Activision Blizzard: It's Official This afternoon, game publisher Activision announced that its shareholders have voted to approve a merger with Vivendi Games. The proposed merger between the two video game giants was announced in December, but required the blessing of Activision shareholders. The game publisher said that 92 percent of shareholders approved the deal, which is expected to close tomorrow. One analyst has predicted that the merged company would make $1.38 billion in profits during its first financial year, enough to make Activision Blizzard the world's largest game publisher. Game industry analyst Michael Pachter said that the merger should be a positive development for consumers. For years, the industry's biggest player has been Electronic Arts, known for titles such as the popular Madden football franchise. So large is EA that it has often gotten the first pick of projects, such as landing deals to make tie-in games for the Lord of the Rings movies, he said. But this merger should give the newly-formed company enough heft to compete with EA for such blockbuster projects, said Pachter. "It's good to have a duopoly instead of a monopoly," he said. "This just makes the industry that much more interesting." Activision is most famous right now for the Guitar Hero series. The Santa Monica-based publisher just rolled out two new versions of that billion dollar guitar franchise last week -- one centered around the career of rock band Aerosmith, another designed to be played on the mobile Nintendo DS game device. Vivendi's game studio Blizzard is most famous for World of Warcraft, the online PC game that has about 10 million fans paying a monthly subscription fee to take on roles in the sword-and-sorcery game's virtual realm of Azeroth. The two companies haven't talked much about what consumers can expect from the merged company, though, for what it's worth, Activision made a song inspired by World of Warcraft available as a free download for Guitar Hero III last month. The merged company will likely have fresh announcements about what to expect from the merged company at the video game industry's major annual trade show, E3, which kicks off in Los Angeles next week. Washington Post
An interesting find today: Angel Imperius Spotted? This is not official, but an interpretation by Diablofans forum members Atrumentis and Daemaro based on the description of Angel Imperius from the Diablo: The Sin War Trilogy pocket book by Richard A. Knaak. The Diablo III artwork that may be found at the official Diablo III website shows an angel with a peculiar bright sword on his chest. Here is an excerpt from Book three: The Veiled Prophet: "THERE IS NO NEED FOR THIS DEBATE TO CONTINUE ... OR TO HAVE EVEN BEGUN, declared a majestic angel with robes of royal red and a shining breastplate upon which the image of an upturned sword blazed. It is not known who the angel in the image above is, but we do have clues that Diablo: The Sin War trilogy is canon lore that serves as ground for the development of the Diablo III Single Player. Angel Imperius is one of the five members of the Angiris Council in the High Heavens. Share your thoughts in our forums.
G4TV - Diablo Retrospective G4TV released a video in honor of the Diablo III announcement, X-Play takes a look back at the history of Blizzard's popular dungeon-crawler franchise. The video starts by giving fans a tour through the Diablo 1 and Diablo II gameplay that redifined dungeon crawlers for a generation of PC gamers. G4TV X-Play mentioned DiabloFans when we had the Diablo 3 Countdown back on May 1 at the very end of their video, and even mentioned Mockery and the new home to the former diablo3.com community. This time around we return the goodwill shouts to X-Play. Except I don't share their comment that Diablo III is boring by seeing the gameplay video. I was there at Paris when the gameplay video was presented to fans and all I could hear at the end of a massive cheerful YAY of people screaming in delight. http://www.g4tv.com/lv3/26862 BlizzPlanet
Bashiok on Trade and Economy An interesting conversation about Diablo III BOE item exchange and currency took place today between fans and the Diablo III Community Manager Bashiok. Here is hoping Blizzard comes up with good ideas to make trade successful in this new game. Diablo III Forums Battle.net
Diablo III is "possible" on consoles, as Activision eyes money PDog Note: This is just another "It's Possible" report, but with the recent finialized merger between Activision and Blizzard, it's a bit of a different angle. While the Internet may be up in arms over the fact that Blizzard has dared to use a few splashes of color in the design of Diablo III, the rest of the civilized world is just looking forward to playing the damn thing. As we know though, Blizzard is now a part of Activision, and since the newly-united mega-publisher is now too big for even the ESA, will Diablo III be PC-only? With a controller, a headset, and playing over Xbox Live or the PlayStation Network? Maybe Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick never met a successful franchise he couldn't spread around different platforms, even if things weren't the best of fits, so why should we assume that the company will leave the piles of money that can be gained by making Diablo III cross-platform on the table? Eurogamer spoke to Rob Pardo, Blizzard's vice president of game design, and he agreed that it was "theoretically possible" to bring the game to consoles. "It would have some control changes that I think you'd have to make... But it's probably, of our major franchises, the one that's most console friendly, for sure... You'd need to think about a lot of the point-and-click spells, like