As we all know, Blizzard are working on an unannounced MMORPG and some have speculated that it could be Diablo related even though Blizzard have stated it is a new IP. However, in last night’s Blizzard quarterly conference call Mike Morhaime was specifically asked about the new MMO and he said that the unannounced MMORPG in development was “not a direct sequel to World of Warcraft”. His response to the question may have been a simple phrasing error but it’s interesting nevertheless. With StarWars: The Old Republic taking the StarWars story back in time could Blizzard be working along the same lines with the Warcraft Universe? We’ll keep you posted if anything else emerges about the new game. Thanks IncGamers.

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After the Amazonian ranged skills and the Assassin's martial masteries, it's time to showcase the prowess of the powerful Barbarian character who is seemingly the only survivor for the past 20 years awaiting whatever we'll encounter in Diablo III.

One of the interesting aspects of Diablo II skills is to compared them to the new Diablo III skills, seeing exactly how the evolution in game design has taken this powerful character. We still have no idea how he managed to become unable to use all his previous abilities, but that's not really a problem in Diablo II. Read up more on this younger version of the Barbarian to get another glimpse of what is in store for us in Diablo III.

You should remember to help out filling out any missing lore from the Diablo II Manual, or add any cool screenshots you might have of the skills.

Combat Masteries	Combat Skills	Barbarian Warcries
Sword Mastery Axe Mastery Mace Mastery Polearm Mastery Throwing Mastery Spear Mastery Increased Stamina Iron Skin Increased Speed Natural Resistance	Bash Leap Double Swing Stun Double Throw Leap Attack Concentrate Frenzy Whirlwind Berserk	Howl Find Potion Taunt Shout Find Item Battle Cry Battle Orders Grim Ward War Cry Battle Command

Massive thanks goes out to all our contributors in the last week: TheWanderer, Zukker, Doomboy, Holyknight3000, - V -, Jonruy, Crehl, AtheistInHell, Razvanthekid, Asteria, Butch Audacity, Veskin7 Bukito and Prihlod. The Diablo Wiki would not be the best Diablo resource on the web without you!

Extra thanks to TheWanderer, who has done loads of lore updates in the last few months. He takes a little hiatus for a while, and will be sorely missed. More lore work is needed, so don't be shy, step right up and dig in!

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In this week’s column I turn my eye on a Diablo 2 character who will not (as far as we know) be making a return appearance in Diablo 3. The Paladin. Who couldn’t like the Paladin? He’s a good guy, he shares auras, he’s holy, he wears shining armor… Me, that’s who. I’m about as fond of Paladins (as they are found on B.net these days) as I am of Blizzard’s decision not to include a weapon switch hotkey in D3. And I have many more words, images, ideas, and humor to work into my rant. Read on, if you dare. Here’s the introduction; click through for the full column.

Paladin Malady

This week we take a closer look at our blight in shining armor: the Paladin. It all started when the supposed holy warrior showed up in my game. I think the little guy playing him noticed my scholarly penmanship. You know that knobby callus on the side of your finger you get in elementary school from using a pencil? Well this guy didn’t have one of those. He accused me of being an Asian player using some sort of English word synthesizer. Man, I wish I was that competent with these here magic computer boxes. I tried reassuring the extremely racist holy man that I was as pale in real life as he was, with no tan or anything. But I must have rolled three sixes because the hero did the thing where he spits out insults and leaves as though the whisper function doesn’t exist. And that got me thinking: why do all the aspiring pimps keep choosing the holy Paladin over the dark Necromancer or angryBarbarian? Are they going for shock value or is the Paladin actually the most evil class in the game? And who needs a knobby callus on your finger when you have a platoon of Paladin friends who are complete knobs?

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Today’s Penny Arcade comic and news post focus on Torchlight‘s clever innovation in inventory (which Lead Designer Travis Baldree first used in Fate); giving all characters a backpack-wearing wolf or lynx for a pet. The pet fights for you, can be outfitted with equipment and spells, and is a fairly effective tank, but perhaps most useful is its backpack, which is huge; identical in size to your character’s.  Better yet, the pet can journey back to the surface and sell anything you give it, while you continue battling in the dungeons. The selling trip takes some time, longer the deeper you are in the dungeon, and you lose the tanking benefit of the pet while it’s gone, but when it comes to the moral victory of saving a trip to town, this is a great innovation.

