Last Decem­ber I had a few words to say about the next install­ment of the very suc­cess­ful Dia­blo fran­chise. Here’s a short recap: Bliz­zard was – and obvi­ously still is – look­ing for new per­son­nel to work on a “Top Secret” title. A few of these job open­ings ref­er­ence to Dia­blo I and Dia­blo II. Every job open­ing refer­ring to a next-gen MMO comes with­out such a ref­er­ence, though. And then there’s the mys­te­ri­ous insider called Surfer Girl who pro­vided the pub­lic with the infor­ma­tion, that the next Dia­blo “will fea­ture a single-player com­po­nent (akin to pre­vi­ous titles) and an MMO com­po­nent (less akin to pre­vi­ous titles)”.

Over the last days there has been a devel­op­ment I don’t want to ignore. Over at Diablo3.com a count­down teaser has been added. It doesn’t say all that much but it deliv­ers an impor­tant mes­sage: “The num­ber of days until half the web links to Diablo3.com. But why???” The count­down points to May 1^st. There has been quite a buzz on what this announce­ment will be about and it has been estab­lished that it’s not the offi­cial Dia­blo 3 announce­ment. Well, Dia­blo II and Dia­blo II: Lord of Destruc­tion have both been release on June 29, 2000 and 2001 respec­tively. It may well be that Bliz­zard has cho­sen to honor the sym­me­try and announce the third install­ment on this par­tic­u­lar date. But then, there may be no mean­ing attached to it.

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