Diablo 3 News: December 3, 2008 Blizzard signs with Massive for Battle.net ads: (source) Blizzard signed up today with Microsoft's in-game ad subsidiary Massive Inc. for a mulit-year deal naming them the exclusive advertising service provider for Blizzard's Web sites and Battle.net in the U.S., Canada, Europe, and South Korea. Before you panic, though, in the press release Blizzard CEO Paul Sams reassured, "This partnership does not include in-game advertising, as Massive understands and respects our stance against advertising that might detract from gameplay or offend our players." Whew, for a moment there I had visions of Axe Body Spray billboards popping up in WoW. It does mean, though, that you can expect to see them as you get ready to hit the battlefield in Starcraft 2 or head into the dungeons of Diablo 3 on Battle.net. Even without their being in-game, this gives Massive some of the most desirable gaming-related ad space out there. We can't begin to imagine how much you could charge for ad seen by the hundreds of thousands of loyal Starcraft fanatics in South Korea alone. November 1, 2008 Blizzcast episode 6: (source) In the sixth epic episode of BlizzCast, we spend a day with a developer and find out what life is like for World of Warcraft Lead Tools Programmer Monte Krol. Next, we take a look at StarCraft II unit design from concept to creation with Senior Art Director Samwise Didier and Lead Game Designer Dustin Browder. In our third segment, Bashiok spends some time with Anthony Rivero, senior artist for Diablo III, and discusses "bridging the gap" in the series’ character design. Bornakk wraps the episode up by answering some questions from the community. Bashiok: When you were working on the Diablo II units, what was design and creation process start to finish more or less, and how has that changed for Diablo III? Anthony: Well the creation process was fairly different, like I said before, a lot of the artists did everything from the ground up. Then there was the sprite rendering part of it, you would have to pre-render your assets, and so basically you’d wait forever for all the stuff to render out, and with the heroes you’d have to render out all of their body parts separately. Things like the gloves and the boots, things that would change on the character. Then you would have to composite those together, for every direction he was rendered in for every frame of animation. So if he’s rendered in sixteen different directions and he has a … whatever, an eight frame animation, well you have to go through all that and composite all those separate elements in the right order for it to look correct on the screen. So you don’t have an arm that’s supposed to be behind the body in front of the body. And… that was a real tedious process. Ocober 27, 2008 Blizzcast episode 5: (source) In this special Worldwide Invitational wrap-up edition of BlizzCast, we briefly recap some of the events at the recent WWI in Paris, and then move straight into a discussion with Diablo III Lead Designer Jay Wilson. We quiz him on how the development team is evolving the classic series -- and then dive into a discussion of some recent hot issues surrounding the upcoming sequel. Excerpt: Bashiok: Talking about Diablo 2, everybody that played Diablo 2, or plays it – I think a lot of people are going back and playing it, since the announcement – they sort of understand the economy of Diablo 2 as a barter item based kind of system, the gold that was dropped in Diablo 2 wasn't worth much. How do you see the economy in Diablo 3 developing? And are there going to be any goals to establish trade systems? Jay Wilson: Well, Diablo, at its core is basically a trader's game. If you look at other types of progression based RPG games, World of Warcraft is a great example. In World of Warcraft the best items are you know, held by the raiders. In Diablo the best items are really held by the traders. You know those people that are really good at trading with other people. We have no intention of destroying that design or that group of players.... October 13, 2008 Diablo 3 Barbarian Skill Tree: (source) Last weekend I had a chance to play through the entire BlizzCon demo with a Barbarian, and you can read my report on that experience below the fold. Also in this post is a discussion of the Barbarian’s overall balance and design, and a profile of some of his more interesting, creative, and controversial skills. Self-resurrection, anyone? The skills are linked to the appropriate pages in the DiabloWiki, since we’ve compiled our notes and massively updated the Barbarian Skills. Every single skill in all three trees (as seen at BlizzCon) is now listed; and since there are about 18 per tree, there are now more than 50 skills named, described, and discussed. Check out the Berserker, Battlemaster, and Juggernaut skill trees in the wiki, and read on to see the Barbarian play report and skill discussion. The report contains a lot of first hand Blizzcon play info that has not previously been posted. |
       
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