It's been seven years of Hell for Diablo 3 Game Director Jay Wilson, and he has had enough. The designer has decided to step down from the position at Blizzard and move on to another project within the company.
That Becky Jenkins thinks she's so good at Diablo 3, swanning about in her "vintage" set of Tal Rasha's Wrappings like she owns New Tristram. Oh, you'll show her. You'll show her good--once Blizzard lets you. Though the action-RPG's PvP team deathmatch arenas are delayed indefinitely, PvP duels are coming in patch 1.0.7. Blizzard has dropped details on how that'll work, along with heaps of changes, in a patch overview for the curious.
You know how it is. You see someone using a bot or a hack in Diablo 3, and make a mental note to report them later. But by the time "later" comes, you don't remember, or other priorities have come up, so the cheater lives to cheat another day. Blizzard plans on assuaging this problem by giving quicker access to cheater reports inside the game itself.
Read more: Cheating reports 'directly through the in-game client' »
Blizzard has spoken many times over the years about a console edition of Diablo 3 and publicly hired for such a project, but never confirmed it as an actual game we'll get to play one day. It does indeed have the action-RPG running on console now, it's confirmed, but even now Blizzard can't say whether or not it'll see the light of day.
Ne'er-do-wells, beware! Blizzard is still casting a watchful eye over Diablo 3 and has issued further rounds of bans for naughty hackers and cheats. Along with the usual bots and whatnot, naughtiness punished includes a hack that zoomed the game out further to attack monsters from so far away they AI doesn't trigger and they don't retaliate.
Diablo 3 is "the top-selling game overall" based on digital and retail sales in North America and Europe, Activision has proudly proclaimed. The long-awaited dungeon crawler has sold "in excess of 10 million copies," CEO Bobby Kotick said in a recent earnings call.
When Blizzard introduced the Monster Power setting to Diablo 3 last week in patch 1.0.5, it was hoping to make things a little more difficult for flashy heroes decked out in the finest gear seeking a challenge. Thanks to a bug, that went a little too far, and now Blizzard's dialing the damage down in Inferno difficulty to fit its original goal.
It's patch day today for Diablo 3. 1.0.5 adds the Infernal Machine event, doubles the drop rate of Legendary items, and gives players the chance to modify monster power for better experience and loot chance at all difficulty levels.
We knew some of the changes planned for the upcoming 1.0.5 patch for Diablo 3, including modifications to crowd control and a new Infernal Machine event, but Blizzard has now unveiled the full list of proposed changes now on the public test realm.
Blizzard gives us a glimpse behind the scenes of Diablo 3, chatting with the three voice actors that played pivotal characters Tyrael, Azmodan and Covetous Shen in the game. And for the record, I nailed the voice of Covetous in one of my game diaries without knowing it.
The upcoming 1.0.5 patch for Diablo 3 is still a few weeks away, but Blizzard is already offering a sneak peek at some of the incoming changes, including a few features that will bring back memories of the previous game in the series.
Apparently Diablo 3 director Jay Wilson didn't like how Ground Stomp was working on his Barbarian at higher levels, so the upcoming 1.0.5 patch will buff the way CC is handled in the game. But why wait until now to fix it? Blizzard said the issue wasn't deemed as important to address as the Paragon system and legendary items upgrade in the previous patch.
Author David Craddock has been working on a book about Blizzard Entertainment since mid-2008. Entitled Stay Awhile and Listen, the unauthorized book talks to nearly 80 former employees, including those who used to work at Blizzard, Condor (later Blizzard North), and Silicon & Synapse (Blizzard's original name when it was founded), as well as people who had regular dealings with Blizzard head honchos Mike Morhaime and Allen Adham. Shacknews is pleased to offer a steady stream of stories from the book leading up to its release early next year and published by Digital Monument Press.
"The problem with D3 is that they tried to infuse to much story into it . Which isn't a bad ..."
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