point to area-of-effect, or things like line-damage in this direction," Pardo elaborated. "Target selection is something you're going to lose on console, you're really going to be able to do targeting direction, but not specific targeting." Why the focus on Diablo III? "Out of StarCraft, WarCraft or WOW, Diablo would be the easiest game to translate. But it would still take a bit of work." The first Diablo was brought to the PlayStation back in the day, so this wouldn't be the first time the series traveled to console land. Arstechnica ------------------------------ Activision, Vivendi Pull Out Of ESA, E3 2008 Representatives from the soon-to-merge Activision and Vivendi Games have announced that the company will not be attending the E3 2008 Media & Business Summit in Los Angeles this July - with subsequent confirmation that the duo has left the ESA altogether. An ESA representative confirmed to Gamasutra that the two companies were no longer with the organization, with communications senior VP Rich Taylor adding in a statement, "While the Entertainment Software Association remains the preeminent voice for U.S. computer and video game publishers, we can confirm that Activision and Vivendi Games opted to discontinue their membership." He continued, "The ESA remains dedicated to advancing our industry’s objectives such as protecting intellectual property, preserving First Amendment rights, and fostering a beneficial environment for the entire industry. Our high level of service and value to members and the larger industry remains unchanged." The news follows earlier reports from consumer website Game Nexus that an Activision representative had said: "After careful consideration, for business reasons Activision has decided not to participate in any official E3 activities. We wish the ESA best of luck with the show." Activision will apparently instead be hosting their own press event on the first night of the E3 event, with various other press events also likely during the week of the show – including the traditional annual media briefings from Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft. Following criticism that E3 2007 was spread out over too many different locations, the 2008 event will once again take place in the Los Angeles Convention Center (LACC). However, summit organizers at the ESA (Entertainment Software Association) have insisted that the nature of the event will be much lower key than in previous years. Although it attracted prominent worldwide news coverage the E3 expo was significantly downsized following the 2006 event – after a number of publishers and console manufacturers complained about the rising cost of stands and the venue’s increasing unsuitability for business meetings and discussions. Gamasutra ------------------------------- Bashiok on Character Self-Sufficiency Not that classes won't benefit from each other in various ways, Barbarian shouts being good party buffs, etc. but every class is essentially a demon-killing DPS class. We have no intentions to create a tank, or healer, etc. Every class will play their own way, and while some may take direct hits easier than others, it certainly wouldn't define their role within a party. Everyone should be kicking in heads at the same time. Diablo III having a strong emphasis on cooperative play is really building upon one of the best parts of Diablo II, and that's charging through dungeons with other people. Our focus is on removing the frustrations that existed with grouping, and adding new features that encourage everyone to stick together and fight as a party. Battle.net Forums ------------------------------- Bashiok on Trading Accessibility One of the largest issues with a bartering system is that it prevents any ease of entry into the system for players. I have an item and I think it's probably worth something, but I have no idea what its worth and no easy way to find out. You have an item I want, but I have no idea what you may want for it or if I'm going to get a fair trade for it. You may throw a bunch of acronyms at me, get frustrated I don't know what I'm doing, and then leave. That's not going to be a positive experience for either of us, and neither of us get what we want out of it. With a stable economy and currency, there's at least a common language that anyone can understand regardless of their game knowledge. World of Warcraft - Diablo 3 Forums ------------------------------- Bashiok on Item Binding Diablo is a trading game, and we have no plans to change that. We don't have any inclination to make items bind to a character, or otherwise remove trading opportunities. Will there be absolutely no items that will be bound to a character? It isn't possible to say with any certainty at this point, there might be. Battle.net Forums ------------------------------ Bashiok on Limited Class Numbers We're setting out to create unique, interesting, and diverse classes that each have their own style and flavor. Most importantly this isn't just a basic look at each individual class, but how they compare to each other and overlap (or hopefully, don't). When you up the number of classes more and more you're eventually going to begin down the route of homogenization, they start to bleed into each other's core abilities and styles which really just detracts from each individual class' recognizability and distinction within the game. In addition, by limiting the number - and I say limiting not because it's a low number, it's the number of classes in Diablo II and a good one at that, but because we're not going crazy with it - we can focus on making each class really impressive, both visually and through the way they each feel and play. Battle.net Forums ------------------------------- Bashiok