diablo-3 posts

The Jace Hall Show had the honor of showing off the first images of the Diablo III female Monk character but now the action-RPG's official web site has made the look of the character official. The web page featuring the monk class is now showing the character art for the female version of the class.

There's also a look at what the character's visuals look like with the in-game character model. Both the concept art and the character render make the female monk look like a cross between Annie Lennox and Jennifer Love Hewitt. At least that's how it looks to us. Your mileage may vary.

IGN's second episode of The Jace Hall Show is now online and it has the second part of the former Monolith head's visit to Blizzard offices. We also get to see some funny-weird stuff in this segment including Stan Lee ruining Hall's copy of Incredible Hulk 1 and original V's star Jane Badler seemingly swallowing a real life mouse (and we are not kidding about that).

But you don't really care about that. You want to know if anything was revealed in the Blizzard visit. As a matter of fact the show did show what looks like some legit art designs for the female Monk class in Diablo III . . . which Hall then tried to steal. Nice. And next week's episode takes place in a StarCraft II design meeting. What will we learn, if anything, from that show? Stay tuned. In the meantime you can check out the episode after the jump.

[Via BlizzPlanet]

A few months ago there were strong indicators that the 2010 edition of BlizzCon would be held in Las Vegas. Those reports were pretty quickly proven to be incorrect. Now our sister site WoW.com has posted up word that Blizzard's (sort of) annual fan event may have a final date and location.

According to a post at the Anaheim (CA) Convention Center web site (that has since been removed after WoW.com's first story) BlizzCon 2010 now has a date of October 22-23. Of course the convention center has been the home of BlizzCon since its start. Blizzard has yet to officially confirm the dates and location for BlizzCon. Last year the event had 26,000 fans attend (ticket sold out almost immediately) who got to play new builds of StarCraft II and Diablo III. What's in store for this year's show? Stay tuned.

So there's been a flurry of activity on the StarCraft II side this week, some of it true and some of it . . . well, just wishful thinking. But Blizzard does have another game in the works. Even though the title won't be released until 2011 at the earliest, the official Diablo III web site has posted up 10 new screenshots to remind us that , yes, they are still working on their action-RPG sequel.

We have added all 10 new visuals to our own Diablo III gallery. They all appear to be from the desert-dungeon area that was first shown during BlizzCon last August. We suspect new screenshots will all we will be getting from Blizzard on the game until the next BlizzCon.

While all of us wait patiently for Blizzard to finish Diablo III (even though we know we won't get to play the game until 2011 at the earliest), some fans of the franchise's last outing Diablo II have also been waiting a long time for a new patch. This week Blizzard announced that a beta version of the 1.13 patch is now available on Blizzard's test server.

The patch notes on the Battle.net message board give info on how to access the test server as well as a list of what's new and improved in the patch. In addition to bug fixes and game balance changes the 1.13 patch will give players "new and challenging tests" to deal with.

Fans of the Diablo series know that for the upcoming third installment in Blizzard's action-RPG series the game developers have been working with a tree-style of architecture for their character skill system. Well, that seems to be officially out of the game design now, according to Blizzard's Jay Wilson

Speaking to site Diablo Fans (natch) Wilson states, "About that, we've decided to remove the tree-type architecture and we are moving into a purely skill-based system." Wilson admits that their new skill system is still in the early design stages and that they wanted to try out a few new ideas. He adds, "It differs from the World of Warcraft/Diablo II type hierarchical styles and is more of a skill pool/path than a tree per se." Since Diablo III's release date is at least two years away we think they have some time to come up with something.

[Via Blue's News]

Blizzard is currently targeting the release of StarCraft II for the first half of 2010 and their next World of Warcraft expansion pack, Cataclysm, is due out sometime in 2010 as well. But what about Diablo III? Blizzard first announced the action-RPG sequel nearly 18 months ago but has yet to give any hint on a ship date for that highly anticipated game.

The newly launched Techland web site (run by Time magazine) has posted up some quotes from Blizzard exec Rob Pardo on that subject. He admits that Diablo III " . . . is not going to be out next year." So why announce a game that is going to take so long to develop? He also admits. "We always announce all of our games too early. We realize that and go, 'You know what? Next time we're not going to do that.' And then we always fail at that." However he says Blizzard would rather be late in releasing a game like Diablo III than releasing a game on time that just doesn't work. In fact going forward Pardo says their attitude when revealing a new title is, "Here's the game we're working on, we're going to start talking about it and who knows when it ships."

Games that are coming out soon have a lot of unknowns that the average person might not know. Who is this character inspired by? Is all the talk of volumetric fog or cel-shaded graphics really worthwhile? Do the game mechanics really seem solid, or are they lackluster? In All You Need To Know we provide information to help you fully appreciate what these upcoming games have to offer.

Feed your head after the jump.

Check out our collection of Diablo III related downloads here on Big Download!

BlizzCon 2009 happened less than a week ago, but the announcements still resonate among fans. Big premieres included revealing that the Monk class would be included in Diablo III. Longtime players or the series might recall that there was a Monk class included in the Hellfire expansion for the original Diablo. However, that wasn't a Blizzard-made expansion, and is therefore not included in the game's official canon or lore.

The new class will be a fast-paced melee fighter that can chain together moves into devastating combos. There's still no word on when fans can expect the game to release, but we're hoping it will come out sometime in 2010. You can see the Monk in action in the Diablo III gameplay video shown after the jump.

Download HD Diablo III Monk Trailer (64 MB)
Download HD Diablo III Monk Gameplay Video (354 MB)
Check out all Diablo III downloads

When we got a chance to go hands-on with the newly revealed Diablo III Monk character at BlizzCon this weekend, we go to see blood. Lots of blood. Blood in extraordinary quantities (to quote Alan Moore). Yes, the action-RPG sequel will indeed be a showcase for developer Blizzard to see lots of creatures blow up a lot of the red stuff.

But what about countries where the red stuff in games is frowned upon? Over at Wired, Diablo III lead designer Jay Wilson states, " Definitely for regions like Germany and Australia, we will have to change blood if we're going to sell there." And its looking like the game may not be sold in China at all with Wilson saying, "Because a lot of the restrictions there are really... we may not be able to do them. It may not be possible." Wilson also says that Diablo III will have parental controls that will allow anyone to tone down the blood and change its color.