DiabloFans

Does this count?

Acid Cloud is probably the best looking runed skill I've seen thus far...C'MON JAY, GIVE US THAT ARTICLE!!

Haha nice. That first one with the granny...

Screw you guys (Blizz), I'm going home.

Quote from KidMi

If you consider what we have been seeing from the interwebs , manuals , posters and now the Germans news , i think we can expect the game mid march ...

The so called big system changes can very well by patched when you install the game for the first time so , yes late Feb- mid march for sure

First Portrugues Post ? Mayby

Déjà vu? I know I've read this in another thread already...

Quote from Ardikus

Official Blizzard Quote:

While it is indeed playable from beginning to end, we’re still actively working on many individual game elements and the ways that they interact with one another, with a great deal of iterative tweaking, balancing, polishing, adjusting, redesigning, and retesting going on.

I understand everything here except "redesigning".

Come on, this is NOT a time to return to the drawing board.

That's just it, Blizz are seeking for flaws in every single element of D3 cause they have nothing else to do. If you listen/watch/play/eat/drink something to much on a regularly basis, you WILL find something to complain about. The big issue here it the Korean RMAH and yes there are more, but not as big as this. This is something that has to be resolved before Blizz can do anything regarding the release date.

That's why they are redesigning everything (of course nothing is perfect, hence there's always a flaw, but this is to much). They have nothing else to do, they are waiting for the Korea RMAH thing to be settled.

I'm gonna bring this up again, but Blizz initially "aimed" for a late 2011 release. This must mean something if Blizz of all companies says something like this...they must've been confident in this release date. But something happened...

What if Blizz give us a narrowed release date this December (lets say Feb) according to how they think the RMAH in Korea will get resolved (ie in early Jan). Then comes early Jan and Korea hasn't made a decision yet...Blizz is gonna crap their pants and people will rage. That's why Blizz isn't gonna announce "another" release date before they are 100% sure of it.

Quote from Moxx

I don't believe him for a second. Read http://daeity.blogspot.com/ if you want to know a lot more about this. it isn't my blog, but I discovered it a few weeks ago. I very very much recommend it. It will all make sense if you read this thing. I can guarantee you that the RMAH is holding them back, and that alone. The reason why there are so many things they are still working on is because they suddenly got a lot more time because the RMAH hasn't been approved in Korea yet. The report from Korea comes in january, and that's when we will get a release date. Blizzard simply doesn't know when the game will be released, because it is entirely up to the government of Korea. In short, blizzard is prioritizing Korea over the rest of the world, and they decided to balance the game further because they now have unexpected development time.
The guy writing the blog above says it so much better than me, and in far greater depth, so go read it. There's a reason why they delete every post on the official forums that contains links to the blog above, because it's the truth. Trust me.

http://daeity.blogspot.com/

+1 Yeah, I also read his blog, he just have some info we don't even know about.

Quote from Deventh

After more than 4 years of development it is very hard to say that the game is not finished. At this period they made so many changes that diablo 3 could be split in 5 different games. If they stick with one design and model, the game would've been released back in 2010.

Haha I wanted to say this when I read the OP! They have made so many iterations to D3, it's scary, they probably can make about 5 games with all the content they went through.

Quote from Umpa

Not even a masterball can catch me.

Dunno how much this has to do with you not being able be get caught by a masterball...

So, do you guys think they'll give us a release date somewhere in December, more likely Dec 31ste since it's Diablo 1's 15th aniversary. Or do you think they'll give us one somewhere in January, after Blizz's deliberations with Korea's RMAH situation is supposed to be resolved?

At this point I don't really know. Each time I think: "Yeah, this time they'll definitely announce the release date", I get smashed in the face with no such thing...

2010...
no, definitely before the end of 2011...
no, definitely at Blizzcon 2011...
no, definitely at the VGA's...
no, definitely before the end of 2011...
no, definitely in early January...
no, definitely in the first half of 2012...
no, definitely on the 30st of May (the day before they release the game)...
no, definitely on 31st of May...
no...wait, what? Oh yeah Oxford Dicionary - Blizz version:

ear·ly   [ur-lee] Show IPA adverb, -li·er, -li·est, adjective, -li·er, -li·est, noun, plural -lies.
adverb
1. on the 31st of May, a course of action, a series of events, etc.: early in the year (May 31st).
2. in the early part of the year (May 31st): to get up early on May 31st.
3. before the usual or appointed time; ahead of time: Blizz finally announced Diablo 3's release date on May 31st (early).
4. far back in time: Blizzard learned early to disappoint and troll their devoted fans.

Quote from Mysticjbyrd

Quote from Ardikus

I'll bet $1million that at the end of the cinematic trailer it will just say "Coming soon" or "Coming in 2012".

I will take that bet!!!
That is an easy win! WOOOT one million dollars

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTmXHvGZiSY

January 17th viable? Yes.

(Edit: Also added some kitties to make the reading easier.)

All of you should know this by now, but might have forgotten or just pushed it to the back of your head. Blizz initially stated that they aimed to release D3 at the end of 2011 if nothing went wrong. This implies that they probably could've released it then, but with a couple of bugs and most likely without the RMAH. If they really pushed the 2011 release, they would've included the RMAH maybe between the first and second patch of the beta. Maybe even in the initial beta release.

