Frank Pearce, a Blizzard co-founder, says while players not wanting to be online while gaming "is valid," they want their community "connected" however.

That don't want separate groups online for each game but as an "overarching Blizzard community," so everyone is provided the "benefits" of a platform.


The rise of 'always-on' is proving an issue for many gamers especially when it's demanded on single player experiences. Blizzard don't promote it primarily as some DRM method though but as a way to connect their community together regardless of the game.

"The opinions of the people who feel like they don't want to be online when they're playing is valid. But for us, our goal is to have an always-connected community, and not just necessarily a community around World of Warcraft, and not necessarily a community around StarCraft or StarCraft 2, but an overarching Blizzard community," said Frank Pearce.

"To create that community and provide everyone who's part of that community the benefits of that community, we want them to be connected and playing online."

Piracy isn't their real motive behind Battle.net's new direction and integration. "I would never say it's not a factor, but it's definitely not the driving factor," said Pearce.

"Ultimately, if people want to pirate the game, they're going to find ways to pirate the game whether we require an online connection or not."

"Our focus is not on preventing piracy, but rather on creating an online experience that's so compelling for people that they aren't thinking about pirating the game because they want to be part of this community and they see value in having this community, almost as if this vibrant community is a bullet point you would put on the back of the box as a feature."

These words echo what Valve's Gabe Newell argued in that piracy can only be beaten by providing a superior service and not enforcing intrusive DRM, although Blizzard appears to be adopting both methods. Diablo III requires you to be always-on to play alone.

"Part of the decision as it relates to that is, is it more important we give the people who are on occasion going to want to play offline the ability to do that? Or is it more important we get this game into the hands of our players as quickly as we can?" he continued.

"We decided we wanted to get it into the hands of our fans as quickly as possible."

It's a "very high-class problem," noted Pearce. "To have a community that's so passionate about our games and what we're doing that they have strong opinions about this is a really nice position to be in. We definitely listen to the feedback from all the fans."

"Hopefully they trust us to make the right decisions for the games and for the community, not just for the short term but for the long term."

Blizzard doubts those who 'protest' against the changes will actually boycott their games. Their thinking is that they're so invested already they can't resist. "I don't think they would be posting that vigorously if they weren't invested enough to buy it. You would almost expect it. If they're an online activist lobbying for something in a game, it's like, you're so invested at that point you'd almost have to buy it," said StarCraft 2's Jonny Ebbert.

"Yeah. It's true that sometimes people's actions are different than their words," added Pearce. Check out the full interviewbetween Frank Pearce, Jonny Ebbert and Eurogamer. Are all these protests over needing to be online with Diablo III pointless?

Blizzard is running some initial stress tests on the Diablo 3 servers with the Friends and Family beta run, where each of Blizzard's roughly 5,000 employees can invite five people to play. Of these 25,000 potential beta testers, at
least one released screens of the beta program, which can be viewed on Diablo IncGamers.

Information about the limited beta run comes via the Russian-language B.net forum, which states that keys for closed-beta testers will be sent out only after an official announcement. There will not be an NDA for the beta, so once it launches we can expect a veritable flurry of information and screencaps. A flurry, we say.

Blizzard has already kicked off "limited external testing" with employees and their families with Diablo III, and there's "no non-disclosure agreement" in place.

That means they can brag and inflame our envy to murderous levels. The studio is "very close to starting" the closed public beta. More info "in the near future."

"We’re getting very close to starting the closed public beta test for Diablo III,” a Blizzard representative spilled. "You might start seeing some new reports about the beta client as we’ve begun limited external testing with employees and their families, and there is no non-disclosure agreement (NDA) for that." Yes, footage of the game is already online.

"We look forward to sharing more info about the beta test in the near future. Stay tuned.” Diablo III carries no release date from Blizzard but a beta was always expected to be launching sometime late this year. The PC action-RPG will likely slip to 2012.

http://imgur.com/a/sJ8mE#btBa9

Looks promising..

Blizzard will release six "proven property" titles over the coming three years, Activision Blizzard COO Thomas Tippl said at the Citi 2011 Technology Conference. Tippl named five of these six expected releases: Two World of Warcraft expansion packs, two StarCraft 2 titles and Diablo 3. Tippl also pinned a Diablo 3 expansion as the possible sixth title. Blizzard said it is immediately focused on updates for Cataclysm, releasing Diablo 3 and finishing StarCraft 2: Heart of the Swarm.

It would satisfy our OCD if these six games would release two-a-year at six-month intervals for three years, and it would satisfy our ADHD if all six titles dropped on the same day, but Tippl didn't provide any more specific dates. Titan, the mysterious next-gen MMO from Blizzard, wasn't mentioned, but it's not a "proven" property and could still launch in its rumored timeframe of late 2013.

For those of you who have been playing Diablo II online for the past 11 years, Battle.net has informed players that the game would be resetting the ladders.

According to Battle.net:

We will be resetting the Diablo II ladder the morning of October 25.

