blizzard-entertainment posts

First announced nearly three years ago and under development for years beforehand, fans of the Diablo action-RPG franchise have been waiting, sometimes patiently and sometimes not so much, for developer Blizzard to release the third game in the series.

In a new article about the game at the New York Times web site, the game's director Jay Wilson still wouldn't cop to a release date but did say, "We're definitely in the home stretch. We're crunching. This is when the magic happens." That should make some fans breath easier but we suspect we still have several months before Diablo III finally comes out.

Blizzard has never been shy about announcing when it has banned groups of players from its games. Today the official StarCraft II web site has announced that it has made the decision to either suspend or ban a new group of players from accessing the multiplayer portion of the 2010 released sci-fi RTS games.

As it usually does with these announcements, Blizzard didn't reveal how many player accounts were affected by this latest round of suspensions and bans, saying only that those players, " ... were in violation of the Battle.net Terms of Use for cheating and/or using hack programs while playing. "

Blizzard Entertainment fans now know when to get ready to purchase tickets for the 2011 edition of the BlizzCon fan event. Blizzard announced today that tickets to attend the Anaheim, California show on October 21-22 will go on sale in two separate days; one on May 21 and the other on May 25.

Pricing for each ticket this year will be $175, a $25 increase from last year's ticket price. Even with the increase BlizzCon tickets will almost certainly sell out very quickly. The BlizzCon site also announced that the annual charity dinner held the night before BlizzCon will continue this year. Tickets for the October 20 event will go on sale May 28 with a price of $500. If you can't attend DirecTV will once again offer pay-per-view coverage of BlizzCon, via TV or online streaming video, for $39.99.

[Via VG274.com]

StarCraft II players now have access to the final and official versions of the custom mod maps that were first announced last October at BlizzCon. The maps, (the cooking themed Aiur Chef, the horror themed Left 2 Die, and the puzzle themed StarJeweled), each have their own special gameplay modes and rules. You can get info on all three maps at the official Maps and Mods web page.

All three maps have been able to be played in beta form for some time but today they are available to all players with a number of improvements and more importantly new official achievements to unlock for players. A fourth custom map that was shown at BlizzCon, Blizzard DOTA, has not yet been released.

Rumors with a little bit of evidence have hit the internet that seem to indicate that gaming media company IGN may be planning to launch its own professional gaming league, with Blizzard's sci-fi RTS game StarCraft II at the center of it.

Starcraft-themed web site TeamLiquid.net reports via Korean-based web sites that IGN will launch such a league with a prize pool of between $150,000 to $200,000. In addition there is a IGN Pro League web site already set up that seems to be counting down towards a launch around midnight Eastern time on Tuesday.

If true this would be the latest attempt to launch a US-based pro gaming league. At the moment only Major League Gaming has been successful at staying afloat with other ventures like the Cyberathlete Professional League, the Championship Gaming Series and the World Series of Video Games all closing up shop in the past few years.

Diablo III's release date may still be up in the air but for the action-RPG's latest April Fool's joke the game's official web site has posted up a (kind of) working game, the Horadapp. The web site, virtual smartphone lets you create combinations of four smaller "apps" in a Horadric Cube. There are 40 possible combinations of "apps" to create.

While this is just supposed to be just for fun, Blizzard has a pretty big disclaimer at the bottom of the web page where it states that it will not be responsible for "headaches, sleeplessness, rashes, hauntings, curses, dismemberment, disembowelment, evisceration, conflagration, immolation, insanity, demonic possession, or athlete's foot" while using the Horadric Cube app. And that's one to grow on.

So we know that Blizzard is at least thinking about making games for consoles again but this newly released April Fool's Day 2011 video shows that the company is further along than we might have thought. Yes, StarCraft II is coming to consoles and yes it has Kinect motion sensing support.

Seriously this video shows how people who play games with this motion controller look, well, rather silly. It goes to the extreme in this parody video where ... well that would spoil the final surprise. Let's just say that playing with a motion sensing controller can cause some physical issues.

Just a few days after releasing its big 1.3 patch for StarCraft II, developer Blizzard has gone ahead and released yet another, smaller patch for the hit sci-fi RTS game. This 1.3.1. patch, available via the game's auto updater, fixes a few smaller bugs that have popped up after the big 1.3 patch was released.

The patch notes have more info on the those bug fixes which include dealing with an issue where some players were not notified if they got a game achievement. Another bug that was stomped fixed an issue where the new 1.3 patch added observer UI features would not function correctly on custom maps for the game.

StarCraft II is now officially invading the many cyber cafes in China. The sci-fi RTS game from developer Blizzard and its Chinese publisher NetEase has now entered into open beta testing in that country and that it will get its official launch just a few days later on April 6.

The game will be sold in 30 day increments for the Chinese market which gives players access to both the multiplayer modes and the single player campaign for the equivalent of $3. The Chinese launch comes several months after StarCraft II was released in much of the world in late July 2010.

[Via VG247.com]

StarCraft II's latest major patch update is now officially live on the game's auto-update servers. This 1.3.0 patch for Blizzard's hit sci-fi RTS game has a bunch of new features along with a long list of bug fixes, game balance changes and map editor changes and improvements.

The big new feature for multiplayer gamers is the addition of the game's Grandmaster League which will invite the top 200 players in each of the game's global regions. In addition some players will receive new league icons that will show the top 8, 25 and 50 players in each division. There's also been a number of improvements to StarCraft II's custom game interface.