The latest BlizzCast brought us some interesting information about Anthony Rivero, but also some new pictures as well! The problem is that all of them have already been posted here, in one form or another, so they are not truly new. The two screenshots were supplied even before BlizzCon 2008, the concept art has been released in other forms in the galleries, and the Mephisto render has been released in the past (even if it’s missing from the Diablo 2 picture gallery. Never the less, they are bigger, and with better quality in the galleries:

Diablo 3 Screenshots

Barbarian Warcry and Witch Doctor Soul Harvest.


Diablo 2 Monster Art & Diablo 3 Artwork: Monsters

Mephisto, Lord of Hate and new Malformed demon.


Diablo 3 Artwork: Characters & Diablo 3 Miscellaneous

Witch Doctor armours and Anthony Rivero with Diablo.

BlizzCast 6 is already available with a few interesting interviews.  This time around Bashiok (Diablo III Community Manager) interviewed Anthony Rivero (Senior Character Artist), who worked on Diablo II and Lord of Destruction. He created the Mosquito Demon in Act 3 and modelled and textured Mephisto, the Druid and some of its abilities and pets. For the expansion, Anthony Rivero was credited as Lead Character Artist.

This is an interesting interview because he talks about the differences between creating Diablo II and now Diablo III. Back then the 3D modelers had to do everything from the ground up.  They had to do concept art, modeling, texturing, rigging and go through the tedious process of creating sprites of each armor and body part in 16 different directions for every frame animation. A very lengthy and complex process.  All that is now a thing of the past in Diablo 3 gone fully into a 3D engine. He designed the female Witch Doctor and her armor and the scavenger pets among other monsters.

The Fan Q&A with Jay Wilson offers details of the elixirs, special random death animations, and the full-screen map overlay.  Two Diablo III questions from IncGamers fans (Diii.net and Blizzplanet) were answered; so check them out. Congratulations to Immelmann and Sly_dawg19 who submited the questions to us. We forwarded them to Bashiok for this BlizzCast 6 Q&A session.

• Elixirs are rare drops, not obtainable from vendors. They add special buffs for certain tough encounters.
• Death Animations will be implemented through a check system where each boss checks your low health stats and randomly decides what type of animation set will be used. The Diablo III team is still jamming ideas about how to implement this system, and what kind of cool death animations to do or if they should at all.
• Thus far there are no plans for a full-screen map overlay. However, some ideas are being discussed.

Read more after the jump!

The activity in the Diablo 3 forums has (as always) been quite high, so it’s more than likely that you missed something of interest on the boards! Luckily, we’ve been keeping tabs on many of the most interesting threads, and compiled a few of them down to a neat little list!


Remember that if you find a particularly interesting thread, feel free to e-mail me at with a link url! It doesn’t have to be created in the last week, but at least have something interesting added to it in the last seven days.


So what did we pick out of the bin this week?


Are you already addicted?

• bluefly resurrects his thread about your “DIII” addictions.

Should the Barb Have Bow Skills Too?

• An interesting Barbarian design question by stillman, who also contributed with his “Barbra the Bowstress” concept art.

Witch Doctor Essentials: Blowdarts

• The pygmy Witch Doctors of Diablo 2 had them, what about Diablo 3 Witch Doctors? teh_Thrasher brings back DemolitionSquid’s thread to life.

Dungeons & Dragons Makes it to DIII...

• Blizzard seems to have consulted their local roleplaying group on Wizard spells. Akimbo dislikes it, melianor likes it. What about you?

Continued Analysis of Runes and Ideas

• This thread by RawBanana is brought up again from last week. How would you like your runes served?

Diablo 3 Trading and Currency

• DarkGoat posted the now quite old quote by Jay wilson on trading in Diablo 3. Damnatorius has brought new life to the discussion. Trading in D3 could be awesome or awful...

The Sin War Pact...

• Lore friend ZSiegfried brought up one of the most crucial pacts in Sanctuary, in terms of lore. Can the citizens trust that pact at all?!

