It's nearly a year later, and Diablo III game director Jay Wilson is now sporting a rather fetching bit of beardage, but the legendary shirt is nowhere to be seen. The outpouring of demand was readily evident, and third-party companies have made a tidy sum producing knock-offs of the design. Where's the real deal?

"The shirt wasn't produced through normal Blizzard channels," Jay explains. "It was something the team had made on their own." Therefore the shirts never underwent any sort of official approvals process, which explains why Blizzard didn't immediately put them up for sale. There's still hope though.

"It's our intent eventually to make them. Whether we make them for public consumption I'm not sure - I don't see why not. I've got other fish to fry." I think we can all agree that working on getting the game finished is slightly more important than releasing a silly t-shirt. Slightly.

As for third-party bootlegs, Blizzard is aware, and will frown in a legal fashion at any company that seeks to make their own unauthorized versions.

Diablo III's rune system, as we explained last year, is an ambitious feature in which every skill for every character can be modified using various runes, changing the way the skill affects enemies. One rune might simply add an additional attack to a skill, while others have more profound effects.

"We can't really do any runes for a skill until we've locked a skill down, and we're notorious for redoing things. When we do finally decide to lock a skill down, that's the point where we say, "Okay, now we can develop the runes for this." So we design out the runes for it, and we do those last."

SO the system, itself involving a massive amount of brainstorming and design work, is dependent on having skills set in stone. With four characters revealed and a fifth and final one still waiting in the wings, it feels as if a fully-realized Diablo III is a long way off, no matter how polished the demos were at the show.

Jay continued, giving us a status on each character. "The wizard and the barbarian both have runes - the wizard has the most, and the barbarian has some. The witch doctor has a few as well, ."

After running into confusion with internal testers over why some powers had runes and others didn't, the team decided to turn the feature off until they could deliver a more complete version of the rune system.

"It was a big disappointment that we couldn't show the runes off in their entirety, but hopefully the next time we do a big unveiling of the game they'll be there."

The basics: As you play through Diablo III you will come across various runes, which can be slotted into active power slots to enhance their powers. Rather than just increasing the damage or range of an ability, however, the runes radically change the form and function of said abilities, almost creating completely new skills with completely different uses.

During a panel on Diablo III development, Jay went over some of the various examples of how runes interact with powers. By far my favorite example was teleport, an ability the new wizard class receives. By itself, it simply moves the character to a different location on the map. Add a damage rune and suddenly porting into a group of monsters hurts them. Add a multi-attack rune and teleporting splits you into multiple characters for a brief period of time.

Another example was the witch doctor's flaming skull spell, which by default has him filling a skull with fire and tossing it at the enemy. With a power rune attached, the skull leaves behind a damaging pool of fire. With the multi rune, it bounces. Bouncing flaming skulls equals love.

It seems like a ton of work, not only creating each of the skills but determining how they function with runes attached, but Jay assured me it wasn't a problem for Blizzard.

"We have a saying at Blizzard when something looks like too much work. How about we pay you? You can work on it, and every two weeks we'll cut you a check."

I love Jay Wilson, and Jay Wilson loves the Blizzard fans. Not only does he love them, but he also values their input. At the end of our far too brief interview, he urged me to urge fans to come up with their own rune / power combinations and send them in. Who knows, if you put in a lot of work, maybe one day they'll pay you.

Diablo III lead designer Jay Wilson says the reason is simple. The Barbarian in Diablo II could've been better. He was a bit more diplomatic in his dissing, saying that the brute force attack class had "room for improvement."

There's one class that definitely won't be coming back for another appearance in Diablo III. And Wilson says that it was because that class was just shy of perfectly designed.

The Necromancer, he said, was simply a victim of his own success. He was just too well crafted as a character, something that Wilson's Blizzard design cohorts, current and former, likely don't mind hearing. Necro fans on the other hand, probably won't be too thrilled to learn of his disappearance, despite the Witch Doctor class's similarities.

Wilson says that there are absolutely no plans to bring back any other classes in the initial release, but, given that Blizzard wasn't breaking any news at Games Convention, wouldn't dish any details on what the remaining three classes will be.

We have a sneaking suspicion that Blizzard will take advantage of its own event, BlizzCon, to make such an announcement. (C'mon, Bard! We really want to serenade Diablo's minions to death.)