If Blizz say something like that they aim for 2011, you must know they really think they might be able to do it, since they usually announce release dates about 2 months prior to official release, hence they aimed to announce the release date in Sep/Oct, which at this point, sounds ridiculous.

In the meantime, after they announced the "early 2012 push back", they probably slowed down a bit and went over the mechanics of the game which required the most attention (AH and runes the 2 biggies) and of course the beta players' responses.



Likely? Meh.

The Blizzard ANZ tweet and the thread. It's obviously not an official announcement of any sort, but it does sounds kinda solid, depending on how you interpret the tweets! (most of us will say it's release, cause it's the most sought out thing in the universe atm. And it isn't the Full Opening Cinematic, cause it has been announced already) . If they do announce the release date at the VGAs (promoting myself a bit ), late Jan/early Feb is most likely.

I also read this regarding the RMAH and Rating(18+) situation in Korea. Blizz is still trying to sort it out (Translated) source:

Diablo III - Korea Ratings Under Consideration

As we approach it's release, players can review the ratings to see if it is within their age group and if the game is suitable for them. We recently contacted the Korea Ratings Board to receive a Diablo III classification. We are aiming for a Mature Adult 18+ rating. The ratings for consideration were based on the latest version of the game and they have been provided a full version with all elements of the game included. We will provide more information and progress of their deliberations sometime at a later date.

I'm sure this won't take long now, since Blizz recently contacted the Korea Ratings Board. But it did take long from beginning compared to already assigned Ratings in other countries:

US - M (26 Sep)(not necessarily the exact date)
UK - 15 (4 Okt-ish)
Germany - 16+ (31 Aug)

So why does it take so long?

The Auction House

There have been many questions about the currency auction house. An auction system like this is in some ways an unprecedented new effort, and there are different regulations and laws in other regions, which we are working on. After an internal investigation, we concluded that the auction house system is legitimate in Korea. However, we respect and are taking the classification system for each region very seriously. Blizzard has been working closely with the national regulation groups, and we are cooperating fully with the Korea rating committee. We are getting closer to release more information, and we will let you know the status soon.

This will take longer to sort out than the Rating. So yeah.

Quote from jabroni85

AH is working great IMO, and i think Jan 24th but probably the 31st, first week in Feb at the latest.

DO you mean the Gold AH? Then yes, otherwise no. The RMAH still has many bugs.

Quote from Brake Failure

I wonder what the odds of them officially announcing th their pushing the date back again are, or will they just not release it without formally stating, ok, late 2012 now.

Yes I think if they do intend to push the release back again, they will definitely not announce it!! Defecation will get accumulated in many people's pants!

I also think they might have pushed the release back another couple of notches: Do you remember the A Day In The Life articles? There were initially only 3 "issues" but there were recently added 2 more articles...

Blizz obviously wants to keep us busy/distracted. They spread out the info they're gonna release to the public between now and when the game is eventually released. Also the art, omgeez the art.

Just a thought though.

Edit: Hope this bring some perspective otherwise I wasted a lot of time doin this... <_<

UPDATE 11/15:

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/3558806470?page=9#163

Ok, I had bad or maybe old info.

Updated my previous post with "It's 1 per *character* you create. You can't drop or trade them, and can't sell them on the AH, of course."

------------------------------------



http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/3558806470#15


Number of uses/How to use:

The CE dyes are infinite in their use. Keep them forever, dye as much stuff as you want "Cloud" or "Smoke" colored. The colors are unique to the CE.

The wings are an item you hold in your inventory (don't take up an equipment slot on your character), and it's a toggle. Use to turn on, use again to turn off. They're awesome looking, and stack with other class effects like Shadow Power and Archon.

How many?

It's 1 per account. If you want to trade to another character you'd just want to put it in your shared stash before logging out. Same with the dyes.

"How does that apply to hardcore characters? Is there a chance they could loose the wings + dye if they kept them on the character?"

Ah, uh, er... hrm. That's a good question. We'll bring that up in our next meeting.

Hello there guys!

I'm glad to announce that I'll be making some diablo 3 strips and cartoons for this forum!
I have a ton of work to deliver right now, but I'll make some free time in my schedule for this project. I will do my best to keep updates coming on a weekly basis.

So, first things first, these are some of the tortured souls characters that will join us in our journey!



FIZZ, THE BARBARIAN!
Full Name: Fizz Icks, of the Moon. ..no pun intended.





PILLAR, THE MONK!
Likes: Meditation, temples, pillars, bells, all sorts of monk stuff.





DOC, THE WITCH DOCTOR
Fun fact: His mother was a Witch, and his father was a Doctor





ARIA, THE WIZARD!
Full Name: Aria Offeh Fect.





RAVEN and FERRET, DEMON HUNTERS
Lots of hatred, zero discipline.



Team is ready to go, stay tunned for more!

My take on the controversial pillar-summoning attack.




Enjoy, comment and rate!

