Diablo III: The First Year in Review, Continued

Diii.net finishes their Diablo III: The First Year in Review feature by taking us through the last four months’ worth of diabolic activity.

April kicked off with various April Fool’s jokes, both large and small. A fairly limp effort was this (Diablo 3 confirmed for the Wii) headline. Much better were Blizzard’s own efforts, which included a new D3 character, the Archivist. Lorenado!

Once the April Fool’s frivolity calmed down, more serious business began. On the 3rd Bashiok made an interesting forum post sharing some information from behind the scenes of the production of the WWI gameplay movie. Most of it was recorded in one take, it took numerous play throughs to show all the details, and some were still not quite perfect, such as when Siegebreaker smashes through the wall to grab the one hapless NPC.

…

June was the last month of the first year of Diablo 3. We started thinking about doing something to celebrate the anniversary in mid-June, and assumed that Blizzard would have some cool plans of their own. True, the June 28th anniversary was largely meaningless to the D3 Team, who had been working on the game for years, but one year from the public unveiling seemed like something of a big deal. It was not; Blizzard issued no pronouncements or other fanfare to mark the occasion. At least we did these year in review articles and inspired some of the community artists to create anniversary wallpapers.

The first news of note in June popped up on the 6th, when one of the Starcraft 2 Community Managers confirmed that Starcraft 2 would be playable, for free, over Battle.net. As with previous comments on this issue, the details were intentionally left vague. Bashiok repeated this carefully-worded message in a forum post a few weeks later.