Also: Happy Birthday Jaedhann, Arkardo and PvtCaboose!

For all of you that really like to crush the undead throngs of darkness, we have put together a small guide to the Undead of the Diablo Universe. The undead are a major part of Mephisto’s, Diablo’s, Baal’s and other minor dark/demonic powers’ forces and for fans of Diablo lore, there are actually a lot of things you might not know that much about (yet)!

There is more to the topic of the undead than “magically enhanced inanimate objects”. The Great Cycle of Being that the Priests of Rathma (Necromancers) live by is holding secrets to life and death that beings outside the realm of Hell can use, for good or bad. Even a simple thing as healing is part of the Cycle (not that healing is important for undead; that’s about the only topic that so far is unknown about them), and there is much to discover of this mental mindset.

Outside the general guide for undead, you’ll find a very detailed description of Diablo Skeletons. These creatures are one of the most common undead creations, and the magical science behind them can truly be fascinating. Even if you do not like the idea of a walking heap of human bones, you should probably read up on the facts behind them as to easier neutralise their threat on Sanctuary.

So take the chance to read up on the scourge of Sanctuary:

• Undead
• Skeleton
• Skeletal Archer
• Skeletal Executioner
• Skeletal Shieldman
• Skeletal Summoner

In celebration of the launch of Wrath of the Lich King, WorldofWar.net are running a second Razer competition! Even if you don’t play World of WarCraft or even hate it, you could always need one of those really cool Razer mice. There should be plenty of video material on the web, and an hour or so in Windows Movie Makers could get you a very prestigious mouse! It will of course be significantly easier if you play WoW, but then again, you probably saw this over at WorldofWar.net.

Lich King First Impressions Movie - By IncGamers and Razer.

Head over to the competition news item over at WorldofWar.net

Blizzard have not really discussed any expansion plans for Diablo 3 yet, which isn’t really surprising considering that the main game isn’t even in Alpha stage yet. The same could be said about StarCraft II up until BlizzCon 2008. Blizzard had mentioned nothing of additional expansions of the game before October.

With StarCraft II, the team have created a plethora of lore and content for the game, and they came to the conclusion that squeezing this down to 10 missions for each of the three races would seriously hamper the epic scope of the new RTS. As a bit of a background to this; they had originally planned two expansions for the game, much like Brood Wars, just adding a second one on top of it. Instead of squeezing the game down, or pushing the production time up another 2 years, they decided to push the story contents out over the two planned expansions, and hence they announced the StarCraft Trilogy at BlizzCon. They would most likely not have revealed their plans for having two expansions until well after release if this had not come to pass.

As Blizzard is now looking to release content on a regular basis, like World of WarCraft and “one expansion per year” goal, it would be UNLIKELY that they would do just one (or no) expansion to Diablo 3. They have already hinted that the story line will tie up loose threads, and make it possible to add new content, be it games, expansions, books or comics to the Diablo Universe.

Now, MTV talked to Mike Morhaime about World of WarCraft expansions, and he said:

	Blizzard Quote: (Source)
	I don’t think Blizzard will ever be able to do sequels of products like a “Diablo III” or “Diablo IV” on an annual basis, but we might be able to do expansions to those games close to annually. Hmmm, is there more profit? In an ideal scenario, I think we’d probably do [expansions] a little bit more often than we’ve been able to do. But I agree — I think putting too many expansions out too frequently, you probably get to the point where people do need to start taking a little break.

Now, all I’m saying is: It’s quite hard to make expansions annually, if you ever only planned to make one, or none.

We are going to se at least two Diablo III expansions!

There’s a great selection of new wallpapers in the gallery this week, so here we go.

• HolyKnight’s Fiery Runes Series 2 continues. This piece features aqua-colored runes around concept art of the male and female Barbarian

• Romak produced a sort of Barbarian collage of 12 pieces of concept art in one.