So I was watching this press interview that Jesse(OMFGcata) posted on his channel where Robert Bridenbecker, Vice President of Online Technologies at Blizzard, talk about stuff and he said some things I found interesting. I'm not sure if this was already known, but I sure haven't heard about it so here goes (Yea I saw this video has been posted in another thread, but figured some people would want this brought to light).

There are no region locks at all for servers. For example: If you buy the game in NA you can still play anywhere, the only lock is for the RMAH auction house.

Excluding certain regions where the market is quite different, such as China.


Your account registration details will determine where you can use the RMAH. If it's set to Britain your default RMAH will be GPB and your playzone will be Europe. Playzone is changeable to where you want to play.
It was also stated that since there may be multiple currencies within a specific region you are free to, if you so wish, use the other currencies RMAH within your region.

Blizzard doesn't expect this to be very popular though due to those purchases being subject to currency exchange fee's and such.

Also there was some additional info regarding regional clients:


Some more interesting bits can be found in the full Interview:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZirE9nd8ILc

Azmodan's Generals have finally been revealed!!

Azmodan, Inc.
We Sin because we care!

All too often the cinematic side of games are overlooked by the majority of players. In many cases, especially in todays day and age, more effort is placed into these short hyper-detailed cinematographs than any scene of similar length from most full length movies. An exceptionally executed short clip often suffers due to its length. Being so short, it can be easily overlooked, or skipped without much second thought.

What I'd like to help get across in this article is how much collaboration and skill it takes to create a truly fantastic cinematic. To fabricate such a believable, and detailed world through a computer takes an insane amount of time and precision. It could take thousands of man hours to create a three minute clip as seen in The Black Soulstone. I'll do my best to convoy the process as talked about at this panel. Also for the sake of not turning this article into a picture book, I'm going to link relative picture to text, so click the links to check out the pics.

Before the presentation had even really begun, we found out that The Black Soulstone clip (which is not the full clip due to spoilers) is only 3 out of 27 minutes of cinematic cutscenes that will be in Diablo III. I don't know about you guys, but 27 minutes of cutscenes like this is in itself enough for me to get a bag of popcorn and watch one by one.


The most important part of a cinematic is how well it tells a story. This process starts off as storyboards, a collective effort from the team to sketch out in minimal detail scenes they want to link together forming the cinematic. A directer and their crew sits down and forms the storyboard, with close collaboration of the relative crews that will help work on it. This process covers the entire production from start to finish. Be it visual, musical, or character progression; everything has to be planned in the storyboard.

An example given was how Leah is afraid of Azmodan. How she expresses this fear has to be planned in the storyboard. This one small choice can make a huge impact on Leahs' character progression. If she screams and freaks out, this says something completely different about her than if she just flinches and shies away. Camera angles and focal points also help convoy character emotion. Again, this is where it all begins.



Color Scripting

Color has a huge effect on how a scene is perceived, this fact is supported by mentioning there is an entire crew devoted to just color scripting. Diablo with all of its earthy hues is particularly sensitive to this color directing. It is so important in fact that the color translation from early rendering to final production is very often spot on the same.





The development of a character in Diablo III pivots around three main concepts, game relevance, suiting to the story, and available technology. Azmodan has gone through many iterations, from a mix of Angel and Demon, through a kind of warrior look, and finally to the crab/sumo wrestler you see today. This final concept was chosen because it represents all of the seven sins in which Azmodan, the Lord Of Sin encompasses. For example the shape of his body suggests gluttony and greed, while his body decorations suggest pride and vanity.

After a characters concept is complete, it must be brought to life. Through a massive effort from many teams, a character is modeled in 3D, textured & colored, rigged for ease of animation, animated, and tweaked for who knows how long before finally making the directors standard. To state that this is an over-simplification is a understatement.

At this level of professionalism, not everything takes as long as you may think though. For example most of the demon horde you seen in the cinematic was conceptualized and preliminarily modeled in just two days. Life is in the details though, and these details are what take the most time to perfect in these creature models. After initial modeling, the item is passed onto the next team which specializes in texturing. Using the initial 2D concept art, the texture team works on translating that 2D texture into 3D, and accurately spreading it around the creature. They aim to perfectly match the 2D concept, since that is indeed where the director chose to finalize the creature.



Particle Effects

Beyond the character models themselves, there are tons of surrounding particle effects that add just as much "character" to the character as the traditional traits like skin, voice, and attitude do. For example, the smokey effect from the Lich Kings eyes adds a lot of supernatural meaning to him. Another example is the smoke rolling off the demons in the Black Soulstone cinematic. These effects have to be subtle, for if they draw too much attention to themselves it distracts the viewer from much more important things happening on screen.



Reference From Real Life

When you're aiming to make something believable, what better way than to study related things in real life? This is exactly what the cinematic teams do throughout their work. This is done through setting up target textures, lighting effects, skin tones/textures, etc and photographing them in real life. Then after capturing their target images, the team recreates them over the computer. This is painstakingly done brush stroke by brush stroke using various software.