Is the Diablo 3 team thinking of anything along these lines? Not yet, at least according to what Jay Wilson told us in our exclusive interview a few weeks ago:

Diii.net: How will we sell items easily in town, since there are no more town portals? How do you pop back quickly and easily without slowing down the gameplay?
Jay Wilson: Waypoints are a little bit more frequent and your bag space is a little bit bigger.

Diii.net: It’s going to be Diablo 2 in style? There won’t be pets you can send back, or NPC merchants out in the wild, or any other odd features?
Jay Wilson: No.

This might yet change, of course, but at this point the D3 team seems not real interested in innovation or newness in their inventory management plans. That by itself isn’t horrible, but consider that they are not going to include Town Portals in the game. Their reasons for removing TPs are sound; they want to add strategy and danger to combat, and make players stick it out in battle, rather than vanishing back to town any time things get sticky. That’s fine, in theory, but it seems like a good way to make item sales and inventory management very inconvenient. More frequent waypoints or not.

No one enjoys coming up with a full inventory and having to stop in the field and sort out the junk. Left clicking items it to a pet that can sell those items though… that’s nice. Nicer than Dungeon Seige’s pack animal assistant. Hellgate: London‘s method of allowing players to instantly break down items into their (much less bulky) raw components (which were used in crafting) was another clever innovation along these lines. One thing to keep in mind: items in D3 sell for tiny amounts of gold, compared to how much you can accumulate by picking up gold. (There were no NPCs to sell items to in the Blizzcon build, but the item hover info included the sales price, so comparisons could be made). That said, I don’t think that making items so cheap that they’re not really worth the trouble of selling is a great solution to this issue.

So what do you guys think? Should D3 stick to the old school, “you will return to town and run to an NPC merchant,” or would you prefer to see some innovation? NPC merchants in the dungeons, right clicking for instant item converting/sales (perhaps for less gold than you’d receive in town), a pet or pack animal or mercenary with extra inventory and the ability to sell it off, etc?

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More news and reviews of Torchlight, for your weekend amusement.

Rush has posted his Torchlight review on our parent site, IncGamers.com. He’s happy with the game, likes his pet dog, and awards Torchlight with a 9/10.

MetalIcarus’s blog on My MMOSite offers a very colorfully-formatted review with a score, but with highly positive comments.

Rock Paper Shotgun is also too cool to sum up their thoughts with an actual grade, but they have a lot of fairly positive and somewhat probing comments about Torchlight.

The Escapist has a nice feature analyzing an interview the author conducted with Runic CEO Max Schaefer, President & Lead Designer Travis Baldree, Art Director Jason Beck and Zombie Pyrotechnician John Dunbar. Here’s a quote, and the full interview transcript can be seen on the WarCry Network.

Hellgate “wanted to be too many things for too many people,” said Schaefer, pointing out that the game had been trying to push the envelope on several fronts including new pricing plans and early adoption of DirectX 10. With Torchlight, then, the team knew that they had to “focus on what we were doing, and a simpler path to where we’re going, not take off gigantic bites that are more than we could ever chew.”

In fact, their own team had been on the verge of making the same mistake with Mythos, said Baldree: “The development of that game was contorted and protracted, and like Hellgate it tried to be a lot of different things for a lot of different reasons ... [Torchlight] is what Mythos should have been. Maybe it’s what Fate and Diablo I should have been.” Having taken those lessons to heart, the Runic team vowed to focus on what they knew their 27-man team could do, and do well: Make a smooth action RPG.

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Ten Ton Hammer has posted a fairly thorough Diablo III preview. There’s no new info or developer quotes, just a general discussion of the title’s ongoing development, but if you enjoy reading all things Diablo III, you’ll want to check it out.

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Bashiok made several quick posts in the forums today. His longest post was in reply to a guy comparing the music in Torchlight to the music in Diablo 2. (Both were composed by Matt Uelmen.)  Bashiok’s take? No moar Torchlight talks! (Is okays. We can has Torchlights forum for joo.)

	Blizzard Quote:
	I know there have been two very good games recently released that are in the same genre or feature some of the same mechanics as Diablo, but I’d like to keep the threads here on topic. If you want to discuss any other games please take it to the off-topic forum. If you want to bring up specific ideas or features that come from those games, or any game for that matter, that’s totally fine, they can stay here as long as they’re relevant ideas and topics for this game. I’d just like to keep the threads out that aren’t here to add to the conversations of Diablo III. Thanks!

Bashiok also made a quick reply to someone asking about the Talisman.

	Blizzard Quote:
	We’ve never said anything about it because it may not even end up being a feature in the final game. It could just get cut.

