It's time for Shattered Soul Stone, featuring the latest news from sanctuary and beyond. Each episode, a heroic party of Neum Band together to help keep you informed on everything in the Diablo universe. And now your Diablo Community podcast. Coming to you from somewhere in sanctuary. This is episode 3, 9 7 of Shattered Soul Stone, your Diablo Community podcast. This episode is called 32 Years and Still Grinding. It is February 10th, 2023. And this is Jen.
I'm going to start off with something you may have heard in the news, the Microsoft Activision deal and the cma, which is the UK's UM, competition and Markets Authority. They have released their findings about this and it's a press release, so I'm gonna read it to you. A CMA investigation has provisionally concluded that Microsoft's proposed acquisition of Activision could result in higher prices, fewer choices or less innovation for UK gamers.
Here's some little blurbs. In-depth independent investigation. Provisionally finds deal raises, concerns about cloud and console gaming. Merger could make Microsoft even stronger in cloud gaming. Stifling competition in this growing market and harming UK gamers who cannot afford expensive consoles deal could also harm UK gamers by weakening the important rivalry between Xbox and PlayStation gaming consoles. They go on from there.
A CMA investigation has provisionally concluded that Microsoft's proposed acquisition of Activision could result in higher prices, fewer choices or less innovation for UK gamers. The provisional findings from the competition and Markets authority CMA follow a wide ranging investigation conducted over the last five months to understand the market and potential impact of the deal.
This has included holding site visits and hearings to hear directly from business leaders at Microsoft and Activision, analyzing over 3 million internal documents from the two businesses to understand their views on the market. Commissioning an independent survey of UK gamers and gathering evidence from a range of other gaming console providers, game publishers, and cloud gaming service providers. From here, they break this into pieces.
The first part says competition in the supply of cloud gaming services. The CMA provisionally found that being able to offer popular games will be important for cloud gaming providers to attract users as the market continues to grow and develop. The evidence available to the CMA currently indicates that Microsoft would find it commercially beneficial to make Activision's games exclusive to its own cloud gaming service. Parentheses are only available on other services under materially worse
conditions. End of parentheses, Microsoft already accounts for an estimated 60 to 70% of global cloud gaming services and also has other important strengths in cloud gaming. From owning Xbox, the leading PC operating system, windows and a global cloud computing infrastructure, Azure and Xbox Cloud gaming.
The CMA provisionally found that buying one of the world's most important game publishers would reinforce this strong position and substantially reduce the competition that Microsoft would otherwise face in the cloud gaming market in the uk. This could alter the future of gaming potentially harming UK gamers, particularly those who cannot afford or do not want to buy an expensive gaming console or gaming pc. The next part is called competition.
In the supply of consoles, the CMA provisionally found that a small number of key games, including Call of Duty parenthesis, C O D, Activision and parenthesis Activision's flagship game, played an important role in driving competition between the consoles.
The evidence available to the CMA including data on how Microsoft measures the value of customers in the ordinary course of business currently indicates that Microsoft would find it commercially beneficial to make Activisions games exclusive to its own consoles or only available on PlayStation under materially worse conditions.
The CMAs provisional findings note that this strategy of buying gaming studios and making their content exclusive to Microsoft's platforms has been used by Microsoft following several previous acquisitions of games studios, the CMA provisionally found that weakening competition by restricting the access that other platforms have to Activisions games could substantially reduce the
competition between Xbox and PlayStation. In the uk, in turn, harming UK gamers, Xbox and PlayStation competes closely with each other at present and access to the most important content like C O D is an important part of that competition. Reducing this competition between Microsoft and Sony could result in all gamers seeing higher prices, reduced range, lower quality, and worse service in gaming consoles over time.
Martin Coleman chair of the independent panel of experts conducting this phase two investigation said quote, it's been estimated that there are around 45 million gamers in the UK and people in the UK spend more on gaming than any other form of entertainment, including music, movies, TV and books. Strong competition between Xbox and PlayStation has defined the console gaming market over the last 20 years. Exciting new developments in cloud gaming are giving gamers even more choice.
He also said, our job is to make sure that UK gamers are not caught in the crossfire of global deals that over time could damage competition and result in higher prices, fewer choices or less innovation. We have provisionally found that this may be the case here. And he also said, we have also today sent the companies an explanation of how our concerns might be resolved, inviting their views and to any alternative proposals that they wish to submit.