Leah

As with perfecting textures and lighting effects, to perfect a believable rendered human first you must study one. To drive the development of Leah, the teams studied how things appear in real life when under similar conditions to what they wanted to reproduce in the cinematic. In general they setup a photographic environment like the one at the beginning of the cinematic, complete with a stone, a girl (their producer), candles, and great lighting. The photograph was then manipulated to closer match what the director wanted to see as the final result in the cinematic.

Continuing with their study, they took close-up shots of various eyes and facial expressions to better understand how to accurately reproduce a face, which is arguably the hardest thing to do when speaking of realistic art. In Blizzard fashion, they went so much further than just simple photos. They setup a specialized camera rig to capture light exposure, color saturation, and texture mapping of various faces, which they can directly use while creating the character model. From early rendering to near completion takes hundreds and hundreds of tweaks to everything from lighting, to textures, shaders, and many other factors even with the assistance of real life examples.



Facial Animation

As with lighting and texturing, the animation team began their study via photographing relative real life objects. They first took hundreds of photos of different facial expressions to identify how the different facial muscles moved during each expression. Their goal in this was to replicate every muscle in the face into their character model so they would be able to perfectly reproduce different emotions through the character, they reached this goal, and the results speak for themselves.

They did the same thing for eye expressions. When observed closely, the human eyes and eyelids have tiny micro twitches, which we don't even notice until they're not there. When viewing older character models up close in cinematics, something looks off. You can't always place your finger on it, but something tips your brain off that this isn't real, and that negatively effects how that character conveys emotions. It's through these tiny movements that the character comes to life, and suddenly all of their emotions become so much more believable. This can be seen as Leah falls asleep into her dream during the cinematic.

This trend of study also made its way into hand and writing observations. Little things like how a pen indents the paper as you write, or how certain small muscles contract during tiny movements. Through the close collaboration of the animation, rigging, and modeling teams they eventually achieved their goals of a believable character, interacting with a believable world.



Dynamic Systems

Features of a character which constantly change drastically are known as Dynamic Systems. Take hair, and clothes for example. With their success in real life studies, similar simulation techniques were used to perfect hair animation. They tracked down a coworker with similar hair to Leah, found a fan, and went to work replicating movements Leah had to do in the cinematic, with the added effect of wind.

After they had all the info and observations they needed, they moved onto modeling, and animation. Hair poses a problem in that there are hundreds of thousands of strands of air, which are near impossible to compute or individually animate. So instead of dealing with each strand one by one, they start off with very large chunks, maybe five in total. Then they'll break those chunks up to say 200. Those smaller number of strands are what actually move individually. On top of those large strands they add in hair models and effects in order to make it look like there are hundreds of thousands of strands moving.






Another thing the Dynamic Systems Team covers are rigs. Essentially rigs are basic models of the character that are broken down into separate parts and placed on different pivot points to enable the animation team to make the characters move. Think of a rig like an action figure. This process in itself is precision work, since if a model isn't rigged correctly, it will be impossible to creature realistic movements in the end character.

What's interesting is that the movements don't always have to make perfect sense, as long as you're not looking at the entire model. In the scene to the bottom left Azmodan is completely hunched over, which looks reasonable from that camera angle. Now if you zoom out and look at the entire rig to the bottom center, you now see he is actually broken, which says that his movement was impossible speaking realistically.






To make those believable movements, first the team had to observe similar creatures in real life. Sad fact though, nothing on Earth is exactly like Azmodan. So instead, they choice to observe crabs for lower body movements, and sumo wrestlers for his upper body movements. Through excellent creativity they managed to merge these two and were left with a very believable rig.



Azmodan Speaks

Their next production challenge was to get Azmodan to believably speak without any lips. In order to produce sounds such as "P" and "B" you need to have a way to block air flow for a second. It just so happens Azmodan has no lips, so instead they used very pronounced movements of his mandibles and tongue to create relative actions to syllables. The end result comes across great, and adds to his creepy factor during the close-up shots.



The Hordes Of Hell

During the end of the cinematic there are tons of creatures marching around, each seemingly doing their own things. In order to populate the entire screen with great looking creature animations, they needed to use some smoke and mirrors. The creatures in the far back are using very simple animations, which don't have those little detailed movements we see in more important close-up shots. The more important, and unique animations are called "Hero Animations". As the link shows, this classification of animation is not bound to living creatures. Another trick they used in order to create the illusion of every creature having uniqueness, is to individually tweak how they hold their weapons. By tweaking this they create a great silhouette across the entire army, where no two spears are tilted in the exact same direction.



The Right Stuff

Not everything makes it into the final cut, in fact most of the original concepts don't. On of these that they talked about was Azmodans lava drool. They tested all different kind of viscosities until they found one that worked, they added lighting and texture, and even went as far as you add it on the finial model. Even through all this, the end result didn't come across right. They felt it made Azmo feel sloppy, and even comical, two things that are not part of Azmodans characteristics; so they cut it completely. Some effects that did make the final cut for Azmodan include awesome things like active lighting effects from his mouth and eyes along side a heat distortion filter.



