (Google translation) but since MortusMox was helpful enough to include a nice summary of it in his news tip, I’ll just quote him: