Saturday, June 28, 2008

Diablo III, praise be to Blizzard

Oh my stars...joy upon joys...the next installment of Diablo III is coming. Finally Blizzard (the shop responsible for the genre expanding Warcraft series) is focusing development efforts on the Diablo world. Diablo was my first serious foray into PC gaming, having spent countless hours playing it at a certain textbook and software publishing house in Emeryville, when I was also starting my foray into Business Intelligence. During the close of the month I had to kick off a manual process of building text files used to construct OLAP cubes, which I then employed to run scheduled and ad hoc analyses and reports. During the file build, I'd fire up Diablo II and wail away at monsters, collect weapons, and hire mercenaries to fight by my side. There was some initial buzz over what Blizzard was doing, as some of the recent content they put online didn't clearly state what was happening., but at the Worldwide Invitational in Paris, France, they announced their next title would be Diablo III.
No release date was indicated, but from the demo material that they released, the POV is top-down like in I and II, the gameplay is updated, and includes destructible environments, enhanced 3D graphics, and new character classes.
It looks glorious. After playing Diablo II and the Lord of Destruction expansion pack to death many years ago, I'm going to need to break it out to get back into the mindset of what is Diablo.

Thank you Blizzard. Thank you.

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