Lighting Effects

Lighting effects can make or break everything in a cinematic. During the panel Blizzard mentioned how they adopted the same cutting edge effects major motion picture companies are using. These effects make for great lighting across the entire world, but in particular, faces. No one looks good under a harsh light, it blows out every little detail to an undesirable degree. Through combining the crisp detail of a hard light, and the blended effects of a soft light, they achieved a great shot which looks both crisp and delicate.







A character has many different light sources effecting them at once. The example they showed was of Leah, which is under five completely different light sources when she faces Azmodan in her dream. When combining all of these, they can go back and tweak each one until they are happy with the result. The second type of lighting passes they spoke about are called render elements. These are essentially just the various layers of each shot. Each other these layers have their own effects which add to the shot, but don't effect one another directly.



Bringing Down The Walls

Moving onto the scene where Azmodan brings down the rock wall, revealing his plan to evade Sanctuary, how this was achieved is pretty amazing. Aside from all the lighting effects which had to be changed as the wall comes down, how they broke the wall itself is pretty interesting. They used a shaping technique called Voronoi. Essentially, they place random dots across a plane, draw lines equal distances from these dots, then uses the lines to create organic shapes which look very natural.







It is also worth mentioning that the falling rocks didn't go through any type of physics simulator. The director had a very specific visual in mind, and so every single one of the 40,000+ rocks you see were animated individually as the fell and interacted with each other.


Well that about wraps it up, I hope you enjoyed our journey through the making of the Black Soulstone Cinematic, and learned a little bit about the absurd amount of effort that goes into creating these windows into Sanctuary.



If you missed any of our other Blizzcon coverages, by sure to check out the Blizzcon Hub, and catch up on what happened regarding Diablo III.

Let's begin with the stuff we already know, or at least we thought we knew. With the introduction of the Book of Cain, the aim of this release is to help consolidate, sharpen, and retcom the lore of the previous games. Chris Metzen commented how the original lore of the franchise was basically a mess with so many people with their hands in its creation. Much of the lore is remaining the same but there are some clarifications and minor changes that they needed to change to help tell a better story.

The Beginning

Starting at the very very beginning, the Diablo team has created an origin of their Universe. Legend in the Book of Cain, two primordial beings were in a constant struggle between good and bad. Anu, a creature representing good made of primarily diamond and Dragon Tathamet, a seven-headed dragon who breathed evil. The two destroyed each other and the after math essentially created the High Heavens and the Burning Hells. A part of Anu, the Crystal Eye, created the Worldstone. The Worldstone is said to be able to create worlds and reality. It is this Worldstone that the Angels and Demons are fighting over.

This fight takes place in Pandemonium. You may remember a part of this area from Diablo II before going into Hell. For hundreds of thousands of years, Angels and Demons have fought over control over this area and the Worldstone itself. Inarius, an Angel, and Lilith, a demon, were sick of this eternal struggle so they decided to leave this battle and create their own world. They manage to get to the Worldstone and essentially steal it from the Pandemonium. They bring the stone into another dimension and in this dimension they create Sanctuary, a paradise. Eventually, Angels and Demons procreate and create the Nephalem. The Worldstone slowly drains the Nephalem's powers reducing them to mere men while innately, they hold the power to be stronger then both Angels and Demons.

Now, some Angels and Demons eventually find out what Inarius and Lillith has done and discovery Sanctuary. However, both sides agree to let man live without influence of either side. However, demons being evil, they decide to try to corrupt man. The three prime evils set a plan in motion while Azmodan and Belial are unhappy with the break of the pact with Heaven. After exiling them to Sanctuary, Belial and Azmodan create a civil war for power in Hell.

Back on Sanctuary, it has been retconned that the actual hero from Diablo I is Aidan, King Loeric's eldest son. As for his back story, Aidan was missing from Tristram right before the events of Diablo I because he was leading an attack on Westmarch, an order made due to Diablo's corruption of King Leoric. He comes back to Tristram to find out his father has gone mad and his younger brother has been kidnapped by Lazarus and we all know what happens from there. Just to note, a big reason for this change was merely to give this character more weight and importance to help tell a better story.

Angels

Moving on from the past, the panel moved to the importance of the role of Angels in Sanctuary. It was mentioned that they have developed a lot more into this side of the conflict to help build and expand the world of Sanctuary. It was mentioned that their role will only get bigger as the franchise progresses. The Angels are created from the Crystal Arch, Anu's spine, of light and sounds. As far as going to the High Heavens themselves, it was not answered one way or the other. The biggest section of the Angels and the High Heavens is the Angris Council. A group of five Angels comprise of the council and rule over the Heavens.

• Tyrael the Angel of Justice - Tyrael becomes the rouge angel after he witnesses Uldyssian's self-sacrifice and sees man's potential.
• Auriel the Angel of Hope - Auriel is the Angel the holds the group together.
• Malthael the Angel of Wisdom - Malthael begins to go mad and darker due to the unknown reasoning and existence of man.
• Imperius the Angel of Valor - Imperius is a warrior at heart and wants to destroy all semblance of demons including humans.
• Itherael the Angel of Fate - Itherael can see all paths of future except for that of mankind since their existence was unforeseen.

