Blizzard Press Conference round-up
Here in sunny Cologne Blizzard have just held a Press Conference to tell everyone how Diablo 3, StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm and the behemoth World of Warcraft are doing on the run up to Blizzcon.
Diablo III
- The difficulty settings have been fidgeted with, where Diablo one and two both had the level cap at "Hell" (Very Hard), Diable III is taking it up a notch and introducing "Inferno". Inferno is a step up from Hell and pushes you to your limit as you'll be at the max player level of 60 and all of the monsters you encounter will be 61 and above (good luck with that). The trade off for getting your arse repeatedly handed to you is that you'll get some super cool gear that you can't get in the "easier" modes.
- The development team have been working hard away on Runes for your characters to equip, now we know that they'll level up. If a rune would split your magic missile into two missiles at level one, when it's at level eight it might split it into six or seven missiles. Basically whatever it did before, it'll do more. Like MSG.
- The in game auction houses won't limit you what you can buy or sell depending on what difficulty setting you're using, so someone playing on normal could cough up and buy a bunch of gear from an Inferno player, it seems like that'll totally nerf the balance, but we'll have to wait and see.
StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm
- SCII: Heart of the Swarm as we all know will revolve around Kerrigan and the Zerg. Kerrigan wants to kill Mengsk because of his history of dick moves and reckons that regaining her powers as the Queen of Blades is the best way to go about this.
- As you play through the campaign you'll be able to upgrade Kerrigan via "Battle Focus", whatever you decide to upgrade isn't permanent, however, as you can respec Kerrigan at will .This is pretty sweet to hear as now we can fiddle about and see what we fancy making Kerrigan kick arse at without reprisal for terrible setups.
World of Warcraft: Cataclysm 4.3 patch
- The boys at Blizzard are bringing raiders exactly what they wanted from the day they first saw Deathwing. A new tier of raids is to be released culminating in raiding parties queuing up to take on Deathwing in a "super-epic" fight that sees you fighting on his back in one phase.
- Blizzard saw that players are losing uniqueness as high level gear is being worn by basically everyone so a lot of the time people playing as the same race & class look almost identical. To remedy this they're introducing Transmogrification. Transmogrification is where you'll take one item you like the look of and use the stats from another item you have to create an epic looking gear that will have the stats of another item you like the practicality of. It's going to do wonders in the personalisation aspect WoW seems to have lost.
- However, Transmogrification will leave WoW players wanted more storage room so Blizzard have come up with the void storage system. They used a lot of long words and spent effort to not make it sound like a second bank. It's basically a second bank.
That's about it - there's loads of stuff there for Blizzard fans to be excited about while they wait for Blizzcon!
