Ende April kündigte Bashiok an, dass der Patch 1.13 für Diablo 2 (incl. Ladder Reset) in Entwicklung sei.

(wir berichteten)

Nun meldete er sich in einem der zahlreichen Topics, in denen die User ein Datum für den Release:

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Q u o t e:
Bashiok, do you have any new details for us about the upcoming 1.13 patch?

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Not really. Work on the patch was put on hold for a while due to higher priority issues, but it commences, and it is nearing.

Das Patch-Team musste also scheinbar wichtigere Projekte bearbeiten und Diablo 2 wurde solange auf Eis gelegt. Der Patch  nähert sich allerdings. 2 Wochen vor Release wird es noch eine offizielle Meldung von Blizzard geben.

Ihr habt also noch etwas Zeit in der aktuellen Ladder. Ein bereits bekanntes Feature von 1.13 wird die größere Kiste sein. [1]

Quelle : Battle.net Forum

+++ UPDATE  1.Juli +++

http://diablogamer.com/2009/07/01/diablo-2-patch-113-es-geht-weiter/

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Barbaren haben in Diablo 3  (ähnlich wie Krieger in World of Warcraft) anstelle von Mana sogenannte “Fury Aufladungen”. Diese sind in mehrere Stufen unterteilt und schalten damit die Angriffe frei, die der Barbar verwenden kann.

Bashiok antwortete nun im Battle.net Forum auf einige Fragen der Community:

• Frage: Okay. How much fury does each skill cost? As an example.

They require fury in amounts of full fury globes. So the most one can cost is 3.

• Frage: Does each ability cost a full globe?

Yes, currently abilities that do cost fury cost one or more full fury “globes”. Don’t get the term ‘fury globe’ too stuck in your brain though, there’s going to be an official name for them and it may not be globe.

• Frage: Do abilities cost a portion of each globe?

There aren’t and probably won’t be abilities that cost a portion of a fury … ball. I’m going to call them fury balls. Wait … no … that’s a terrible idea.

• Frage: Are the globes valued numerically, similar to rage, and the abilities cost a “number” of Fury?

Right now they actually are, but that’s because it’s sort of mid-transition from an old fury system. They’ll simply be shown and referred to in ability cost as full globes. At least that’s the current thought.

As I said it’s still a system and game in development, and any of this can change entirely. This is just a peek into the current workings.

• Frage: Does fury deteriorate over time?

Yes.

• Frage: Is fury cost affected by skill growth (adding more points to a skill).

I don’t know of any abilities that do right now but it’s always a possibility for balance later.

• Frage: When you use a fury skill, does the damage dealt serve to recharge your fury (meaning that you could theoretically have a net zero fury cost when attacking crowds)?

It does, but of course it’s subject to change.

• Frage: How many dots of fury (dots, yes) does the ground stomp cost? If three, I can see people holding it for when they need it, and not using any other skills to conserve fury.

It doesn’t cost any fury, but it does have a cooldown.

• Frage: On that note, is 3 the absolute maximum? Or can you go a little over 3, like 3.9 or something, so you’ll get a full bubble soon after? If 3 is the hard max, then you’d have to use a 3 dot skill immediately before it decays to 2.999 or something.

Fury decay doesn’t happen that quickly. There’s a grace period in there before it starts ticking down.

• Frage: Appreciate the info on the system as it stands bash, and if my deductive skills are working properly one could assume that there will be skills that dont use the fury system, such as ground stomp. Could you give us an idea of one that would use fury? how powerful will these skills be?

Ground stomp is an exception mainly because of the nature of its use. A cooldown allows it to be used as an “oh crap I’m overwhelmed” ability without also requiring you to have fury built up. Most if not all straight attack abilities like cleave, leap attack, whirlwind, etc. have fury costs, in addition to most ‘buff’ abilities.

• Frage: So it looks like each fury ball has 5 ticks to charge up. So cleave, which seems to be the most basic attack will take 5 normal hits to charge up before it can be used assuming it takes one fury ball. And if Whirlwind required 3 fury balls, then there would potentially be 15 normal attacks in between each use? Ouch! Spamming normal attacks and using a special attack about 10% of the time doesn’t seem very epic to me. It would also suck for PvP, because it will be hard enough to land a special attack in most situations let alone 15 normal attacks just to get to use a special attack.

Fury is also built from incoming attacks. If you’re in a moderate sized scuffle you can unleash abilities pretty regularly. The animation that was shown in BlizzCast was made in a test environment, using a single weapon and attacking stationary (and non-attacking) zombies. So it built up fairly slowly, but nice and consistent for the video, which was the point. In a normal game, and as the barbarian especially, you’re quite often surrounded and the balance of normal attacks/fury gen/special ability use feels quite nice.

