New Diablo 3 Merchandise from the SDCC

As we posted yesterday, Blizzard showed off a bunch of new merchandise at a panel at the SDCC on Thursday afternoon. New D3 stuff included a Diablo’s head belt, a Demon Hunter coat, a Tyrael hoodie, and more. Pictures below, thanks to Kotaku’s slide show.

The Kotaku post also includes a brief mention of what I initially thought was a Diablo Novel, but I guess it’s about the Book of Cain, since Gamespot’s post (below) referenced it as well.

Metzen also said that the company’s upcoming Diablo book will focus on the events that occur between Diablo II: Lord of Destruction and Diablo III.

Elsewhere, Gamespot has a short post about the panel that makes reference to the Book of Cain.

Blizzard’s senior VP of story and franchise development Chris Metzen said that the studio plans to release an official source book for the Diablo franchise alongside Diablo III’s as-yet-unestablished launch. The Diablo compendium is being positioned as the journal of Deckard Cain, the wizened advisor to characters in the game. The book includes an extensive run down of lore and history for the Diablo franchise, ranging from class descriptions to notable people.

We were all wondering why the Book of Cain went up on Amazon.com, then vanished, without any official word from Blizzard. Clearly they didn’t mean the book to go public yet, and might even have been saving the debut for ComicCon, but scrapped that after the leaks to Amazon? (Incidentally, the book is still listed on Amazon UK, Canada, and Germany, all with different release dates. You can find links from the wiki article.)

Update: Big Shiny Robot was less pleased by the Blizzard panel.

Next up was the Blizzard panel talking about swag for Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo. This was really a disappointment. They made it clear up front that they would have no information about Diablo III, future WoW expansions, etc. And then they were stingy with the swag! I mean, why make it so only the first person to log on and enter the code gets the in-game digital swag? Jerks.