Hello everyone. I apologize in the long delay for my Diablo 3 review. I know the game has been out for a few months now, but I was hoping to progress through Inferno before posting anything, however, thanks to my wonderful job and me being in South Korea at the moment, I’ve found myself a little short on time.Anyway, without further delay… I present you with Diablo 3: A Long Overdue Review.
As the intro trailer suggests, The Diablo III Monk is every bit the expert melee combatant that you would expect. Continue Reading
As mentioned in Part I, Diablo III will be adding in a few new classes and one of the most interesting classes added to the third addition to this classic dungeon crawler is the Witch Doctor. Continue Reading
BlizzCon 2009 Artwork
This morning, Blizzard announced that they were cancelling this year’s annual festival where they usually hold rock concerts and showcase their latest in game-development.
Blizzard Entertainment, known for the World of Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo franchises, will be too busy working on developing games. A short press release from Blizz said: “We’re also heavily focused on getting Diablo III, Mists of Pandaria, and Heart of the Swarm into players’ hands as soon as possible.”
However, there will still be big tournaments for World of Warcraft Arena and Starcraft II later this year in the 2012 Battle.net World Championship Event. It will likely be one of the biggest eSports events of the year with pro-gamers around the world playing for the title.
The Championship is said to be taking place in Asia, but dates and times are yet to be confirmed. BlizzCon will be returning in 2013 for what will hopefully be the biggest one to date, considering their plans to skip this year, although this is of course good news if it means we get the next set of Blizzard games quicker.
Blizzard are known to be working on a mysterious MMO, named ‘Titan’, but the lack of news on that topic continues. But we are still expecting a few games from Blizz this year, including the next World of Warcraft expansion: Mists of Pandaria, the first Starcraft II expansion: Heart of the Swarm, and the third-entry into the Diablo Franchise: Diablo III, which is still in closed beta.
Akardo
In September, Blizzard Entertainment began sending out closed Beta Testing invites for the highly anticipated Diablo III. While it seems there have been a rather limited number of these highly sought after beta invites, I have been fortunate enough to have a friend ( thanks again Mike!) who has been kind enough to allow me to watch him play the game in order to write this series of content previews for the GTN readers! Continue Reading
Blizzard Entertainment have announced Foo Fighters as the musical guests at BlizzCon 2011.
The press release was released yesterday, announcing the headliners for the closing concert of this year’s BlizzCon on the 21-22 Oct.
Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl said: “We’re pretty sure that in the future, music historians will look back at BlizzCon 2011 as the unquestionable pinnacle of Foo Fighters’ long and illustrious career,” which you can’t argue with, they had Ozzy himself only two years ago.
BlizzCon first started in 2005 with only about 8000 people attending, this year’s Con is looking more like 30,000+ people, and the guests for the closing concert included Level 60 Elite Tauren Chieftain, a comedian, and The Offspring. Since then, it has just got bigger and bigger, with Ozzy Osbourne, and the D (Tenacious D) rocking the halls of Anaheim – just as Foo Fighters will do next month.
As of BlizzCon 2009, it was available live via internet stream and covered both days as well as exclusive interviews and discussion, this was available for a much more reasonable price of around £25, and the system is much improved as you now have choice over four halls on what to watch and when, plus it counts as a front row seat to see the closing ceremony.
This year, expect to see some Starcraft 2 updates tournaments from literally the best players around, plenty of World of Warcraft coverage, and probably most significant this year, Blizzard’s third franchise which has just gone into closed beta, the much anticipated: Diablo 3.
BlizzCon will run over two days on the 21 and 22 of October, and there are still an unallocated number of virtual tickets available from the website, which will give you great views for developer panels, competitions, tournaments, and the closing ceremony, not to mention the World of Warcraft in-game pet, Murkablo!
I’m away from home at the moment Dog/House sitting so anything I was writing about is more or less on hold. John Walker’s article for Rock, Paper, Shotgun on Blizzard’s insistence* on turning single player games into MMO’s needed reposting however, if only to get as many people aware of this nonsense as possible.
You can’t pause. In fact, in most ways, the game acts like an MMO. For instance, quit it, and you’re given the optional cooldown to have your player clear the server properly. But it’s not an MMO. It’s not even close to an MMO. So when I’m playing the single-player game, and I’m in the middle of a frenzied mob, and there’s a knock at the front door, there’s nothing I can do. As happened to me yesterday. Twice. On another occasion I was surprised by a phone call that led to my having to do some other things. I’d safely left my character in a cleared area, but long between checkpoints. When I came back to the PC, I’d been idle for too long and the game had logged me out. – John Walker
Anyway, here is the link to the full article, if you are considering buying Diablo III you really should read it before placing that order…
How Diablo III’s DRM Will Affect You.
Diablo III has been delayed until the early part of next year, so there is a while for Blizzard to go back on this ridiculous decision, and a while for you to decide if it is enough to stop you buying the game.
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* In my opinion because it gives them more control and money rather for any of the reasons they claim about making the game better.
Trion Worlds released their widely popular MMO-RPG earlier this year. On its release many players in the gaming community said that this would be the “WoW-Killer”, and in part, they were correct. While World of Warcraft will always hold Blizzard‘s fanbase close to it, the game itself leaves much to be desired for those who came from other MMO-RPGs such as EverQuest. Where World of Warcraft is lacking in these aspects, however, RIFT takes up the slack.
RIFT uses an interface that is extremely similiar to WoW’s and nearly all other MMOs, but, hey, if it’s not broken, don’t fix it, right? RIFT however takes leaps and bounds over World of Warcraft and similar MMOs with its graphics. While the characters have a certain Dragon-Age feel to them, they are highly customizable. And let’s not forget the details and graphics present in this game. Visually, RIFT makes up for everything that WoW lacks. RIFT uses a more realistic color scheme instead of the bright and vibrant, almost cartoony, color scheme that is present in World of Warcraft, which is much easier on the eyes. Continue Reading
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