And then they go on to the background of all of this, which most of you probably know if you've been paying attention. bbc.com posted an article titled Microsoft Deal to Buy Activision Opposed by UK Regulator. I'll read you a little bit from that. The UK's competition and Markets Authority CMA has said it opposed to it is opposed to Microsoft's planned purchase of games. Developer Activision Blizzard, the CMA said it had provisionally concluded it would result in higher prices,
fewer choices and less innovation. The $69 billion, 47 pound billion pound deal would see Xbox Maker Microsoft acquire hit titles such as Call of Duty and Candy Crush.
Microsoft said it would find solutions to address the CMAs concerns. End quote, uh, Rema Alawi, Microsoft Corporate Vice President and Deputy General Counsel said quote, our commitment to grant long-term 100% equal access to Call of Duty to Sony, Nintendo, steam and others preserves the deal's, benefits to gamers and developers and increases competition in the market.
She added that 75% of respondents to the CMAs public consultation quote agree that this deal is good for competition in UK gaming the findings for provisional and both parties would have a chance to respond to Activision said in a statement, the Call of Duty maker wrote, we hope between now and to April we'll be able to help the CMA better understand our industry end quote in order to help the regulator quote achieve their stated mandate end quote,
to promote an environment where fair dealing business can in innovate and thrive. And it goes on from there. Kotaku posted an article titled Bobby Kotex says UK will become quote Death Valley and quote, if Microsoft Purchase isn't approved. That's kind of a strange statement to make.
The comments come as the $69 billion deal comes under increased scrutiny, there are serious concerns being raised around the world over Microsoft's planned $69 billion purchase of Activision Blizzard with opposition coming not just from Xbox's competitors but everyone from Google to Nvidia as well. You would think such a precarious situation would require some delicate diplomacy. But then this is Activision we are talking about here.
A few days after an Activision executive blessed the world with a completely unhinged last of us themed take on the deal. I'll get you to that in a minute. The company's ceo, Bobby Kotek, has gone on TV to defend the proposed purchase and plead Act division's case appearing on a CN b C business segment. Kotek begins the interview at a fairly sedate level-headed way, talking about the uncertainties in the video game industry and the economy as a
whole. Pleasantries aside, things move quickly to the Microsoft purchase quote, whether it's the FTC or the CMA or the eu, they don't know our industry. And quote, he says quote, I don't think they fully appreciate that it's a free-to-play business that the Japanese and Chinese companies dominate the industry. You look at Sony, you look at Nintendo, they have these huge libraries of intellectual property. Sony has Sony Studios that goes back 80 years.
Nintendo has the very best characters that exist in video games. Now, if you are the CEO of a big company like Activision, who is hoping to get pulled into Microsoft, maybe don't say some other gaming studio has the very best characters that exist in video games, . Cause otherwise, like it just sounds strange,
doesn't it? He then says, the biggest companies in the world are now Chinese operations like Tencent, who enjoy quote protected markets and quote and cites Activision Zone quote struggles and quote to enter the Japanese market at as proof that the real competition in the video game space today isn't between American and European companies, i e the ones that are trying to merge, but them and the Asian giants, which is a really weird phrase.
We could sit here all day and pick through these comments. There's a whole paragraph about this sort of stuff. More extraordinary though are his comments at the end of the interview. There were reports over the weekend that the UK's competition and markets authority is leaning towards saying no to Microsoft's purchase, which would seriously threaten the whole thing responding to that looming
threat. Kotex simply says that should the UK try and block the deal, its ambitions of becoming Europe's own Silicone Valley would be toast. If you look at the UK and think about the post Brexit uk, it's probably the first country where you're seeing a recession like the real severe consequences of a recession. Okay? Okay. The UK is not the one having the first, is that the first country seeing a recession? This has happened throughout the United States and various other countries as
well. So I don't know what he was on about with that. Kotek also said, if you are the UK and you have an incredibly educated workforce, you have a lot of technical talent, places like Cambridge where the best AI and machine learning is, I would think you would want to embrace a transaction like this where you're gonna see job creation and opportunity and it isn't really at all, whether it's Sony's or Microsoft's platform,
it's really about the future of technology. And you know, they've said now for the last year, that would like to be the Silicone Valley of Europe or of the continent. And if deals like this can't get through, they're not going to be Silicone Valley, they'll be Death Valley. Really strange way of phrasing it since I don't think the UK has deserts, maybe they do,
but maybe not as big as Death Valley in the United States. So this is all just, he might maybe, maybe should have spelled out in a, something he could read out about what he wanted to say and not sound like this. Instead, the Kotaku article mentioned Lulu Chang Erve, who is Activision's top coms person since October.
