Diablo 3

I'm sure everyone who's interested has heard that Diablo 3 has been announced. This actually caught me off guard, I wasn't expecting Blizzard to announce it until after Starcraft 2 went gold, but hey, I'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth. As I'm sure you can imagine, there have already been a lot of people bitching about it. This tends to happen whenever an older game is taken up by a new development team to make a sequel (see Fallout 3). I can understand where they're coming from, after all, someone else is handling (or perhaps manhandling) your childhood memories, but that doesn't inherently make it inferior. Anywho, here's some of the gems I've come across that I think you should see:

An online petition begging for a new artistic direction of Diablo 3. I'm doing my best to think of something that is less likely to affect any actual change that signing an online petition. I mean, does anyone really take these things seriously? Now, before I get started on my views about how Diablo 3 looks, I'm going to give some free advice to any online revolutionaries. When you make a petition, be sure to give it a quick reading first. A spellchecker won't notice that you put down "ear" instead of "hear." It really does just make it look unprofessional. And try to pick an email address that has some dignity to it, unlike "Ultramegazord00" (I guess he was a Power Rangers fan). Learning how to put a hyperlink into the post helps with making it look nice and official as well. Really, everything you should have learned in your high school english class (remember the MLA format?) should apply to this kind of thing. I guess that the petition actually did accomplish something though. There's another petition saying "Please keep the colours, we like them just fine!" I sometimes hate the internet, y'know?

I really don't have an issue with the look of the gameplay trailer. Sure, it's unpolished, but that kind of thing gets fixed with time. Overall it looks like a great spiritual successor to the earlier games, and it improves on a lot of areas. I'm not thrilled with only having five classes, it seems like a step backwards from Throne of Baal. It is cool that they (finally) let you pick what sex you want your character to be. What will really sell this game for me is if they allow for user made dungeons.

I was going to post more about some of the idiocies of the internet (in particular one man who hoped that Diablo 3 would bankrupt those bastards at WoW), but I lost the will after I read the petition.

-Andy