Dia­blo 3 Has Been Unveiled

Finally, Dia­blo III has been unveiled on June 28, 2008 at the 2008 Bliz­zard Enter­tain­ment World­wide Invi­ta­tional in Paris, France. Dia­blo III, D3 in short, is an action role play­ing game sim­i­lar to its pre­de­ces­sor, Dia­blo II. D3 will have a focus on coop­er­a­tive play over Battle.Net. There will also be a sin­gle player com­po­nent, but its main focus def­i­nitely is on team play. The game fea­tures a pro­pri­etary 3D engine that will incor­po­rate Havok physics. As a result, there will be par­tially destruc­tive envi­ron­ments which will be of use to the player. Accord­ing to some news over at IGN Dia­blo 3 won’t require DirectX 10, though, so it should be able to run on a lot of sys­tems. As always, Bliz­zard is plan­ning a simul­ta­ne­ous release on both Win­dows and Mac OS X platforms.

The devel­op­ers want to keep the focus on action and expand the role play­ing ele­ments while stay­ing true to the orig­i­nal con­cept. There will be a focus on mak­ing D3 replayable and because of ran­dom adven­tures and class-specific quests that should prove no prob­lem at all. With­out a doubt, we will see large scale com­bat and scores of ene­mies on screen which is one of the key points of the dia­blo fran­chise. Addi­tion­ally, they made the game eas­ier by imple­ment­ing a hot­bar. Eas­ier con­trols allow to quickly swap through skills which directly trans­lates to a more fast-paced expe­ri­ence. Bliz­zard also redid the health sys­tem. It tried to elim­i­nate down­times in com­bat and it came up with health globes. These appear ran­domly after a mon­ster is slewn. In coop­er­a­tive play all play­ers ben­e­fit from the restora­tive effects of this globe.

The inven­tory is still being worked on but it will be sim­i­lar to WoW. No grid inven­tory will be used this time and they haven’t set­tled upon a final inven­tory size. There will be new and return­ing classes. Up to now, only the Bar­bar­ian and the Witch Doc­tor have been unveiled. In Dia­blo III you can select the gen­der of your char­ac­ter, though. There should be five classes ini­tially, but they’re not really quite sure about that yet, I sup­pose. Sto­ry­wise, D3 will play 20 years after the events that took place in Dia­blo II and some evil is stir­ring again in Tris­tram. Deckard Cain has already been announced as a return­ing NPC.

Nei­ther the sys­tem require­ments nor the launch date have been announced as of yet. Be sure to check out the offi­cial site now and then to get the lat­est info.

Fire­fox 3 has been released yes­ter­day – and all the down­load servers have been over­loaded in just a few min­utes. If you haven’t already down­loaded the over­hauled browser, you can do so here. Just in case you’re won­der­ing why you should upgrade I’ll present a few good rea­sons. The new Gecko 1.9 ren­der­ing engine and quite a lot of tweaks con­tribute to sig­nif­i­cant per­for­mance gains, i. e., it launches and runs much faster. The JavaScript inter­preter works faster too, and the browser deliv­ers an improved mem­ory han­dling. The new address bar, now dubbed Smart Loca­tion Bar, makes it eas­ier to find the sites you recently vis­ited, and allows for a bet­ter book­marks han­dling. The Book­mark Man­ager is now called Places Orga­nizer and is more intel­li­gent than ever before. Finally, the Down­load  and Add-On Mangers have become more pow­er­ful too. There are more fea­tures, of course, but these are the most impor­tant to me.

After installing it, I tried to get all my plug-ins to work. Luck­ily, ever exten­sion I have in use has already been upgraded to work with ver­sion 3.0 of Fire­fox, which has been in devel­op­ment for roughly 3 years. By the way, ver­sion 3.1 is already in the works and should be released at the end of the year. It will incor­po­rate a few fea­tures that didn’t make it into Fire­fox 3.0. As I was writ­ing, every exten­sion was avail­able for the new ver­sion – save one: Mouse Ges­tures, one of my favorites. A fast search on Google pro­vided a solu­tion to this par­tic­u­lar dilemma – Mouse Ges­tures Redox.

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This is one of those films that hat been com­ing for­ever it seems. Finally, after two teasers we got our­selves a nice lit­tle present in the form of a real trailer. Baby­lon A. D. is a sci­ence fic­tion film that plays in the near future. Toorop (Vin Diesel) is a mer­ce­nary who has to escort a woman from Rus­sia to Canada. What he doesn’t know is that Aurora (Mélanie Thierry) is car­ry­ing an organ­ism in her that ever­body wants to get their hands on.

Dur­ing pro­duc­tion the crew did encounter some dif­fi­cul­ties and did run over the bud­get. Film­ing was com­pleted more than a year ago and now the first full-length trailer has been released. You can watch it here if you so choose. The flick is avail­able in higher res­o­lu­tion over at IGN. If you want to check out the teaser trail­ers first, check this site out. I gotta say, it looks quite promis­ing and may be well worth watch­ing at the theater.

In late Feb­ru­ary this year, Trans­porter 3 has been announced. Once again, Jason Statham will play Frank, the deliv­ery dri­ver who will trans­port any pack­age any­where, no ques­tions asked. No plot details have been released yet, although Prison Break’s T-Bag, Robert Knep­per, will be the vil­lain. It has come to my ears that the teaser trailer has already hit the web – and it sure looks good. A higher qual­ity ver­sion of the trailer can be viewed at French site AlloCiné. I’m really look­ing for­ward to watch­ing this movie. It’s all about the action, baby!