We anticipate all Diablo II realms to be down for approximately six hours during the reset. More specific information on realm availability on the day of the reset will be posted in the Battle.net Status forum. When the ladder is reset all existing ladder characters will be converted to non-ladder. All characters and items being converted to non-ladder will remain intact, but once converted these characters will no longer have access to ladder content such as creating ladder-only rune words.

The site states that for more information on ladder characters to visit the Arreat Summit Realm Character Types page here.

Blizzard North co-founder David Brevik, now working on Marvel Universe Online at Gazillion Entertainment, believes the MMO genre in general is a bit stale.

He feels the genre is generally "in a rut," with little exploration beyond 'what's safe'. The MMO game "is a platform," and there's many ways to get people together.

“I think MMOs in general are in a rut,” said David Brevik. “It’s still mainly WoW clones.” Studios needn't stick to the same flavours in theme, mechanics and techniques.

“Look at Ultima Online,” he said. “It’s an MMO, but the experience of Ultima Online was very different from World of Warcraft, yet everybody’s gone in that one direction."

“In reality, a massively multiplayer online game is a platform. It’s the ability to get people together in the same game to play at the same time,” he added in an interview. ”It doesn’t have to be limited to this one kind of game.”

Do today's MMOs all copy and paste the same general foundation of gameplay? Blizzard has said before they hope someone comes along to inject more life into a genre they've dominated for years now, as it would help World of Warcraft to flourish too.

What do you think of Star Wars: The Old Republic, or Guild Wars 2?

The Diablo III beta has been live for a while now, making the wait unbearable for those who didn't get in. Blizzard has heard your sad little cries, and they're here to help. All you have to do is be a winner.

Blizzard is giving away 2,000 beta keys starting October 17 and every Monday for the following eight weeks. In addition, every fourth winner will actually score two passes, so they can invite a buddy. To enter, sign up on the Diablo III Facebook page. If you're into reading rules (oh, there are so many rules), go here.

While you're waiting to see if you'll be joining the ranks, check out Adam's thoughts on the beta. I think he wants to marry it or something.

Blizzard's senior vice president of creative development, Chris Metzen, admits it's "a little weird these days" creating new stories what with 11m fans.

It's not just the sheer number but the "different skews of humanity," and what works in North America "may not translate all that well" in Asia's fan pool.

"It's hard at this scale, with that many eyes on your product, that many different skews of humanity, kids from all over the world... A story beat that works well in North America may not translate all that well, and I don't mean that facetiously, to China," said Metzen.

"And as a dumbass kid from California, I certainly am not cosmopolitan enough to know what all these paradigms are." Chris Metzen has had hand in Blizzard lore since joining way back in 1994 and he focuses on the studio's script work, but also game design.

In some cases Blizzard yield to the community and bank with them on where something should be going, but Metzen points out that's not always healthy.

"It's hard to not let that sometimes steer you in a way: well, I guess my instinct as an artist is that we go left, but the community sure seems to want this idea to go right. And that's a very strange space to be in," admits the Blizzard boss.

"Sometimes you go right for the community, and sometimes you draw a line in the sand and go, f**k it, we're going left. You just have to hope that people stick with you, even through patches of content that they're not entirely thrilled with."

"The smaller per cent of truly vocal fans on the internet that just rip everything you do to pieces... Sometimes it hurts, and you're left to conclude, like any artist in any medium, boy, I guess they really didn't get it."

Metzen describes World of Warcraft as "a study - clumsy or not - a study of societal breakdown and why do we keep clobbering each other, why does hatred persist generationally?" StarCraft's return offered him a break from WOW's burdens.

"I was excited to get into StarCraft because it is so much more linear, and it is about just a couple of people, and it is something goofy like a love story," admitted Metzen.

The big news from Blizzcon is starting to pour out of the holes in the internet, and the biggest news is that Diablo III is going to be free to annual World Of Warcraft subscribers. Signing up for the annual pass gets you Diablo III for nowt and new in-game mount for WoW, Tyrael’s Charger. And there we were thinking WoW subs were going to decline. Clever boys.

so there is no Diablo in Diablo III?

If I were to get that Soul Stone USB flash drive, I'm afraid that I might have to stab it through my forehead.

Blizzard's Diablo 3 developers are on the main stage at BlizzCon 2011 right now, and game director Jay Wilson spoke a little bit about the potential console version of the game. Nothing has changed -- there is no officially announced console version. But Wilson did confirm that Blizzard has hired a team to work on it, and that the company has been iterating on console controls.

"The movement actually feels better on the controller," Wilson said, in response to a fan's question. "Targeting is the issue." Most of the schemes the team has come up for choosing what to attack and loot require a reticule, "which we really don't want to do," Wilson said. "Monster distribution and AI also feels a little bit different than it does on the PC version."

And Blizzard won't even say that there's a console version coming "because we don't want to announce something until we're sure." Obviously the team is working on it, and obviously Diablo 3 on a console would be extremely popular -- the first game did officially come to the original PlayStation all those years ago. But as Wilson says, the team wants to assure that "if it goes on a console, it doesn't compromise the PC game in any way, and it feels like it was built for the console."