Quelle: Battle.net Forum

Update von Bashiok

Einige Skills können die Fury Generation und Degeneration begünstigen. Die Fertigkeit “Enrage” z.B. erzeugt einen Grundwert an Fury, mit dem man angreifen kann.

Momentan gibt es nur einen Skill, der mehr als eine “Fury Bubble” kostet. (Ich tippe auf Wirbelwind)

Yeah there are abilities that alter fury generation, degeneration, and how and when it’s gained. Those skills are a bit outdated but the general mechanic intentions persist.

Regarding someone’s question on getting into a battle on a cold start (no fury), there is Enrage, an ability that grants a bubble of fury and increase fury generation. Kind of similar to Bloodrage for Warriors in WoW if that helps you. So you can pop enrage (lolinsidejokelol?) and then be able to get in and start using at least one ability instantly.

Regarding fury cost and someone implying that everything is going to cost tons of fury, right now there’s only one ability that costs more than a single bubble. Even still, if you’re surrounded, you cleave, that costs a bubble but the damage you’re taking while you cleave and the damage you caused with the cleave is usually enough to cleave again immediately.

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Ein User stellte im Battle.net Forum die Frage, ob die beiden fehlenden Chars (neben Wizard, Barb und Hexendoc) eventuell auf der BlizzCon vorgestellt werden.

Bashiok antwortete darauf:

The mere occurrence of an event such as BlizzCon doesn’t truly dictate what will or will not be shown. We obviously want to put on a good show, and entertain those in attendance as well as reveal new information about our titles currently in development, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the information we reveal will include a class announcement.

Man will also die Präsentation neuer Inhalte möglichst gut “verpacken”. Das heißt aber nicht, dass Blizzard zwangsläufig neue Klassen auf der BlizzCon ankündigen wird. Wenn man jedoch spekulieren darf – es wäre schon sehr unwahrscheinlich, wenn die BlizzCon nicht wenigstens einen Char bietet.

Auch eine Beta ist nicht undenkbar – die Version des letzten Jahres könnte man eher als spielbare Alpha bezeichnen.

Quelle: Battle.net Forum

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Auf Nachfrage eines Users stellte Bashiok einige grundlegende Dinge bei Bosskampf klar.

Bosse werden also in Diablo 3 viel interessanter als in Diablo 2 ausfallen. So hatte ein Boss früher einfach nur etwas bessere Werte (Leben / Schaden / …). In Diablo 3 will Blizzard zu den Bossen auch eine Geschichte erzählen und spezielle Mechaniken anbieten. So sollen Bosskämpfe vielseitiger werden.

Heil-Sphaeren (das Pendant zu Tränken) könnten in diesen Kämpfen von den Dienern der Bosse fallen gelassen werden. Auch weitere Features wären denkbar :

I hope you’re not calling that an interesting fight, or saying Diablo II was replayable because it had no mechanics beyond the boss’ abilities.

In Diablo III we want at least some boss fights that aren’t defined simply by having a creature with more health, unique art, and more powerful abilities. We want there to be something more to them, tell a story, have more unique mechanics that make sense for the boss.

As far as the original topic, when health globes could be delivered during a boss fight, there’s really no limit for how they could be delivered. Take the King Leoric fight, they were delivered through creatures that he summoned, normal skeletons. Every boss could essentially have the same thing, normal enemies around him that can be killed for the potential at getting a health globe drop. Or, you could have something more interesting … like a boss that does a special attack that has the ability to break open some large corpse storage tanks that are in his lair. The player has to lead the boss to the tank and try to invoke the special attack so he’ll break the tank open, which unleashes some health globes. You could even treat the tank (code-wise) as a normal creature, meaning abilities and items could augment the number that drop and amount they heal, etc. giving some control to the individual player. If you don’t need the health you can ignore the mechanic, but it could be a way for players to try to game the boss and make sure they can survive the fight. Totally hypothetical, we don’t have a fight that resembles what I described, but it’s a possible delivery system.

I disagree that having bosses that do something more than simply cast the spells they’re given to cast kills replayability.

Quelle: Battle.net Forum

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Bashiok verriet im Battle.net Forum ein paar Details über die (aktuellen) Möglichkeiten, Runen (in Items?) zu verwenden. Ob nun die Runen wirklich in ein Item gesockelt werden, oder weiterhin die “Runentasche” verwendet wird, ist allerdings noch nicht ganz klar.

