Yes, it’s great that Blizzard is showing off skills from Diablo III, and postponing PvP to get the action-RPG faster, but when will it actually launch? May 15. That’s when Diablo III is coming to PC and Mac. This is happening.
“After many years of hard work by our development team and months of beta testing by hundreds of thousands of dedicated players around the world, we’re now in the homestretch,” Blizzard CEO and co-founder Mike Morhaime said in the announcement. “We look forward to putting the final polish on Diablo III over the next two months and delivering the ultimate action-RPG experience to gamers worldwide starting on May 15.”
May 15 is when it’ll be available both digitally via Battle.net and at retail in the United States, Canada, Europe, South Korea, Southeast Asia, Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau. It’ll be available for download in Mexico, Argentina, Chile, and Brazil on May 15 too but won’t hit store shelves in those countries, or in Russia, until June 7.
You can pre-order Diablo III on Battle.net now to pre-load the game in advance, ready to unlock the second it’s released.
Blizzard plans to patch PvP in for free some time after launch. The launch on May 15. In exactly two months. Oh, it’s finally happening!
The regular edition of Diablo III will run you $59.99, while the shiny Collector’s Edition packing an art book, soundtrack CD, documentary DVD, and soulstone USB key containing Diablo II and its expansion will cost $99.99.
“If you’re not making your customers happy you’re doing something stupid,” says the new-look, full-bearded, Gabe Newell. Penny Arcade have been chatting with Valve’s managing director about his job, the state of PC gaming, and more. They also have an image of Gabe with a beard that we’re not sure we can use yet, hence the artist’s interpretation up there. EDIT: I’ve just got permission from The PA Report. Find the real-life beard embedded below.
Gabe even went into depth on DRM and how it affects game sales. He reckons intrusive measures can result in a false economy: “You know, it’s a really bad idea to start off on the assumption that your customers are on the other side of some sort of battle with you.”
“We tend to try to avoid being super dictatorial to either customers or partners. Recently I was in a meeting and there’s a company that had a third party DRM solution and we showed them: ‘Look, this is what happens, at this point in your life cycle your DRM got hacked, right? Now let’s look at the data, did your sales change at all? No, your sales didn’t change one bit.’”
The Valve boss says customers are getting unnecessarily pissed off, and developers are losing out on sales thanks to the restrictive measures: “We tell them ‘You actually probably lost a whole bunch of sales as near as we can tell, here’s how much money you lost by bundling that with your product.’”
“Giving customers a great experience and thinking of ways to create value for them is way more important than making it incredibly hard for the customers to move their products from one machine to another,” concluded Gabe.
Microsoft officially confirmed the new branding for its Windows 8 operating system today. The new Windows logo, a play on the company’s internal Metro design, will be used across the upcoming Windows 8 operating system. We saw images of the logo leak earlier this week, but the company unveiled it officially today stating that the logo is a Window rather than the traditional flag found in earlier versions of Windows. “We wanted the new logo to be both modern and classic,” says Microsoft’s Sam Moreau.
The logo uses flat colors and clean lines and shapes to convey the message of Metro and will change color based on the core theme color used in Windows 8. “When you change your color, the logo changes to reflect you,” explained Moreau. Microsoft will use the logo in the new charms bar for Windows 8, adopting the chosen theme accent color. We are expecting to see the new logo in the Windows 8 Consumer Preview, due on February 29th.
High Moon Studios has explained why it won’t be making a PC version of the upcoming sequel Transformers: Fall of Cybertron. In a moment of honesty that most developers wouldn’t typically share, High Moon admitted that the PC is not their strongest platform.
“Focus is one [reason],” High Moon’s game director Matt Tieger said in a recent conference call. “I know that it’s not a huge leap to do a PC SKU, but it is different. It’s outside of our area of expertise, to be honest.”
High Moon’s frankness on the matter is due, in no small part, to the poor reception of the PC version of War for Cybertron, which suffered from a number of significant issues. A number of bugs plagued the title on PC, along with a framerate capped at thirty frames-per-second. Many PC players were not pleased.
“We were spread so thin that I feel like we barely served that audience,” Tieger explained (via Kotaku). “Then there were some issues with continued support that were frankly beyond our control, but at the same time did not create a great experience for PC gamers that got it.”
It turned out that issues like adapting the user-interface, controls, and voice integration–things that were easy for the studio to implement on consoles–were well outside of High Moon’s comfort zone.
Transformers: Fall of Cybertron is headed to Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 this Fall.
