Bashiok went on a forum tear late Tuesday night, touching on a number of issues.
A fan complained about the no-LAN support issue that’s currently gripping the SC2 community and Bashiok replied with an eye towards D3:
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| All removing LAN support does is hurt legitimate buyers, pirates will have LAN and their free game.It might take them a while to reverse engineer it, but they WILL have it.
Bashiok: More so than overbearing/invasive anti-piracy measures that would affect everyone who buys the game regardless of how they’re going to play it instead of just those that may want a LAN feature? I would doubt it. I don’t know a lot about it, Diablo III isn’t really facing the brunt of the Battle.net 2.0 features just yet, but I think that removing LAN in an attempt to avoid more severe anti-piracy measures is pretty cool. We’re saying “Hey, we’re pretty sure you’re going to love our game. The multiplayer is really the best part though. In order to get in on that that we’d just like to make sure you bought the game. Cool?” |
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In a related post, someone asked if D3 would be free through Battle.net. Bashiok hints that it will be just as free as SC2 will be. A very qualified statement.
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| are they going to charge to play diablo 3 online?
Bashiok: Mike mentioned it in an Activision Blizzard investor meeting [paraphrased] “A player that buys Starcraft 2 at retail will have the ability to play on Battle.net with no additional fee.” I’ll point out that this is a very carefully worded statement. So you mean you have to subscribe to the online fee in order to find the high level weapons and use all of battle.nets features right? Bashiok: No. |
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Elsewhere, some dude tries to get overly-clever with the game lore vs. the D3 Hammer of the Ancients skill, but falls just short of completion.
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| None of the Ancients use a giant two handed golden hammer. Talic wields a fiery sword and shield and uses whirlwind. Korlic wields a polearm and uses leap attack. Madawc wields dual throwing axes and uses shout. I even checked their lore backgrounds on Diablo2.diablowiki.net and none of their backgrounds suggest the use of a two handed golden hammer.
Bashiok: “Those three are not ancients” |
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First of all, it’s a virtual hammer created magically for a short duration, not a specific item of which only one (for the purposes of lore) exists. If there were a D2 skill called “Blessed Hammer of the Protectors” it wouldn’t mean those blessed hammers were literally the same ones used by some mythological paladin lords. More specifically in this case, the confusion comes from the fact that the D2 quest and NPC dialogues use the term a bit loosely. Madawc, Korlic, and Talic are called “The Ancients,” and they’re reached via “The Ancient’s Way,” but the actual quest is called Rite of Passage. See the lore sections on each of their monster pages for the story of how they were selected by the ancient Ancients to become the newer Ancients and stand guard over Mt. Arreat.
Finally, someone just noticed the Rainbow Level t-shirts from last year’s Blizzcon, and had some questions about them.
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Two quick questions about the shirts that some Blizzard employees were wearing at Blizzcon 1. Do you plan to sell these? Bashiok: 1. Maybe. |
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That guy should have been here back in February when we posted this news item. Before the lawyers shut them down…