This is on Axios and uh, she surprised many people last week when she tagged the Federal Trade Commission on Twitter asking the regulator if it watched HBO's hit adaptation of the PlayStation game. The last of us in a thread viewed more than 1 million times she made the case that the show's breakout success was proof that the FTC didn't need to block 69 billion Activision bid to preserve game industry competition between Sony and Microsoft. Quote in gaming, Sony is the first of us end quote,
and they will be just fine without the FTCs protection. She tweeted, there's a part here. Axios always gives you a little blurbs like what they're saying between the lion and all that. So what they're saying says, probably going to do more like that. Missouri tells Axios regarding the Twitter thread. It's like, if there are things that we think people should know about, we should just go ahead and say it out loud.
She acknowledged some internal worry about making the arguments specifically over whether it would anger Sony, which opposes the deal, but also works with Activision to bring Call of Duty and other top company franchises to PlayStation. We are a partner to them. She says, were they worried about pissing us off when they tried to kill a really good deal that our employees wanted and that players wanted? Were they worried about pissing us off when they made all these claims?
That seemed pretty disingenuous and we didn't take it personally. They're making the case for what's best for their business, uh, between the lines, Missouri joined Activision Blizzard last April initially as a member of its board. She was well aware of the company's reputation in light of mid to 2021 lawsuits from the state of California and the federal government over alleged gender
discrimination and sexual misconduct. The company was not perfect. She said, quote, it's a company of over 10,000 people. Things did happen to real human women. She said some of it had snowballed in the press and she decided the company was good at its core . Initially, Missouri served on the board's workplace responsibility committee charged with
assessing company reforms. It was also empowered the, the board was also empowered to restore C E O Bobby Kotex salary, which Kotek had lowered to a minimum at the height of the scandal and even grant him a 22 million bonus if reforms deemed sufficient. She says neither has happened because neither Kotek nor the board has pushed for it. Missouri acknowledges there are company employees who have questioned the kind of place they work at and says her approach to open communication is intended to
help restore trust. Goes on from there. The Hollywood reporter, which I don't typically bring into the show very often, if ever, uh, they posted an article titled Twitter Places Limits on Tweet frequency impacting Business and individual accounts. The blurb says the company said it will now limit users to a maximum of 2,400 tweets a day.
But users reported being prevented from tweeting far below that limit and it's got the, you know, ubiquitous photo of Elon making a strange face, which I've seen in a lot of these articles about him.
There's just so many pictures like this. Uh, so the Hollywood reporter wrote Twitter on Wednesday began placing limits on the frequency of tweets and account consent with users operating both individually and individual and business accounts receiving error messages about exceeding the quote daily limit for sending tweets and quote, the company under Elon Musk is now placing limits to the number of direct messages and tweets that a user can send per day.
According to a page on Twitter's help center site, the daily tweet limit is 2,400, but the site notes quote, the daily update limit is further broken down into smaller limits for summary semi hourly intervals. End quote retweets also count toward that limit.
It is not immediately clear how many tweets are allowed within the semi hourly intervals and individual and business accounts, including the Hollywood reporter's Twitter account received the error message when attempting to tweet more than once in at least an hour. It goes on from there. Now why would I bring this up? Well, here's why. The, uh, world of Warcraft forums has a community manager named Kai Ax, K A I V A X, I hope I pronounce that correctly.
And he's posted to this Twitter integration removed from World of Warcraft over the next two days. This was on February seven, so it's already been done. Over the next two days, we will update World of Warcraft to remove the integrated Twitter posting feature. After this small update, the function to tweet from in-game will no longer be available and the settings which store your Twitter credentials will no longer appear. This will not require any action by players.
So I'm wondering if the myriad of things going on with Twitter that are making it unpleasant for some people, probably a lot of people, and making it harder for you to find the people you actually follow. Um, I think that maybe this was a decision made by Blizzard Entertainment to say, okay, we're not gonna have a connection to Twitter anymore with that thing that was
letting people post their screenshots just to be safe, I guess. Mike Kiva, president of Blizzard Entertainment wrote this on Twitter. Few game companies make it 32 years in the industry. It's a reflection of the growth mindset of everyone at Blizzard Entertainment has our commitment to listen to players and the work teams do to strive to exceed expectations. Congratulations on 32 years. Happy anniversary Blizzard Entertainment.
And there's the Blizzard Entertainment logo underneath that tweet, rod Ferguson, the SVP and GM of all things Diablo at Blizzard tweeted about Dice 2023 he wrote, looking forward to doing this. See you in Vegas. Well, what's Dice 2023? It's an event, it's a summit. It's happening February 21 to 23 at Resorts World Las Vegas. And there you could register for it on the website.
