As the release of Diablo 3 draws near, I thought it would be a good idea to create an 'official' thread in which we can discuss all Diablo-related things.

Official US website: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/

Official EU website: http://eu.battle.net/d3/en/

How to buy: The game can be bought from Blizzard's online store (physical and digital versions), and Amazon (physical version). Buying the physical version will also give you the digital, downloadable version which will reside on your Battle.net account.

Release date: 15th of May, 2012.

It worries me that they're changing so many things when they said back in September they were doing the victory lap, to be honest.

I mean, I'm sure the game will be awesome, no doubt of that, but with that post done I doubt the game will be out before May :\

In before DRM discussion.

That ones been done to death.

These days we like to bitch about the fact that it's not a legitimate Diablo game and about how much better Torchlight 2 is going to be than Diablo 3.

Also, the complete lack of ponies in Diablo games.

That can't be true. Ghostcrawler promised me one of those :(

Yes, Diablo 3 needs more ponies.

Honestly, I wish Blizzard would be friendlier with mod developers as IMHO that's a huge selling point for a game. Well, the mods that is, you can't assume that because there are tools that they'll become popular.

At the moment I'm quite enjoying Titan Quest, which basically is a 1:1 clone of Diablo 2 in a mythological Greek setting. The things I heard about Diablo 3 didn't sound too thrilling, and the "always online required" DRM abomination makes it easy to skip it. Perhaps I'll have a look if they release a DRM-free version in a couple of years.

It just goes to show Blizzard or more so Activision just want complete control of their game so obviously down the line they can nickel and dime there customers with overpriced pets or other crap, sort of like what they are doing with world of warcraft at the moment.

With mods it may encourage people to actually buy their game who.. otherwise may not have bought said game. I know i certainly would buy Diablo 3 if there was a MLP mod that changed the character classes to the mane 6.

IIRC there is a mod for Diablo 2 that makes every single enemy drop a bunch of unique and/or set items.

Such mod would either mean that someone will use it to sell a shitload of items on AH for real money, or that everybody will start using it and nobody will ever touch the AH (no money for Blizz).

So I kinda understand why are the mods disallowed, even though they may help make the game better.

There are a few Diablo 2 mods but they're hackish in nature and tend to get broken when Blizzard releases a new patch. Diablo 3 almost certainly won't have any as it's online only and Blizzard tends to be pretty anal about preventing modifications. Expect the kind of mods that there are for WoW and not a whole lot more.

I doubt that's going to be a big deal to anybody that hasn't already been turned off by Blizzard's insistence about telling people how to play.

That is coming with Heart of the Swarm (SC2's first expansion). They already introduced The Arcade, a 'marketplace' where people can list their mods (for free and for $). Think of it as something like App Store / Android Store / Windows Phone Marketplace.

Dunno about whether something like that will happen with Diablo 3, nothing has been announced yet.

EDIT: For fuck's sake, GOG, fix the damn bugs. :(

Yes that's the problem with Blizzard lately because everything is about making profit.
While it's cool to be able to make money, the real reason behind AH and arcade is to let players trade and harvest a small percentage from it all.

They are trying hard to make a system that lets them reap money like in a MMO with subscriptions.
I wouldn't mind even that, but the quality of games is slipping.
Imagine the quality of the product if time was spent on development of it instead of these gimmicks.

With SC2 and Battle.net we barely got offline mod, didn't get chat channels for a long time and are still region locket and no LAN while we got the awesome Facebook support and will get Arcade.
In this you can see how popular ideas which could sell take priority in front of ideas that actually matter.

I can foresee an April Fool's patch already.

New about chat channels:

"Public chat channels will be in Diablo III, barring any catastrophe that requires we remove them, because they're already implemented. In fact they'll be in an upcoming beta patch so you'll get to see and play around with them yourselves."