Sooner than I would have guessed! Well, I know one thing I'll be doing this summer...
Standard version is $60, special edition $100. Warcraft III also started at $60 in most stores, but its special edition was just $75...
Wake me when they release Diablo 3, please.
Who cares, Diablo is fun for a week, but their RTSes are fun for decades...
Eh, I'd trash Starcraft 2 if it meant Diablo 3 coming out this July.
... You don't like Blizzard RTSes? That's very sad... :bummed:
I'd happily have Diablo 3 cancelled or delayed for years if it meant Warcraft IV coming sooner.
I got Diablo II for my birthday in 2000, had fun for the 8 days it took to complete on normal in single player and then I didn't really play it again until the expansion came out. Then I played that and then stopped again. It's a fun game, but nothing which keeps me interested after it was over, and the online play has never interested me at all. I just don't quite see why it grabbed people so much... I mean, it's fun, and there is depth, but even in online it's still pretty much a mostly single player game, and the whole point is just "getting better items and stuff". There's not much else to do. That's not too interesting, what interests me is completing things, beating the game, mapping out areas... but those things don't matter much online, apart from levelling. Maps are randomized every time, etc. It's also very stupid that it deletes Battle.net characters after three months, I've never had a character last at all because of that stupid requirement (as if the game is interesting enough that I'd actually log in every three months? No way).
Starcraft and Warcraft III, though, are the two best games ever made and are by far my two most played games of all time. There's no way I could ever possibly ever guess the number of hours I've played of those games... they are infinitely adaptable, variable, and deep. No other game has anything the equal of Custom mode, for instance. That they are so amazingly brilliant is also why I don't play other RTSes much... I mean, sure, Supreme Commander or Age of Empires II are really great games, but when I could be playing something even better like Warcraft III instead, why should I?
That's why my third most played RTS of all time is NetStorm, it's so utterly different than anything else that playing it doesn't make me want to play a Blizzard RTS instead. There's no other game in existence quite like Netstorm.
Oh, my third most played game ever is Guild Wars, which is orders of magnitude better than any Diablo game ever will be. The game was, of course, made by a company founded by ex-Blizzard members... and they made a game better than either Diablo or World of Warcraft. :)
Who says anything about not liking Blizzard's RTSes? I've owned, played, and loved all of them, thank you very much. But if it's down to whether I can get Starcraft 2 in July or Diablo III in July, I'm sorry but Starcraft 2 can go die in a fire because I've got to get my looting on as soon as possible.
Diablo III is years away and you know it, so your point doesn't matter anyway. 2012 would be my guess, probably.
And on top of that, Guild Wars 2 is probably coming this year (next year at the latest), so there's one more reason to not care about Diablo III, above all the others (that Diablo is repetitive and gets boring, that I find the online play not that interesting, the Warcraft-ized art designs, etc, etc)... GW2 is much more a traditional MMO than the first game, which is something I'm very concerned about (I think that GW is fantastic and just about perfect with the design it has, making it full open world MMORPG isn't really a change that I think will probably improve it), but still I'm sure that it will be a very, very good game.
On that note, I actually started playing GW again a few days ago... it'd been way, way too long, months I think since I played much of it. My two first characters got their fifth birthday presents. :) I really need to finish Nightfall... bought it day one, but I just never got as interested in it so I never got past like a third of the way through the campaign... well, I'm trying to fix that mistake now. Finally got to Vabbi, and I think I'm liking it more than Kourna. :)
GW: 869 hours total played since launch, 493 with my main character. Add like 200+ hours I played in the beta before that, and I think I'm nearing 1200 hours played now... and that's a number that should be higher, it was at like 900 years ago, but then I started playing less in order to play other games. Oh well...