Demons

Opposing the Angels are the main Demons of Diablo III. Belial and Azmodan are the only two remaining Evils after the events of Diablo II. With the destruction of the Worldstone, their focuses have moved to Sanctuary.

Belial the Lord of Lies

Belial uses coercion and lies to get others to fight for him. The Triune and vipers are underlings to Belial. It was also noted that in gameplay, many of his underlings will appear human and then turn on you. Belial's pressence will be encountered in Act II around Caldeum. The once prosperous city has fallen and refugees are on the verge of death. Your hero will come into the story trying to figure out how the city has fallen and why Belial is there.

Azmodan the Lord of Sin

Azmodan has two of the sins in Diablo III who work for him. Much more pronounced and hands-on the Belial, Azmodan had ruled Hell for over 300 years and is now emerging in Sanctuary to obtain the Black Soulstone to obtain the greatest power. His siege will pour forth from Arreat Crater to attack Sanctuary. On a side note, Sedeah, the Maiden of Lust, was originally the Mistress of Pain who was removed but brought back thanks to the costume contest winner of the 2010 Blizzcon.



Black Soulstone

While not much was revealed about the Black Soulstone is was said that Leah is trying to use it to capture and destroy Belial and Azmodan. However, Azmodan is trying to obtain it himself because it will bestow him power that will make him stronger than any other Demon in Hell.


Areas

Three new areas were shown from Act II. All three of these areas are playable and play an important part in telling the story as we progress through this Act.

Caldeum - Caldeum was the jewel of the East. In became the trading center for all of Sanctuary. However, there was turmoil due to the Zakarum, rich merchants, and Wizards all vying for power over the city. Hakan eventually took rule and united the three groups to create the most prosperous city. However, his death left a son to young to rule the city. The Iron Wolves, lead by Asheara from Diablo II, were hired to protect him until he was old enough to rule the city. However, Hakan II removed them and replaced them with his own Caldeum guards. However, Asheara is unsure of why he made this decision.

Dahlgur Oasis - This small paradise was the birth of Caldeum. A mysterious man rose from the waste and showed the original settlers this source of water which was used to help begin Caldeum. However, the story is said that this mysterious man disappeared back into the waste after showing them.

The Archives of Zultun Kulle - Zultun Kulle was one of the original members of the Horadrim who helped capture the Prime Evils the first time. However, he eventually became corrupt and evil. He was so strong that they could not kill him they cut him in half. They removed his head and buried it underground surrounded by magical runes. His body has sent into another dimension.

Questions and Answers

I will be paraphrasing these questions. We will have complete video coverage of the panel later for direct reference.

Q: Is Adria dead?
A: Yes, you will find out how in Diablo III

Q: Can Angels become Demons?
A: No, but they can be corrupted and become evil. You will also see Izual again in Diablo III.

Q: Who is Leah's father?
A: No comment (Although this is odd because it was already released that Aidan, the hero from Diablo I, is her father.

Q: Will the heroes from Diablo II have an appearance?
A: To some degree. Some are hinted at. The Necro's apprentice is in Act II.

Q: What was the effect of the Worldstone's destruction?
A: Azmodan's invasion is a direct effect. Also, it is possible it was not actually destroyed since it was only in Sanctuary as a shift in its dimensional existence.

Q: Will Trag'Oul be in Diablo III?
A: No, after putting the Necromancers' on their path, he has disappeared.

Q: What about the lesser evils not having soulstones?
A: "I wouldn't leave them"

Q: Why is Arreat Creater the place of the invasion?
A: Logically, it is where the Worldstone disappeared so it is likely the place where reality is weakest currently.

Q: Will items connect with lore?
A: Yes, a lot of Legendary items are tied to lore of previous and new lore.

Q: Will Ormus appear in Diablo III?
A: He was and then removed but I would like for him to come back.

Q: Will we see any areas from Diablo II?
A: Other than Tristram, no.

Q: Why does Diablo need a human body but not always?
A: He primarily needs a body because he is weakened in Sanctuary. It is also because being a human host helps anchor him into the dimension of Sanctuary.


You can also see every image shown during this panel here.

Gameplay

With the game drawing tantalizingly close to completion, there wasn't any ground braking announcements in this particular panel, but one could say none were expected. Most, if not all of the game features have been announced prior, even if they have not been detailed yet. So in that light, while nothing completely new was founded, we received a great deal of detail on already existent features.

Achievements & Banner
As the panel opened they jumped right into it, beginning with Achievements. We've heard very little on this front in the past, so any news on them was welcomed. There are three main ways to progress through your achievements.

• Game Progression:

This is rather self explanatory, there will be achievements for progressing through the game such as completing a difficulty, or defeating a boss.

• Obscure Gameplay:

So you've defeated the normal difficulty, neat. How about weaponless, or even gear-less? Such feats of insanity will be rewarded via achievements.

• Longterm Goals:

These goals include things such as completing the Bestiary, a feature while tracks what creatures you've encountered. Or finding every lore book in the game.

