Over the past few weeks, well years for some of us, with the announcement of Blizzard’s World Wide Invitational - or WWI - on June 28, there has been some serious praying for an announcement of Diablo 3 by hardcore fans. There have been little hints that the game has been in development since 05, but no announcement has come to date. The righteous however, never lost hope as they know that one day the land of Sanctuary will need saving once again! Will this day be upon us very soon? I can only hope.

As a massive Diablo fan who has just recently started playing again - that’s right, this is the one game I own that I have played every year since its release in 2000 - I decided to check an old site I used to visit now and then called www.Daiblo3.com. It was a fan site dedicated to finding out any information about the anticipated title - or even if the game had a chance in The River of Flame of seeing the light of day. Many lost hope over the years, until a few weeks ago, when the site had to change its URL to www.DiabloFans.com as the site owners had sold their old URL to Blizzard! Now why would Blizzard do this if they did not plan to release the game? More good news came later that week when Richard A. Knaak, writer of the Diablo novels, said that his newest trilogy, The Sin Wars, was not written for a game that would never be released. By this time I could not wait for WWI to start! Good thing that week patch 1.12a was released for Diablo 2. Wait the first new Diablo patch in two years? Too bad the patch barely contained any new content, especially in comparison to 1.11. Hopefully Blizzard is just saving it all for this weekend.

As WWI approaches, Blizzard decided to suddenly change the rating of the event to M, for mature, which is odd because Diablo is their only series with that rating. Can things get any better you may ask yourself? Well beginning on Sunday, Blizzard has set up a teaser on their homepage. It is a block of ice that melts and cracks each day, and also a new symbol, or rune, appears on the ice each day. Now if I remember correctly, the 1.11 patch teaser proclaimed that Hell had frozen over. Is Hell about to be unleashed this weekend? Additionally, there are many odd things hidden in the image’s source code and some appear to point towards Diablo. As of Wednesday, there is one symbol for each of Blizzard’s three big franchises. Day two’s hel rune represents the Diablo series. As the week progresses and WWI starts, we can only hope that the heavens open and Tyreal presents us with a beautiful new gift: two free skill points! Wait, I mean Diablo 3!

Oh, and did I mention that the closing day of WWI is the same day that Diablo 2 and its expansion, Lord of Destruction, were released on? Very interesting.