Diablo 3

The big news about Diablo 3 was the unveiling of the fourth Diablo 3 character class – The monk!
The monk class is going to replace the paladin in terms of style. A religious, spiritual warrior on the side of good, he will use his martial arts and his staff as weapons and will have various charge up skills similar to the assassin from Diablo 2. What makes this class unique is that instead of using separate finisher moves all his charge up attacks are triggered in stages from one skill; you can then combo the stages of different skills to create unique chains of martial art abilities.

Check out the official site for the monk trailer and examples of some of his moves. Keep an eye out for the seven sided strike which apparently works like the sorceresses’ chain lightning, except you are the lightning!

http://www.blizzard.com/diablo3/characters/monk.xml

The fifth and final Diablo 3 character class will not be announced until next year although apparently it will be a remake of an old character, look out for a ranger class then guys.

All the Blizzcon videos, gameplay footage, interviews and panels about Diablo can be found at this link.

http://www.diablofans.com/forums/showthread.php?t=21313

World of Warcraft.

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/cataclysm/

World of Warcraft: Cataclysm. This was the new expansion revealed for World of Warcraft this year and from what I can make out this feels less like an expansion and more like a sequel, the whole game is being reworked, and it feels like now Blizzard have the resources they are finally making the game how they originally intended it to be. Firstly let’s start with the big announcements.

Two New Playable Races: Adventure as one of two new races, the cursed worgen with the Alliance or the resourceful goblins with the Horde. Goblin racials will include:

Rocket Jump – Activate your rocket belt to jump up to 20 yards, every 2 min
Rocket Barrage – Fire your belt rockets at an enemy within 30 yards, every 2 min. (Shared cooldown with Rocket Jump)
Time is money – Cash in on a 1% increase to attack and casting speed.
Best Deals Anywhere – Best possible gold discount, regardless of reputation.
Pack Hobgoblin – Calls in your personal servant, allowing you bank access every 30 min.
Better Living Through Chemistry – Alchemy skill +15, your potions give more health / mana

And now the Worgen racials:

Darkflight – Activate your true form, increasing movement speed by 70% for 6 sec, every 3 min.
Viciousness – Increase damage by 1%.
Abberation – Reduced duration on Curses and Diseases used against you by 15%.
Flayer – Skinning skill +15, you skin creature fast, and you don’t even need a knife.

Because these new racials are so spectacular Blizzard announced the other racials are going to being revamped too, cant wait to see these, let us hope the alliance get some love.

Level Cap Increased to 85: Earn new abilities, tap into new talents, and progress through the path system, a new way for players to improve characters.

Classic Zones Remade: Familiar zones across the original continents of Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms have been altered forever and updated with new content, from the devastated Badlands to the broken Barrens, which has been sundered in two.

7 New Zones will be Added: The new zones include The Twilight Highlands, Mount Hyjal, Deepholm, Uldum, Gilneas, The Lost Isles and The Sunken City of Vash’jir. The sunken city will be an underwater zone and was the home city of Lady Vashj before the original sundering; this will be a gateway to the Abyssal Maw.

More Raid and dungeon Content: The Firelands will be a new raid dungeon, it will let you go to the Elemental Plane of fire and visit Sulfuron’s Keep, Ragnaros will make his return! Uldum will feature two new dungeons, the Lost City of Tol’vir and the Halls of Origination (a titan city). Grim Batol will have a level-up dungeon and a raid instance. Skywall (Air Elemental Plane) will have a level-up dungeon and a raid instance. The Deadmines and Shadowfang Keep will be back in a brand new level 85 heroic version. Blackrock Caverns will be a new level-up dungeon located in Blackrock Spire. This is an entirely new dungeon, new art, new creatures, new everything.

New Race and Class Combinations: Explore Azeroth as a gnome priest, blood elf warrior, or one of the other never before available race and class combinations. Check out this link for all the new combinations.

Guild Advancement: Progress as a guild to earn guild levels and guild achievements. Guilds will now have their own talent tree to use as they level up, talents will include abilities such as lower repair costs, mass resurrection, less durability loss on wipes and the ability for one character to instantly summon the whole raid. Blizzard made it clear that these abilities will only make life easier, and will be nothing like increased damage or defence which would give certain guilds an unfair advantage. Levelling your guild will not just favour larger guilds either; your experience will come from your top 20 earners so potentially a guild of 20 could level just as fast as a guild of 1000.

New PvP Zone & Rated Battlegrounds: Take on PvP objectives and daily quests on
Tol Barad Island, a new Wintergrasp-like zone, and wage war in all-new rated Battlegrounds which will get you the same rewards as Arenas. New arena maps will also be added.

Flying Mounts in Azeroth: Explore Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms like never before, but don’t get too excited, you have to be 85 before you can fly again.

Cross Server LFG: This will let you PUG 5-man instances and search for groups through multiple servers. It will come with its own reward systems. If you’re the leader of a PUG and complete the dungeon successfully you will be rewarded.
It should be out for patch 3.3.0 and so far will only be within your battlegroup. If all goes well they will extend the servers and allow you to cross server raid too.

As if all that wasn’t enough Blizzard also plan on completely revamping stats and talents, this is what I mean when I say it will feel like a new game. Blizzards plans to streamline the statistics found on items, all unnecessary stats are being removed and all existing stats are going to be easy to understand and consequently more appealing.