Your achievements progress reflects onto your Banner, slowly but surely adding new ribbons, facets, or other features. New ways to personalize your banner may become available through these achievements also. These small additions to your banner themselves expand as you complete more and more achievements. For example, as you progress in a certain category of achievements more gems may start appearing on a ribbon dangling from your banner. Or as you play through more Hardcore content the mound of skulls and bones under your banner will grow.



Crafting

Crafting is getting an overhaul in Diablo III, becoming more viable for any stage of the game. In this topic we got a good amount of confirmation on the abilities that each of our three Artisans will provide.

• Mystic:

This Artisan offers item enchantments. This may ring a bell, as a similar system was in place in Diablo II. With the new system you'll not only be able to enchant your items, but continuously do so, each time rolling better and better stats. This enables a player with enough focus and funds to eventually achieve very high stats on his or her item.

Through these enchantments, you can also take advantage of very off-class type items on your character. An example the developers gave was a Demon Hunter using a one handed axe and a shield, both of which being enchanted with Hatred regeneration, something that wouldn't natural spawn on such weapons. As the Mystic levels up, she will have access to more powerful enchantments, which are dropped as recipes in the game.

• Jeweler:

This old man has very simple, yet essential talents. He can combine Gems, add sockets to items, and remove gems from items. Exactly what scales as he levels isn't entirely clear yet, but one could imagine a few scalable aspects, such as what level gems he can combine, or what level item he can add sockets to.

• Blacksmith:

We know more of this Artisan than the other two, both through more exposure via Blizzard, and presents in the beta. The Blacksmith can forge a huge variety of items, some are unlocked as he levels up, others only through recipes you find as drops. He even has the ability to forge legendary items, some with set values. This is a beautiful thing, since through the randomness of Diablos' drop system, by the time you find every item in a set for a mid-level character, you've likely already out leveled the set, making it useless.

Now through the Blacksmith you'll be able to craft your way to a full set if you're willing to front the needed materials and gold, making those low-mid range set items a viable choice. Besides crafting he can also repair your items, something that will likely need to be done regularly come Inferno, seeing as you loose 10% of your item durability with each death in the game.


PvP: PvP hasn't undergone very much change, which at this stage of the game shows how solid it is at heart. As was discovered a while back, the Arena will now have a team death match style of scoring. Meaning that your lives are infinite, you respawn shortly after each death, and the team with the most kills at the end of the game wins. Exactly how long each round will be isn't clear, though one full game will likely be around ten minute. The system of health globes that spawn at certain points on the map wasn't spoken of, so where they are with that is unknown.

Something that has changed is the amount of players in each match, moving from 3v3 to 4v4. Another useful tidbit of knowledge is that you will not be able to swap skills in between matches. This makes it so a team can adapt their play style to counter an opposing team, without worrying about them having an entirely different skill-set from round to round, making it so comebacks are very possible if a team can adapt efficiently. This forces players to think strategically, instead of just swapping skills to deal with a problem.

Auction House: As known, you'll be able to trade nearly anything you find in-game through the Auction House, be it gold, gems, crafting materials, tombs, etc. Whole character selling will not be available at launch, but will likely be added later on. Search features will be extensive, including a "smart search" which detects common stats across your character and searches for items with similar stats. For the more picky person there will be an advanced search feature where you'll be able to pin point exactly the item you're looking for.


Life Cycle Of Items

With the introduction of the auction house, comes a new level of item recycling that had never been seen in a Diablo game. Whereas in Diablo II items more or less drifted around form player to player endlessly rotating, in Diablo III these items can be transformed into many forms, and then like a Phoenix reborn, take shape into new amazing forms.
In Diablo II the ideal life cycle of an item was as follows: Drop > Wear > Trade > Eventually Sold. That's about as far as it went in the best case scenario. This wouldn't be so terrible if gold had any true value in the game, a purpose.

In Diablo III this is the ideal life cycle of an item: Drop > Wear> Trade > Eventually Salvaged > Crafted into new item > Eventually Sold. Not only are there many more things you can do with an item, but when it is eventually sold for gold, that gold can be used to continue feeding the economy, or even better, sunk into one of the many gold sinks, removing it from the game and delaying the build up of gold in the economy.


Final Game Tuning

Those words have a great ring to them, or maybe just the word "final" being used at all. Tuning, or polishing if you will, comes as the last stage of development. It's where numbers are tweaked, and features are perfected for release. This polishing happens across the entire game, so we'll touch on the interesting topics which were presented.

• Monster Improvements:

The creatures of Sanctuary are a formidable bunch, each with a role to play in the heat of battle. Fulfilling these roles is an important job, and sometimes new roles need to be created to address balancing issues. One of these issues that's very clear for any Diablo player is how casters can often avoid affixes of creatures, such as lightning, thorns, or other short distance AoE effects.

To adress this, the new affix called Mortar was introduced, where a creature will lob fireballs across the screen, endangering casters while flying right over melee characters' heads.

• Passive Skills & Synergies:
  

True to their claims of nothing being final, there have been small tweaks all cross the passive skills. In some cases is may just be a number change, though as they displayed there are a couple of new passive skills to support different builds.

