Blizzard Entertainment revealed a new Monk character class for upcoming action-RPG Diablo III on Friday.
“I’m proud to introduce the new Diablo III playable class, with all of its open-handed Tiger Strike fury,” said Chris Metzen, Blizzard’s vice president of development. He introduced the first trailer and gameplay footage for the character class at BlizzCon, the company’s annual fan convention held at the Anaheim Convention Center.
“That definitely gets the old juices going,” said Metzen of the trailer, which showed a Monk in an epic battle with a demon. In the gameplay footage, the Monk used high-speed melee attacks to shatter his enemies and splatter blood.
The new Monk class joins the already-known character classes of Barbarian, Witch Doctor and Wizard, and is now playable at BlizzCon.
Battle.net developer Greg Canessa says that Blizzard is actively working on a LAN-like solution to include for Battle.net play in StarCraft II.
“We are working on solutions with regard to things we can do to maintain connectivity to Battle.net in some way, but also provide a great quality connection between players,” said Canessa.
Blizzard recently announced that traditional LAN play would not be included in the game, with offline play only being allowed in the singleplayer campaign.
I asked Canessa whether the solution his team is working on might include a pseudo-LAN connection, where the game would only check in with Battle.net to authenticate before reverting to typical LAN behavior.
“Something like that,” he replied. “Maintaining a connection with Battle.net, I don’t know if it’s once or periodically, but then also having a peer-to-peer connection between players to facilitate a very low-ping, high-bandwidth connection.. those are the things that we’re working on.”
Diablo III lead designer Jay Wilson also confirmed that Diablo III will treat LAN in the same way that StarCraft II does, meaning that while traditional offline LAN will not be included in that game, it should support any Battle.net solution developed for the RTS.
Despite the delay of StarCraft II into 2010, Blizzard says the release of Diablo III will not be affected by the shift.”I will confirm that the move of StarCraft into 2010 does not affect the release schedules of any of our other games,” said Blizzard president Mike Morhaime.
When asked whether that means Diablo III and StarCraft II could both be released in 2010, as Blizzard had previously said to expect a major Blizzard release each year, Morhaime’s response implied that possibility.”We haven’t announced any release dates on any future title. And I’ll also reiterate that the [move of] StarCraft into next year does not impact the schedule,” said Morhaime, who then, with a slight laugh, added: “And so it would be correct to conclude that you could expect two releases of Blizzard next year. But I will not make any conclusion as to what those titles will be.”
I’m willing to bet a million bucks that Diablo 3′s gonna be delayed to 2011 if they’re releasing Starcraft 2 Q3 to Q4 of 2010. It’s gonna affect sales of D3 and SC2 if they release two powerhouse games at the same time.