MP5: This will be removed from items and replaced with Spirit. All healers will be given a meditation-like ability.
Spell Power: Spell Power is being removed from items and Intellect will be improved so that it provides mana and Spell Power.
Attack Power: Attack Power will go and they going to allow Agility to provide the necessary Attack Power for leather and mail wearers. Strength will provide the appropriate amount of Attack Power for plate wearers. This means leather and mail items will no longer be desirable for plate wearers.
Defence: The Defence statistic is also being removed from items so that players no longer have to worry about juggling around “the cap.” Tanks will receive the necessary anti-crit from talents, like Survival of the Fittest.
Armour Penetration: This ability is too confusing and “mathy.” It is being replaced with Mastery, a stat that makes you better at what you do.
Haste: Will also increase the rate at which you gain energy, runes, and focus. Retribution paladins and Enhancement shaman will have a talent that allows them to take advantage of this benefit.
Block: Block Value is being removed. Blocking will now always mitigate a percentage of damage.
Stamina: Players will notice more Stamina on gear as Defence, Spell Power, Attack Power and Armour Penetration are removed.

A few classes are being made more streamlined too.

Warlock
Soul Shards are no longer in your bags. The goal is to make them fun, not a hassle.
Soul Shards will be integrated to the user interface. (Just like Death Knight runes)

Hunter’s mana is gone
Hunters now use focus, they will no longer care about intellect or mana regen.
Focus regenerates continuously; steady shot improves the rate of getting focus back.

Personally I think these changes will be welcomed, especially for the casual players, many people however are worried the game is going to become too simplified and straightforward. Blizzard made it clear that there are changes in the works that will suit the hardcore players too, at the higher levels there are going to be many new ways of customisation.

The Path of the Titans: This will allow players to follow a path (not restricted to classes), this is a new talent system with new skills and passive abilities.

Archaeology: Archaeology is the new secondary profession that will be joining the ranks of cooking, fishing, and first aid in World of Warcraft: Cataclysm. Archaeology allows the player to unlock new abilities and rewards by discovering ancient treasures throughout the world. Each archaeologist uses the profession to uncover clues hidden in the world around them, such as troll relics or map fragments, and decipher their meaning, enabling the clever archaeologist to manipulate pieces of the past, learning the location of a treasure cache or valuable artefact. Such artefacts are highly sought after by the Archaeology Society, and they pay in gold and items for their return. Those who have mastered archaeology can find Titan artefacts, earning special currency used to unlock character paths and allowing the player to further customize their character.

Reforging: Reforging is another way to customise your gear. It will be relatively cheap and you will need a Blacksmith, Leatherworker, Tailor, Jewelcrafter or Engineer to do it. Each profession will get to reforge different types of items. It lets you reduce one stat for another. Some restrictions will apply for example you cannot put the extra stat on something that is already on the item.

These new systems alongside the already implanted gems, glyphs and enchants means spreadsheet and number crunching players will still have a lot on their plate to worry about.

As Blizzard always state their games will be out “when they are done” so everyone is unsure when this expansion will be officially released. The introduction of Arthas and the Icecrown Citadel will be the last of the patches for WOTLK and then all of their efforts will be focused on Cataclysm, Blizzard state that they do not want to take time away from working on the expansion to create new content for WOTLK. Playable versions of Cataclysm were available at Blizzcon and it seems a lot of the graphical content and artwork is further along than anticipated, but to implement all the other changes and to get it tested, balanced and working to high standards will take a long time. My guess would be a minimum of 5 months after Icecrown, however Blizzard realise that even if players start to leave once they have completed the woltk content -as soon as Cataclysm gets released EVERYONE will be back, so don’t be surprised if we have to wait as long as 2011 for this one.

Stracraft 2

Probably the least amount of info released out the three games but from what I saw the Starcraft 2 single player is going to be great. Tons of fun escort missions and missions where you battle the environment itself. One example was a charred planet full of slowly rising larva. On top of that the Starcraft 2 cinematics are amazing, looks like it’s really going to build the story. The actress who plays Six from Battlestar Galactica is new the voice for Kerrigan. Exciting stuff.

Battlenet 2.0

The new battlenet can be blamed for the lack of new content for Starcraft 2, this thing is going to be huge and you can’t have Starcraft without battlenet. They are going be creating a whole new friends feature similar to the Steam community, by adding someone to your BNet friends list, you can see what games they are playing. For example if your on WoW and your friends is on Starcraft 2 your be able to send him messages, see what server he’s on and even log out whatever game you’re in and jump in and join him. Will be interesting to be doing dailies on WoW then suddenly jump into a Starcraft skirmish in the matter of minutes.

Also for Battlnet there are launching a Starcraft 2 marketplace where you can search for custom maps in game, rate them and download them. The custom maps will be created through the Starcraft Map Editor which seems like an extremely powerful tool, it’s going to allow you to develop art assets to completely redesign the look and UI of the game. Expect to see a lot of really nice mods and total conversions for this, and I’m not talking just RTS. On the Starcraft 2 gameplay panel Blizzard showed examples of what can be done using this tool, we saw a 3rd person shooter including mouse aiming support and a top down shooter game similar to R-Type. They are also working on implementing a way for modders to be protected from people stealing their ideas changing one thing and calling it “version 2” there will also be a way for you to charge for your mod. Great incentives for the modding community to knuckle down and come up with some original ideas, it really feels like the sky is the limit for this. From Blizzards standpoint it means that SC2 will have longevity, and will run and run for years.

As you can see there is a lot to look forward to in the up and coming years if you are a fan of Blizzard games. This is not even including the super secret next gen MMO Blizzard has in the works. Let’s look forward to Blizzcon 2010 for information on that one! Will it be the WoW killer? Check back here next year to find out.