According to a press release, the first services users can expect to return are:
-Sign-in for PlayStation Network and Qriocity services, including the resetting of passwords
-Restoration of online game-play across PS3 and PSP
-Playback rental video content, if within rental period, of PlayStation Network Video Delivery Service on PS3, PSP and MediaGo
-Music Unlimited powered by Qriocity, for current subscribers, on PS3 and PC
-Access to 3rd party services such as Netflix, Hulu, Vudu and MLB.tv
-’Friends’ category on PS3, including Friends List, Chat Functionality, Trophy Comparison, etc
PlayStation Home
This phased restoration will be on a country by country basis beginning in the Americas, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Middle East. No specific times for the PSN return were announced, but you can watch the U.S. state-by-state progress of the PSN’s return on the PlayStation Blog’s map.
A new firmware update for the PS3 is available, as well. While it’ll seem like it does nothing, Firmware 3.61 will force users to change their passwords when they return to the PSN for the first time.
“We strongly recommend that all PSN account holders with PS3s update their systems to prepare for when PlayStation Network is back online,” said Eric Lempel, vice president of the Sony Network Entertainment, on the PlayStation Blog. “The release of this update is a critical step as we work to make PlayStation Network significantly more secure.”
Your password can only be changed on your PS3 or a PS3 your account was activated on. If you try to use a system where your account isn’t activated, an email will be sent to your registered email account.
“This e-mail will contain a link that will enable you to change your password,” Lempel said. “In this email, click on the link and follow the instructions to change your password. Once you have changed your password you can sign-in to your account using your new password.”
“The company has made considerable enhancements to the data security, including updating and adding advanced security technologies, additional software monitoring and penetration and vulnerability testing, and increased levels of encryption and additional firewalls,” the statement said. “The company also added a variety of other measures to the network infrastructure including an early-warning system for unusual activity patterns that could signal an attempt to compromise the network.”
Sony expects to have the services fully restored by the end of May 2011.
The creator of Minecraft “Notch” has released information as to when the retail copy of the game will be released. The date will be 11/11/11.
Notch stated:
“It’s the same date as a few other games and movies, and the one I’m the most excited about is Skyrim, so that will be a nice reward for me if we actually manage to hit that date!”
For those of you who are disapointed by the idea of Beta being over perhaps the following statment will bring you solace:
“The “full version” won’t be very different at all from what the game was like a week ago, and we’ll keep adding features after the release as well, so it’s really more of a milestone when we finally get rid of the Beta label, and some kind of goal for us to work towards. The plan is to be open with this and try to get people to cheer us on as much as possible, but to be open with the fact that the game won’t change much at the actual release day. (It’s more a progress up until that point)”
Because of the recent obsession with the new Piston mod in the Minecraft community, Minecraft developers decided to alter it to fit into a later patch.
I’ve been running this gaming website for about a year now. However I’m going to be getting on a plane tonight and This will be the last post you hear from me for a couple years. I know I’ve had lots of fun writing for you guys and I will be back eventually. My Editor Richey will keep the site up and running with semi-regular posts.
That seemingly unintelligible string of numbers and letters attached to MS Point cards and Xbox Live Gold trials has an underlying code, a kind of system in place, a group of hackers found out yesterday. Using old claimed codes, this group was able to come up with an algorithm to generate new, valid code strings — those who input the code got 160 MS Points and could refresh the site for more. Later, through a separate channel, hackers were able to exploit the algorithm to generate codes for a Halo: Reach Banshee Avatar prop.
This forum seems to be the origin point of the algorithm in question, where some users have claimed to have gathered hundreds of dollars in MS Points; current estimates put the total damage to Microsoft at over $1 million. Microsoft has since had the codes pulled, though we have to wonder if there’s any other countermeasure the company could use to catch these individuals.
On its weekly update blog, developer Bungie explained that the recent news of its MMO-based future was a joke gone awry. According to the blog, lead network engineer David Aldridge was convinced that “everybody got the joke” during rehearsals for the panel.
“It was all in the delivery, he assured us, and he was certain it was clear that he was playfully riffing off of the recent rumors,” the post wrote. He was so very wrong.
It should be noted that, while the post pokes fun at Aldridge’s comments under a thick layer of Charlie Sheen references, there is no denial that the studio is working on a massively multiplayer title. But the post also doesn’t deny Bungie is working on a successor to the My Little Pony series, so that doesn’t mean much at this point.
