Dia­blo 3 – is it next-gen? Next-gen! You under­stand? That should’ve been the word of the year, instead of w00t. What is this next-gen every­body is talk­ing about? Where is it? What does it do for me? There is this blog where the mys­te­ri­ous Surfer Girl has already made some remark­ably accu­rate pre­dic­tions over the time. In the post I’m refer­ring to she also indi­cates that Clover­field may not be as awe­some as some of us would like it to be. What a surprise.

Any­way, I want to focus on the Dia­blo III related stuff – start­ing with the offi­cial Bliz­zard site: Just take a look at the job open­ings and you’ll surely notice that Bliz­zard is look­ing for new staff mem­bers. The offer­ings include two artists for a “Top Secret Next-Gen MMO”. Let’s go back a lit­tle fur­ther and we will stum­ble over a video inter­view con­ducted with Blizzard’s COO where it was revealed that Dia­blo 3 “is def­i­nitely a very impor­tant fran­chise” to [Bliz­zard]. Of course, there has been rumors of a pos­si­ble third install­ment of the suc­cess­ful Dia­blo fran­chise as soon as Dia­blo II has been released. And then there’s the busi­ness of a pos­si­ble Dia­blo movie which could be inter­est­ing for Blizzard.

Now, let’s get back to the issue of the Next-Gen MMO. Nobody knows for sure this is about the next install­ment of Dia­blo. If it is, what will it look like? Can you even imag­ine Dia­blo with a style heav­ily rem­i­nis­cent of World of War­craft? And it even will be next-gen, what­ever mean­ing will be attached to this term. I con­fess, I am really anx­ious to see that come to be. Surfer Girl’s short infor­ma­tion on Dia­blo III states that the game will be announced “some­time next spring and is still on track for release before decade’s end”. I’d really like to see that. And I cer­tainly do wish that the devel­op­ers won’t just cre­ate a “bet­ter World of War­craft” in the dis­guise of Diablo.