You may have noticed, perhaps, that there was a small gathering of gamers, 8,000 or so in number, in Paris, France this morning. There has been speculation and coverage leading up to this Invitational for days now, so much so that any reasonable player would be sick of hearing about it by now. Of course, I am not reasonable, sane, or anything of the sort, because I was one of many who were up at the ungodly hour of 4:30 AM central time to tune into the stream.
Diablo 3? Wrath Beta? Release dates for either Wrath or Starcraft 2? Both maybe? The splash screen on the Blizzard.com web site has been hinting at something, and even before the opening ceremonies began the word had leaked about the biggest announcement of the event, but as I said earlier, I really did not feel that one big announcement would be all we would get from the ceremony. If Apple can do several products in one keynote, Mike Morhaim can!
The Big News
As I was downing Coke Zero by the can to wake up enough to actually report on what we heard, what we were all excited about, when BA chat saw a pointer to MMO Champion, who had a leak from the big screen at the Invitational that showed the new title would be Diablo 3. Being that this was not overly surprising news, I hunkered down and waited for the announcements to start. Once the high res stream began working, missing little of importance, the stream stuttered and buffered it's way to the end.
Mike Morhaim proudly announced Diablo 3, an amazing teaser for the upcoming title showing a totally awesome cinematic with voice over. While I only caught part of it, I am sure that Blizzard's web site will have a copy of that video later today. Mike then introduced the Diablo 3 Lead Developer, who went into a couple of the classes, showed some of the improvements since Diablo 2, and showed a few fights.
Expecting that Mike would come back and begin the process of announcing the Wrath stuff, I was cursing when my stream kept stopping for minutes at a time. isheepthings, who was in BA chat at the time, was kind enough to give a description of the stuff, since apparently the stream wasn't crappy for all of the users, just most. I was saddened, though, to hear they went back to thanking folks in the audience and then moved onto some fire dancers to close out the opening ceremony.
While we will undoubtedly see a nice amount of information out of the unlabeled discussion panels, at least some of which will have WoW content as wrath draws near, it is not the level of information I was hoping for. Discussion panels will not have release dates, cinematic, or other Wrath information that many of us want so bad. I will report again when we have more information on whatever they decide to tell us about the Wrath expansion and current game.
Diablo 3? Wrath Beta? Release dates for either Wrath or Starcraft 2? Both maybe? The splash screen on the Blizzard.com web site has been hinting at something, and even before the opening ceremonies began the word had leaked about the biggest announcement of the event, but as I said earlier, I really did not feel that one big announcement would be all we would get from the ceremony. If Apple can do several products in one keynote, Mike Morhaim can!
The Big News
As I was downing Coke Zero by the can to wake up enough to actually report on what we heard, what we were all excited about, when BA chat saw a pointer to MMO Champion, who had a leak from the big screen at the Invitational that showed the new title would be Diablo 3. Being that this was not overly surprising news, I hunkered down and waited for the announcements to start. Once the high res stream began working, missing little of importance, the stream stuttered and buffered it's way to the end.
Mike Morhaim proudly announced Diablo 3, an amazing teaser for the upcoming title showing a totally awesome cinematic with voice over. While I only caught part of it, I am sure that Blizzard's web site will have a copy of that video later today. Mike then introduced the Diablo 3 Lead Developer, who went into a couple of the classes, showed some of the improvements since Diablo 2, and showed a few fights.
Expecting that Mike would come back and begin the process of announcing the Wrath stuff, I was cursing when my stream kept stopping for minutes at a time. isheepthings, who was in BA chat at the time, was kind enough to give a description of the stuff, since apparently the stream wasn't crappy for all of the users, just most. I was saddened, though, to hear they went back to thanking folks in the audience and then moved onto some fire dancers to close out the opening ceremony.
While we will undoubtedly see a nice amount of information out of the unlabeled discussion panels, at least some of which will have WoW content as wrath draws near, it is not the level of information I was hoping for. Discussion panels will not have release dates, cinematic, or other Wrath information that many of us want so bad. I will report again when we have more information on whatever they decide to tell us about the Wrath expansion and current game.
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