Rob Pardo, Blizz’s VP of Design has confirmed it’s a new game.
Possibilities:
Diablo 3
Warcraft 4
World of Starcraft
World of Diablo
Project “Hydra” (Next-gen MMO or Diablo 3)
Their new handheld game (they’re looking for senior handheld UI designers)
ETA: A little while ago they did have openings for a senior graphic artist “experienced in Massively Multiplayer Online Games” who wanted to work on a brand new project, so they are in fact working on SOME MMO.
I’ll be disappointed if this is Diablo 3. Blizzard has three franchises that it could live on forever, but I’m hoping they will take a risk and try something new.
It doesn’t matter what it is, the Diablo fanbois will weep regardless.
The only thing I’m hoping for is that it’s something I can play on my PC. I’m a one-platform man, and if they do some Starcraft:Ghost bullshit, I’ll be a very sad man.
Daniel
“Diablo III: Warlord of Pain”?
“Diablo: World Police”? 
“Diablo: World PvP Playoffs”? (AS in a tournament)
Here is a link to a job opening annoucment:
http://www.blizzard.com/us/jobopp/senior-3d-environment-artist2.html
Can someone tell from reading this, on whether or not it is for a MMO or a single player game?
For example, there is experience with “Maya” preferred. Is Maya more likely to be used for a MMO like WoW, or no?
Also, how much 3d modeling is needed in a top down game like Diablo II? (Some, I realise, but not as much as WoW. In WoW, the players viewpoint is from amongst the objects, thus the player must be able to look at objects from different angles. In Diablo, other than moving objects, the static enviornment, like trees, only present a single “side” to the player.)
Wait now…D=4, O=15, P=16, W=23…those are the Lost numbers.
They’re missing 8. If it’s in sequence, someone messed up, or it’s not meant to be those and it’s a huge coincidence.
It was just announced … Diablo 3!
I was watching the streaming video online, live from Paris. It kept kicking me and / or crashing, but I saw about half the demonstration video of Diablo 3. It doesn’t appear that the http://www.blizzard.com/diablo3/ site is up yet, but that’s the URL the splash image tries to link to currently.
They demo’ed a Barbarian and a Witch Doctor, from what I saw. Looks like lots of great hack-n-slash action. The perspective looks like that used in WarCraft 3. It’s 3D in a rendering sense, but not 3D in an arbitrary camera-angle sense. Looks spiffy.
I’m sure high resolution videos of the gameplay demo will be on YouTube before many of you even wake up today. 
UPDATE: Gameplay and teaser trailer videos are now available on the official site.
I went to bed early last night (not related to waking up early for this occasion) and woke up at 6AM CST today and decided to check and see if the site would be updated as promised and sure enough, it was. And … wow.
The servers are mobbed. It’s taking forever to even load up screen shots, and the trailers are downloading very slowly, but damn if this doesn’t look beautiful. The quantity and variety of conceptual artwork they generated for the game’s environments (and the degree to which they realized the quality of those concepts in the actual game) is incredible. The environments have the look of hand-painted backdrops from a point-and-click adventure game. They exhibit incredible perspective and blending, with an almost watercolor quality about them. They’ve taken the same level of detail being put into StarCraft 2 and injected it into the Diablo universe. There’s even a creature in the trailer (Diablo himself?) that looks like a big Ultralisk, almost as alien and otherworldly as it is supernatural. Amazing.
I know there are still many who play Diablo, though I haven’t played it in ages. I’m still definitely on board for this one. It’s a great time to be a bigger fan of StarCraft and Diablo than of WarCraft, and I am so glad they’re finally reembracing their other franchises. The WarCraft MMO obsession has turned me off of Blizzard for several years now.
I am not very sure if I like what I am seeing. It’s like an arcade game. Maybe the videos aren’t the final gameplay, but…
It looks look much like Titan Quest, and the over the top physics, almost cartoon-like WoW-ish effects, seem to me that the designers had forgot about the horror element in Diablo I. Of course, so far they are only showing zombies and skeletons, but the death animations are too…exaggerated…to believe that this is a game set in a dark fantasy world. I wished they had tuned down the special effects; it seems with each incarnation of Diablo, the heroes are getting more and more powerful to the point of almost ridiculous.
