Unconfirmed: Diablo 3 Rumblings

[GameBanshee News]

Two Diablo fansites have countdowns for purported big announcements, to hit the 1st of May. Diablo3.com:

The number of days until half the web links to Diablo3.com. But why???

And BlizzPlanet refers to the Church of Triune (aka the Holy Trinity).

Diablo 3 has been hanging in the air for some time now and seems to be inevitable by now, but announcing it through fansites would be weird. I doubt the Diablo3.com servers could even handle the traffic such news would bring. We'll see.

Spotted on Blue's News.

[Siberys]

Well....we all know it's to be made, but what I'm really hoping for is for it to be blizzard making the game.

Yeah, I know that sounds a little farfetched, but Blizzard has yet to make this game and has essentially forgotten to throw us a bone at whether they are even considering it, so someone else might pick it up (much like Obsidian did with NWN and KoTOR, although the sequals to each of those games, NWN2 and KoTOR 2, were far better than the originals). However, Blizzard I believe is the only company who can do a game like diablo 3, and successfully, so I just pray that no one else takes up the copyright folder and negotiates the devlopement with blizzard (I don't even want Flagship studio to touch D3. Hellgate london was OK, but just because they were the original designers of the diablo game doesn't mean it's not gonna be drastically different not under the management of blizzard).

[Brother None]

Eh? I'm assuming Diablo is copyright, so nobody can just "take it up" without Blizzard's permission. And as far as I know, Blizzard has never let anyone else develop on of their IPs, so I'm not sure where you're coming from with this.

And Blizzard is pretty obsessive when it comes to pleasing its own fans and quality assurance, so even if they shipped it to someone else, I'm fairly sure they'd be keeping a very close eye on it.

Regardless, we know Blizzard has 3 teams, and only one is working on StarCraft II. Blizzard's two other projects are Secret MMO and Secret Game. Can pretty much guarantee either one of those is Diablo.

[BuckGB]

Originally Posted by Brother None

And as far as I know, Blizzard has never let anyone else develop on of their IPs, so I'm not sure where you're coming from with this.

Actually, Nihilistic Software was the studio developing Starcraft Ghost before it was put on indefinite hold. I highly doubt they'd let anyone else work on Diablo 3, but, at least for a period of time, Blizzard was open to letting others work on their IPs.