I know that I'm a little late on this announcement, but I just heard about it, and I had to make a post.

On Saturday June 28th, 2008, Blizzard announced that they are working on Diablo III!

Now, Blizzard has always used "when it's ready" as their release date, so there's really no telling when it will be out. You can read the official press release, and make sure that you visit the official Diablo 3 web site.

For those who may not be familiar with the Diablo Franchise of games, they would fall into the fantasy Role Playing genre, and they use the third person view, kind of a top-down look, at the world.  The screen is centered on your character, which you move by clicking on various parts of the screen, or clicking on items.

You have a choice between various characters, usually a brute force kind of guy, the barbarian, and then some other magic user character class, and at least a bow and arrow amazon type of character. In Diablo 2, they also had a few other character types, but those are the basics.

So far, the only classes announced for Diablo 3 is the Barbarian and the Witch Doctor.

Characters walk around, performing quests, collecting better gear and gold, and defeating the bad guys. I think the item collection is just as addictive as the game play. You can play alone, or with others.

Now, just as a warning, I love Diablo, I can't tell you how much time I've spent playing it, but  I can tell you that when Diablo 2 was announced, I checked a news site at least once a day, for the 2 years before it came out.

But wait, it gets worse.

When the release date was announced, I pr-ordered 2 copies of the game, one for me and one for my wife. These were guaranteed to be delivered the morning the game was available.

I ordered my copies from 2 different vendors, just in case one of them didn't make it.

I used 2 different shipping carriers, just in case one of them lost the package.

I took a day off of work to make a 3 day weekend.

Yes, I was that bad off.

The one thing that I can say about Blizzard games is that you really do get your money's worth. The story takes a good long time to work through, but then the multi-player aspects create so many more opportunities for new and interesting twists, that you'll want to play it for a ridiculous number of hours.

You can be sure that I'll keep posting about new news, but I heard that Starcraft 2 is first on the agenda, and then a World of Warcraft expansion or something. Once those are done, they will wrap up Diablo 3.

I may have to start playing Diablo 2 again, just to wet my appetite.