The backstory sounds intriguing, but somehow something from WoW seems to have slipped in Diablo 3. And what is that I see? Floating hearts from Devil May Cry series?
Other than that, the site, gameplay and so on, doesn’t seem to make it any more different or exciting than Titan Quest. Let’s hope the “random, dynamic scripted quests” worked out fine. Another disappointment are that there will be only five classes; though they promise much customisations, I am really taking it with a pillar of salt. Titan Quest and Guild War has set a precedent for multi-classing/class-combos – but LOTRO’s trait systems also managed customisations while providing fixed classes – so we should see.
I am really lowering my expectations after the fuck-up that is Hellgate London, anyway.
I think it looks badass. That witch doctor is very cool and they did some very cool stuff with him like the locusts and the zombie wall.
All in all it looks like diablo, it’s not an MMO and they kept the mousecentric controls. Blizzard has NEVER let me down so I have faith the this game is gonna kick some ass.
Oh and FTR I thought Titans Quest was a fantastic game. It definitely raised the gameplay bar when compared to Diablo thats for sure, though the atmosphere and storyline of Diablo is better.
I do want to add though that I’d bet you $$ that Battle.net isn’t going to be free any more. At best they will have a free and pay version. Mark my words folks.
Noooo! Then it will be like the Hellgate London’s “freebooters vs. subscribers” war all over again.
Actually, for public online play, paying is fine if there are perks. However, please give me TCP/IP and LAN for private gaming or else I am going to crack some demon’s soulstone.
This. I have been a HUGE Blizzard fan since, oh, WC1 and 2 were formative experiences of my (very young) gaming years. Diablo and Starcraft in high school, Warcraft 3 in college… I LOVE Blizzard games.
Except I don’t really like WoW. Actually, that’s not really true - I like it as a GAME, as what’s there, but I strongly dislike it as a MMO. I’ve tried it a few times, and for all the polish and perfection, I’ve just never found it to be as much FUN as half a dozen other MMOs, never mind Blizzard’s other offerings.
So basically I have been deprived of new games by my favorite game-maker for the past several years. And now, with SC2 and especially Diablo 3 – and frankly I’d have been even MORE thrilled with a new IP, as long as it wasn’t MMO – I am especially excited about PC gaming for the forseeable future. Not to mention that Blizzard is back on my map in a HUGE way.
Wow, yes, I agree with you on this one. I was half expecting D3 to be a MMO.
Anyway, from the website’s tone and so on, it seems so far they had the engine done and some snippets. I daresay we won’t see the light of Diablo III for a couple of years, so there’s plenty of time for refinement and so on.
But at least it is official. Just hope that D3 won’t suffer the fate of SC:Ghost…
There’s no way D3 will go the way of Ghost. It’s a guarunteed 1M+ seller in it’s first month, no doubt about it. D3 is what is going to bring people back to their PCs to play games instead of on consoles. This is PC gamings chance to come back so they better not blow it.
I can’t say I’m a huge fan of BLizzards method of releasing game info and screens that look playable years before the games actually come out. It leaves too much time to get saturated with exposure so when the game actually comes out you’ve seen it all.
I love that after all this detective work, the end result was that all the pictures and all the numbers and everything in this “countdown” had nothing to do with Diablo III.
Blizzard learned their lesson last year and everybody still knew what they were announcing.
Is anyone else having zero success downloading the 800mb gameplay trailer? I’ve been trying to run the Blizzard downloader on and off for the last six hours and despite seeing many peers being discovered under the connection info list, it hasn’t downloaded a single kilobyte. One would assume it’s due to a flood of download traffic, but I didn’t have any problems downloading the other two trailers …
I’m hoping they wise up and hit the consoles with this as well.
I don’t see why they would have to. There are more PC gamers than there are purely console gamers. At the same time there ARE purely console gamers, and Diablo’s control scheme tends to be simplistic so they just might.