The intent isn’t for runes to be hot-swappable or interchangeable at any time. The ability to change the rune is the point of any comments made about switching them around, not that we want to allow easy and free interchangeable runes. What we do intend is for people to be able to try different runes without fear of losing the rune, or permanently changing the way a skill works.

Early design thoughts on rune swapping are that there would be some sort of cost to remove them so a new one could be put in its place. Early in the character’s life it would be inexpensive enough so it isn’t prohibitive, as we want to encourage experimentation, but later on the cost would become more substantial.

In addition, the high end runes are intended to be very rare. So while you’re looking for them we want you to be able to use the runes you have without fear of losing them or using them incorrectly. Being able to experiment with different runes along the way to creating your perfect character is more fun, and potentially enlightening to the different ways your character can be used.

Es wird also voraussichtlich so ablaufen, dass man Runen (in Items??) austauschen und wieder verwenden kann. Damit dies nicht zum durchgehenden “Hot-Swap” (spontaner Austausch in jeder Spielsituation) verkommt, wird es gewisse Kosten geben, die man für einen Runentausch berappen muss.

Außerdem wird es wohl (wieder) einige sehr seltene Runen geben, die in Diablo 2 leider fast ausschließlich durch Cheats/Dupes erzeugt wurden. Derartige Probleme wird Blizzard allerdings mit dem kompletten Neu-Design des Battle.net “2.0″ beheben.

Update:

Runen haben damit offenbar als Währung ausgedient. Bashiok erläuterte auf einige Nachfragen noch kurz, warum Runen in Diablo 2 zur Währung geworden sind und wo die Unterschiede zu D3 liegen.

• 1) Mit dem Patch 1.10 wurden Runen von JEDEM Spieler benötigt, der an die Top-Items wollte
• 2) Runen wurden häufig geduped, so dass die nötige Anzahl für eine Währung in Umlauf kam
• 3) Die eigentliche Währung “Gold” ist wertlos

The currency thing keeps coming up so let me try to address that as best I can.

High runes in Diablo II became a currency for a few reasons. One (and most importantly) because they were necessary to create some of the most powerful/sought after items in the game post-1.10, two because they were duplicated allowing enough of them to be common enough to become a currency, and three the actual currency (gold) was essentially worthless. Before high runes the currency was Stones of Jordan, again, duping is the main issue here for how they were allowed to become a common currency.

If they were only being picked up legitimately there simply wouldn’t be enough of them circulating to become a common currency.

Now, just because word “rune” is used for the runes in Diablo III it does not mean:
A. They will be the most sought after items in the game (although they could be)
B. Duping will be an issue allowing rare items to become common
C. There won’t be a better and more appropriate currency

BUT, despite all this, we still want item trades to be useful. There is nothing wrong with people trading items for other items. It only becomes an issue when the barrier of entry into general trading becomes prohibitive due to secondary currency markets based on illegitimate items. And it won’t happen as long as there is a intentional and low-barrier currency (gold), and the game is designed and maintained as to not allow creation of illegitimate items.

Quelle: Battle.net Forum

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Seit Sommer 2008 wurde es still um den ehemaligen Diablo 2 Projektleiter Bill Roper.

Seine “Flagship Studios”  fielen mit Hellgate:London leider so sehr auf die Nase, dass sie ihre Geschäfte einstellen mussten. Nun arbeitet Bill bei Cryptic Studios als ausführender Produzent von “Champions Online“.

Seine ehemaligen Diablo 2 / Hellgate:London Kollegen (Max & Erik Shaefer, Travis Baldree, …) arbeiten unterdessen weiter an ihrer neusten Spieleschmiede “Runic Games“.  Ihren neusten “Diablo Clone” Torchlight konnte man am Wochenende bereits auf der E3 anspielen. Die ähnlichkeiten zu Diablo 3 sind natürlich an vielen Stellen erkennbar, doch man muss der Entwicklergruppe natürlich zugestehen, dass sie die inoffiziellen Nachfolger von Blizzard North (alias Condor)  sind, die 1993 von Blizzard aufgekauft wurden. Die Rechte an der Diablo Reihe gingen dabei natürlich an Blizzard über.

Unterdessen gab Bill Roper den Kollegen von Gamasutra ein sehr ausführliches Interview, in dem er sich über seine Vergangenheit bei Blizzard, Flagship und seinem neusten Studio “Cryptic” äußerte. (Etwas lang, aber durchaus interessant zu lesen)

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