• Wallpaper newcomer Yuudaimuhi debuted with a bang, contributing 8 different images. There are two series, each of which has 4 slightly-different images, which you can evaluate from Yuudaimuhi’s user gallery. The Against All Evil images are painter-y in style, with a scythe-wielding figure standing before a swirling sky. The Fallen Guardian series features concept art of a murderously-determined Barbarian, on a black background with blood red smoke highlights.

Shortly after the announcement of Diablo III at the Blizzard Worldwide Invitationals, former Art Director Brian Morrisroe departed Blizzard to pursue a personal non-gaming business. We recently reported Brian and some friends launched Booyah.

Job openings for the Art Director position were posted at the Blizzard Jobs section for months. The long wait is over. The Art Director and other positions were removed from the jobs section. We contacted Blizzard Public Relations to find out the name of the new director, but at the moment it is kept under wraps. We will get back on this once the name is revealed. What matters is that Diablo III has a new Art Director to move forward.

Thanks, Lyquid.

Our german collegues, InGame.de, started a very plausible petition for the Diablo III team to motivate them to think of methods to replace mulling in Diablo 2 via patch. For Diablo III, this was already discussed in the Invitationals (WWI) and Blizzcon 2008, however Diablo 2 will be around for a while with no viable way to exchange items between alternate characters. This petition is a good way to get the community around the world together as a single voice.  Diablo 2 needs this feature. In order to sign the petition you must register and sign in.

Dear Blizzard Entertainment,
Dear Activision Blizzard,

We all have been playing Diablo, Diablo II and Diablo II: Lord of Destruction for many years, and really enjoyed travelling through this atmospherical fantasy world, experiencing the adventures versus the prime evil with different kinds of characters. We also want to thank you for supporting us with patches and new challenges all the time: we really appreciate the time and effort Blizzard Entertainment put into responding to our requests.

As the lately ban of 350000 Accounts showed, you still care about cleaning the Battle.net from cheaters and hackers. But that ban showed something else as well:

The community wants a safe method to transfer items from one character to another. We did this in the past by starting several instances of Diablo 2 via a modified d2gfx.dll and it was at least tolerated for several years. We disabled the check for running instances in good faith that it is just a technical measure to protect slower computers, not an anti-cheat-device, because running multiple instances is possible with more than one user account as well as by simply owning multiple computers.

Since you started banning people for using this method, it is no longer possible to transfer items between different characters of the same player easily.
As collecting Items is one of the main reasons to play Diablo 2 after so many years, the lack of such a feature is restricting the fun while playing. So today, with this petition, we tell you one of the communities biggest wishes:

Give us a safe method for muling!

As this feature is in World of Warcraft and will be in Diablo 3, we know that you know about this problem as well and that you are able to solve it.

We do not want to be seen as cheaters or hackusers like all those botters and maphack users for wanting to keep our items safe.

We only ask for a feature that should have been in the game from the beginning to make it an even greater experience to play!

Yours sincerely,

The united fans of Diablo

One of the core design elements of the Diablo series, something that sets these games apart from most other RPGs, is the fact that characters in the Diablo games do not have preset roles in a party. Some characters are better at some things, but all of the characters are designed to be viable playing alone. They can all inflict substantial damage to all types of enemies. There are no characters who must play in the back lines, there are no healers without powerful killing spells, or tanks who can only bash toe to toe and can’t deal with ranged attackers, etc. All of the characters can fill all of the roles, depending on how they are built (though obviously some are better at given roles than others), and you never need a party to succeed.

Most players see this as a strength of the series, and enjoy the freedom to play their characters solo, or in groups. Some players though, with experience in D&D and WoW, would like more interdependence. Not outright tank/mage/cleric/etc roles, but the ability to work better in a group, and the option to use skills that to boost their teammates.  Does this sound appealing to you, or do you want Diablo III to go in the other direction, and not include party-boosting skills like Auras and Warcries?

Click through to see evidence for how the game is being designed, to entertain arguments on both sides of the issue, and to join the conversation…