Art Director
Blizzard Entertainment is currently looking for a talented, motivated, and experienced art director to lead the Diablo III art team. For this position, you must be highly organized with outstanding communication skills and proven experience in management. We're looking for a proven track record of shipping AAA products in an art director role. Experience modeling and texturing assets for a diverse visual range of environments and a solid grasp of form, color, and light for both 2D and 3D art assets are also essential. You must be experienced at mentoring a team, able to work well in an environment of artists who are passionate about making great games, skilled in another art task (illustration, modeling, texturing, animation, or concept drawing), and well-versed in related tools (Maya, Photoshop, etc.).

The fact that the position, which hit the site on Tuesday, is specifically Art Director and that it spells out that the person will be leading and mentoring the Diablo III art team leads me to believe that perhaps something's up with Brian Morrisroe, who last we heard was the game's art director. Of course it could be that he just lay the ground work for the game and they want to bring someone else in to wrap things up. It could also mean that they're taking a new direction, but given how adamant Blizzard's been about not changing the game's look, that seems like a pretty slim bet.

We've contacted Blizzard to see if Morrisroe is still the art director for Diablo III and whether he is still at Blizzard. We're also trying to nail down whether this new job listing means the game's art direction is undergoing a change. I'll be sure to update once we hear back.

[Thanks Sedako]

Update: Morrisroe did indeed quit.

by Lesley Smith

Blizzard Entertainment President Mike Morhaime formally announced Diablo III during the WWI’s opening ceremony this morning, not that this will come as a surprise to anyone with the Diablo III forums already active on the official Blizzard site and rumours running rampant for nearly a fortnight.

After recapping on the success of the previous Invitational held in Korea, Morhaime premiered a trailer and then demoed a level playing as a Barbarian and a Witch Doctor, showcasing some of the improvements over the original game as well as giving attendees a hint at what they can expect from the final product. This includes a new UI in place of the potion belt and the ability to play the game just by using a mouse. Similarly the health system has been augmented by God of War and Devil May Cry style red globes which replenish not just the health of the character but also those near by.

After the Fire Dancers had left the main stage and the crowds has dispersed, many jubilant, I headed for the jam-packed press conference where journalists got to give Blizzard’s Jay Wilson (Lead Designer on Diablo III) and co-founder Frank Pearce a grilling about Diablo III.

“It’s been in development for a few years. About four.” Wilson admits and of course, when asked the next Big Question: a release date, he gives the typical Blizzard response. “When it’s done,”

Blizzard co-founder Frank Pearce was quick to add that, even after four years, “it’s far too early in development.”

Despite being vague on many points such as how much of the game was complete – a process Wilson described as ‘super fun’ - and the specifics of the storyline, He revealed the game is set twenty years after the War of Destruction and the events of the original games have become regarded as myth, indeed even those who were alive (and that’s not many) are either insane or convinced that nothing happened.

Unlike Warcraft, this is not a game about crafting your own unique virtual persona. Other than the classes and the gender, avatars aren’t customisable; instead the idea is to “dive right in and get to the monster killing”.

Being a Diablo title, it really wouldn’t be right unless there were plenty of monsters to slaughter and bosses to defeat. The monsters themselves are huge but even the obese charging abomination we saw steam-rolling towards a Barbarian – a giant in its own right – was just a mob. But the most impressive aspect was not the size of the mobs – it was a wall of zombies which managed to elicit cheers from the crowds.

While the assembled masses were shown two areas, a dungeon and a grassy wilderness, that was more than enough to show off some of the more interesting aspects of the Barbarian and Witch Doctor. The first, for example, uses a special attack called Whirlwind to send zombies and other trash flying to their deaths while the Witch Doctor makes use of pets who do their bidding. They can also summon swarms of locusts who devour enemies and anyone nearby. Like World of Warcraft’s priests and warlocks, they also have the ability to send enemies running using an ability called Horrify as well as mind control which is going to make for some interesting fights. Even more so when you consider that maps aren’t all static, some are random meaning the exit and entrance to an area might not be in the same place each time.

Oh, and for those of you wondering what really was with that Blizzard splash screen well the Diablo theorists were right. Wilson confirmed that the design of the splash screen was meant to hint at Diablo III but doesn’t know anything about that purple penguin.