on Health Globe Play Style The health globes are actually, in my opinion, really cool. Playing the game and actually seeing what types of strategy they encourage, you can start to see what they add and how they make the combat more interesting. I'll set the scene. You're a barbarian, you're in the wilderness and after fighting wave after wave of ghouls, skeletons, demons, what have you, you're low on health. You're out of potions, and after using a strategic leap out of the fray you turn around and seismic slam the skeletons charging you. Two of them drop health globes, but the globes dropped behind the skeletons that are still advancing. If they reach you, you're not going to survive. Are you able to leap safely to snag the globes before they can tear into you? Can you throw out another slam and try to remove the remaining enemies? How can you survive? You have a fraction of a second to decide. The health globes help to create situations just like this, where you're not just sitting there spamming potions, you're using your abilities and strategy to stay alive. Possibly most importantly, you're encouraged to keep fighting, and not just run away. With random spawns, random drops, and of course the randomness of combat, the health globes add to creating situations that are just more... interesting, and in my opinion, fun. On the side of potions, they still exist, but they're likely to be on a cooldown of some type. They'll also likely restore health based on a percentage that's relative to your character. They may heal an instant amount, they may be the old over time type system. They're probably going to be filling an emergency-heal role more than anything though. Battle.net Forums ------------------------------- Fallen Shaman Confirmed? PDog Note: Not really news, but in case you haven't noticed, Bashiok's avatar on the forums is that of a Fallen Shaman in Diablo III's engine. I'll get you an animated version once the Battle.net Forums are back up. Here's the animated version
"Fallen Shaman" is that guy that shoots fireballs and rezzes the annoying little red guys near the beginning of D2. He has many multicolored counterparts throughout Act I Edit: PDog beat me to it
Assassins are the best class to take out shaman because of the arch mechanic and the splash damage from fire blast. There's warped ones in act 5 as well, they spawn with colenzo.
I really hope they keep items non-bound in DIII and your info seems to support that. The only thing I could see being bound would be the uniques you can have only one of like the annilus(sp?) charm from DII and such.
Oh god, binding items in an economyless game? It would crash so hard. The only thing that really kept people going was the fact that the metagame for item drops was so involved that the fact the gold wasn't worth shit didn't matter as long as you could hunt for that 1/10,000 drop by grinding and grinding.
After picking through these 34 pages i dont think ive seen much of anything on the whole magic find bit. Sorry if it was over looked on my part, and i realize that its all still fresh news, etc etc. How is everyone feeling about that? Having a magic find set again?
Even in normal, there's just a huge imbalance for equipment in general. See a caster and a melee attacker's gold req and compare in normal, hell for trap sin or skelemancer you could go naked with only a 30g item for the trapper because all you actually need is weapon attack speed because that's all trap casting is based on.
what he means is, is that like myself I had a dpsing set and a mf'ing set. The Magic Find set was for when I wanted to go and try and get good items of quality off of meph or baal or whatnot. I would MF grind, *MF being magic find* So the more % you had and by hitting the breaking point, the better chance you had at getting uniques or sets to drop.
Bashiok Regarding Health Globes Yeah, as others have said the current intent to encourage cooperative play (in regards to health globes) is to ensure that they heal everyone in the party when picked up. But in any case, why wouldn't the witch doctor be using any of his abilities? Mass confuse, and while everything is busy wailing on each other or attacking your mongrels you sneak in. Or horrify, and while they're scattered you snag some health. The witch doctor is a little sneakier though, a little more frail, a little more of a "I'm gonna make you die or kill your friend while I'm all the way over here". You should probably be doing everything you can to avoid being hit, and you have the tools to do so. Maybe? Maybe not. Maybe there are other situational/environmental mechanics that would, or would provide assistance in healing up? That's a lot of conclusions to jump to in a single sentence. Classes will have abilities to help them work through groups of monsters. Obviously health globes are going to be necessary to pick up, and obviously class abilities will exist to help you do so. And, come on , I realize there's a lot of room for hyperbole since we just announced and a lot of details aren't out there or just don't exist, but at least have the ground before you call it a mountain. Rational concerns, complaints, issues, questions, are going to go over way better. Well, it's not like there's a hard cap on what a loot table can contain being forced upon us, or that health globes are even associated with loot drops. It can be balanced any way we see fit. Bottom line, is that we're simply not going to release a game that is irritating, slow, aggravating, boring, or any of the other adjectives you used. If that means ripping out the health globe system and going a different direction, so be it, but at current it plays and feels fun and engaging. Battle.net Forums