Actually, I asked Jay Wilson about this during our recent interview, and he gave quite a bit of info. There will be some sort of substantial stat boosting system in D3, whether it works through the Talisman or something else.  Click through for more details and one last Bashiok post.

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Richard A. Knaak has a book signing tour throughout various bookstores within Texas to promote his LEGENDS OF DRAGONREALM, and as usual welcomes Warcraft and Diablo fans to come by to say hello and to get their Blizzard novels signed.

I have been pestering Knaak and Jaime Costas (Pocket Books) for ages, and more recently at BlizzCon 2009 and a few weeks ago. The answer remains the same. They won’t spill the beans, confirm nor deny if there are Diablo novels in early discussions. We will have to be patient, but heck I bet everyone shares the sentiment that we need more Diablo novels while we wait for Diablo III to keep our craving to normal levels. Don’t worry, I will continue pestering and torturing them till they shine some hope for us avid readers of the epic-adventures within Sanctuary.

If you live in Texas, check out the following bookstores that might be near you, after the break.

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Another day and another batch of Torchlight news and other features.

We’re conducting a podcast/interview with Runic Games’ Max Schaefer this week, and we’re looking for question suggestions about TL or other issues. Drop them into this forum thread if you’ve got something you want asked.

Taking firm hold of the stupidest article yet written about Torchlight is this piece on MMOSite.com, which asserts that Blizzard is going to have to remake Diablo 3 because of Torchlight.

It is rumored that the release of Torchlight will force Diablo 3 to be remade. Blizzard has stopped announcing any new information about Diablo 3, which is within our expectation. A game with most content of Diablo 3 has been open to the public, certainly, it has a bad influence on the popularity and anticipation of Diablo 3 in any way. Blizzard no longer publishes any news about Diablo 3, it seems that Blizzard has made up its mind to reform the game system thoroughly. This way can also relieve Blizzard’s awkward situation in the face of Torchlight.

Do you still remember that the launch of NOX caused a notable impact on Diablo 2 in 2000? Partly similar elements of NOX made sensitive Blizzard modify Diablo 2 for more than one year. How long will it take to remake Diablo 3 completely when Blizzard confronts the clone Torchlight? Maybe players can only have a chance to experience Diablo 3 after 2014. Suppose you marry now, maybe you can play it with your child when it’s officially published. lol…

That bit about Nox is just insane. I remember the game well, and trust me, despite the best efforts of Westwood (they flew webmasters from all the leading Diablo fansites, including our former writer Gaile, out to a Nox launch event in Las Vegas), Nox sunk almost without a ripple. It launched on January 31, 2000, shortly before the Diablo 2 beta began, and caused no delay of any sort to Diablo 2. Nox had no randomization and therefore very little replayability, and there was no co-op multiplayer upon launch.

As for Torchlight and D3… really? TL was released a week ago, and Blizzard has kept on releasing just as much Diablo info during that time as they have since Blizzcon. (Which is to say, not so much.) It’s true that Blizzard might take some inspiration or feature ideas from Torchlight—Bashiok acknowledged as much in a recent forum post—but it’s irresponsible to invent rumors of this nature just for the fun of it.Especially when they are directly contradicted by things like… facts.

Elsewhere, Wired’s Game Life column gives a big thumbs up to Torchlight’s addictive nature.

The latest iGame Radio podcast features an interview with Max Schaefer, Travis Baldree, and Jason Beck of Runic Games.

Finally, GNews points out one benefit of Blizzard’s multi-year development process. Other games and developers have room to sneak in their own games in the same genres. Torchlight is mentioned, of course, but they also mention that the various Starcraft 2 delays have given aid to other RTS titles such as Dawn of War 2: Chaos Rising. Click through to view that game’s not-very-impressive trailer.

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Bashiok replied today to a fan impatient for more info on the fifth character class. I’ve inserted a visual aid to help you envision what I think their original design concepts for the 5th character were.

	Blizzard Quote:
	Well the game was originally announced with the barbarian and Witch Doctor. BlizzCon ‘08 saw the announcement of the wizard (at BlizzCon, not three weeks after), and BlizzCon ‘09 saw the announcement of the monk. The fifth class was something that was decided early on, but after continuing to work on the game and the other classes it just wasn’t up to standards any longer. So it’s back on the drawing board. We only have one class left to reveal, it’s sort of a major card we can still hold close to the vest. While development doesn’t depend on our plans to reveal it, we definitely aren’t going to tell everyone what it is just because we know what it’s going to be.

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