• Synergies:

Another way Blizzard is supporting build diversity is by cutting down on synergies. While synergies may look appealing, they actually drastically decrease the amount of viable builds. This is due to the very nature of them, where if you have one skill you're most likely best off following it up with skills that all have corresponding synergies. This forces the player down a certain path in order to maximize the effects. While they're not removing synergies all together, they will be down-tuning their effects, or removing certain corresponding effects completely.


Class Tuning

With the idea of class specific resources surely came a huge amount of development to get to this point. As with any complex feature, constant polishing is the only way to achieve balance. While each class is fairing well with no major setbacks, small tweaks are being made to adjust how each class handles.

• Barbarian:

The trend Blizzard has noticed in the beta is players will skip the small Fury generators such as Bash or Frenzy in favor for the larger ones like Leap Attack, or Ground Stomp. To account for this the amount of Fury the smaller generators will create is getting bumped up. They also found that come late game the Barb is having a tough time surviving due to the classes' need to be within melee range of creatures. This is a little more complex polish, and will involve a few defensive changes.

• Wizard:

As we've known, a certain section of skills will slowly become less costly as you level, eventually becoming completely free. This system is undergoing small changes which weren't clearly detailed. All spells are also moving to % weapon damage, making weapon more important to casters than before.

A common concern with this change is - well if casters depend on weapon damage, shouldn't I just run around with a two handed axe? - This is being addressed by also having the casting speed rely on weapon speed, so while your attack may do more damage with a two handed axe, your DPS may be less than if you were to use a wand with a lower attack, but faster attack speed. There are also class specific buffs on many casting oriented weapons that could sway a players choice from say a sword, or axe.

• Witch Doctor:

Mana seems to be unlimited in the beta, and at this early stage of the game it essentially is. Though as the game progresses you'll have to make crucial choices that will effect how your Mana will behave. It was stated that if one were so inclined, they could form a build where you do indeed have infinite Mana, though they'd be sacrificing other aspects of the class, such as damage, or defense.

• Monk:

Mantras are now going to have a three second period when first cast where they'll grant double the buff they normally would. This makes them feel like less like a maintenance skill, and more like an active skill that needs to be paid attention to. Combo skills are also undergoing some small changes in their basic functionality, both in how they are combined, and how powerful each level of attack is. For example they plan to increase the range in Deadly Reach to make it more viable.

• Demon Hunter:

As touched on not too long again, the DH will have a completely new Hatred system than as the class does now. At this very moment in the beta Hatred constantly regenerates, though as many have found, you end up constantly low,if not drained of it. To remedy this there will be Hatred generating skills and spending skills, much like Fury. Snares will also see some buffs to better keep enemies at range, or help better preform their role.

While each class have some very specific changes coming, one change is reaching across every class - awesomeness. Through feedback from the community, and internal testing, a lot of players have found skills as a whole don't make them feel as awesome as they'd prefer. Blizzard has heard the cries, and plan to increase the visual effects of many skills, helping enforce the fact that you're a badass demon-slaying demigod.


Difficulties

Many fans have speculated on exactly how difficult each act will be. Some even feel the entire game will be relatively easy. This may be due to the easy content we've seen in the beta, which is indeed very casual. This is by design though, normal difficulty is meant to be a kind of tutorial, which teaches you everything you'll need to know, while not punishing you too hard for making mistakes.

Very casual players will enjoy this first difficulty, while more serious players will find it laughable. This again is by design, because in essence every serious gamer was once a casual gamer. At one point in time we all were n00bs. Blizzard understands this, and wishes to help turn those casual gamers into more dedicated gamers through nice and easy difficulty transitions.

Blizzard also understands that a large portion of their fan base are hardcore gamers looking for a challenge. Thus comes the concern that even in later difficulties the game will not present an adequate challenge, well Jay Willson assured us that this isn't something we should be worried about. Through a display of testimonials from in-house testers who have been put up against the Inferno difficulty, we're given an idea of how difficult endgame content will truly be.


Followers

Followers replacing mercenaries wasn't all too popular among the community. The fact that these new side-kicks were only available in single player was a big change it itself, but the added hit of them only being viable in normal difficulty never settled well with the majority of the fan base. In good fashion Blizzard has listened to these concerns and tweaked followers to be viable through all levels of content, though still only useable while playing solo.


Town Only Skill Swapping

The title speaks for itself, but the reasoning behind why this change is being made is interesting. The dev team found that more and more often players would have their skill UI open while slaying monsters, swapping skills out multiple times as they played through small areas. This would make for some problems if left unattended. Not only does it take up a large amount of screen real-estate, but it takes away from the feeling of identity with your character when you're changing such a core aspect so often.

So right now they're testing town only skill swapping where you'll walk over to this area or NPC to swap out your skills. Jay didn't seem very happy about this, and stated how this isn't the final solution. If this doesn't work they will also be testing an out of combat swap system. This second option could make for some heavy development, since it have been stated that Diablo has no in, or out of combat tracker that these type of systems can communicate with.

Nice one Blizzard. Giving WoW players to play D3 for free while Diablo fans that do not want to play WoW no deals. This is just lame. I was just starting to get back in the mood to play D3 after getting the bad news in August but now I am again angry with Blizzard.