DigitalBattle.com

While many companies announce new games via websites and press releases, some companies like to take a more dramatic approach when unveiling a title. Blizzard waited until their Worldwide Invitaitonal last year in Korea to announce the highly hoped for Starcraft II. This year they’re going to Paris and with work being underway on a ‘next-gen MMO’ many are prognosticating what the big announcements will be (assuming there will be any). If you take a glance at Blizzard’s main page there’s a graphic featuring characters from their trifecta of franchises: a protoss from Starcraft, an elf from World of Warcraft and the Lord of Terror, Diablo from the series of the same name. Given that a Starcraft MMO is probably unlikely at the moment since the second game hasn’t been finished and that Diablo is the only other franchise that’s essentially been lying fallow for a while, it could be that this ‘next-gen MMO’ is a Diablo game. The format would work well, as there could be a setup similar to the ‘horde vs alliance’ with ‘heaven vs hell’ being the sides players could align themselves with. If you enter the main page for the event, a side bar shows the logos for Warcraft III, Starcraft, WoW and of course the main Blizzard logo, but the Diablo II logo is also featured. Given that there aren’t any specific events mentioned that concern the game while all three of the other games will have tournaments at the event, it could be put in there simply to throw people off the trail. Or it could be that I’m reading far too much into a simple image.