Everything I talk about in this show will appear on the shattered soul stone.com website, so you can dig into it yourself and, you know, learn more about whatever you're interested in or if you forgot something, it's there. You can just read it again. Uh, so this is talking about the speakers that are going to be there and there's like keynote speakers and panels and stuff like this that you'd expect it seems to be focusing on. I mean, it's called dice.
I don't know what DICE acronym comes down to, but yeah, it's there. And there's several people from Activision Blizzard that are going to be speakers there. So if you're interested in that, you can scroll through, take a look, see who's there. There's a bunch of other gaming companies that have sent people to Dice or will be sending people to Dice, so there's that. Um, I had never heard of this,
but I hope it's fun for everybody involved. The Diablo account, uh, as you may know, has started out a second round of Diablo Hell's Inc. Locations. There was going to be four. The, uh, blizzard Entertainment selected, um, Pittsburgh, Dallas, and Las Vegas, and let the crowd on Twitter decide where the last location, you know, the number four location would be and they picked Seattle. So this is how this is gonna run. Um, you're gonna have Las Vegas on February 25th.
You're gonna have Pittsburgh on March 4th, Dallas on March 11th and Seattle on April 15. I've seen some tweets connected to this account saying, well, you could have gone to Helsinki because it makes sense, hell Zinc, you know, that kind of thing. But that didn't happen. Wow. Head has this amazing interview with Chris Metson and they've titled it Chris Metson interview, developing a Robbers Coils of the Serpent.
Now that is something that was on Kickstarter and it was a TT R P G game based on Dungeons and Dragons fifth Edition. And it seemed really interesting because you know, those of you that have any idea who Chris Metson is, I think he's pretty well known and, you know, and Blizzard Entertainment and stuff like that, he's at a, a remarkable storyteller.
So I was really interested in picking up a robbery and then I wasn't sure if the people I came with would wanna check it out, uh, back when this was live on Kickstarter. But now since there's so much controversy over what d and d has done lately, and I'll leave you to look that up if you care, people are looking into different systems. So I might, I might seek this out possibly. So here's a little blurb about this.
In an exclusive interview, wow Head had the chance to sit together with Chris Metson once, senior Vice president of Story and Franchise Development, and now Creative advisor for the Warcraft leadership team at Blizzard Entertainment to talk about his current projects. After Kris had left Blizzard in 2016, he founded War Chief Gaming,
a company focused on creating tabletop role-playing games. Last year, war Chief Gaming released its first game a robbers coils of the serpent, a Dungeons and Dragons five e campaign setting. Inspired by Matson's very first adventurer group, he also wrote the source book called World Book Law Brand, which leads both game masters and players through the wondrous world of law
brand. Additionally, Metson worked together with Mickey Nielsen, one of the leading writers at Blizzard, who worked on multiple franchises to create Under the Sun a novel telling the crazy story of Matson's teenage role-playing group set in the law brand universe. This novel is also available as an audiobook on Audible narrated by Chris Metson himself. Back in December last year, Chris Metson returned to Blizzard Entertainment as a creative advisor.
According to John Hit, general manager of the Warcraft franchise. Matson's War focuses on World of Warcraft for now, but we'll expand to other franchises in the future. And there's a disclaimer here saying this one, this one-on-one spoken interview was lightly edited and condensed for the purpose of clarity. So there is not a video here. There is however, links to a robbers coils of the Serpent World book, A Robbers Under the Sun on Amazon, and a robbers under the Sun audiobook on Audible.
You can get all of those things if you choose to, you can access them and it's really easy. You probably just click and go. So I'm gonna read just the first part of this and you can pick up the rest later, whoever did the interview. And it's unclear. It just says Wow head. So, uh, oh wait, the person that wrote this post is named Thrid,
but I don't know who all did the interview specifically. Maybe him, maybe not, I'm not sure the gender of the person, so I'm just gonna roll with this person During the interview, said Chris, thanks for having us and welcome back to Blizzard Entertainment. You left Blizzard in 2016 and founded your own tabletop game studio War Chief Gaming. The first game you developed is a robbers, coils of the serpent, a campaign setting for the fifth edition of Dungeons and Dragons.
This setting doesn't tell a random story. It's the story of your first campaign that you've played with your high school friends. It's safe to say that all TT R p g players will fondly remember their very first adventure, right? But it's just as safe to assume that most of them didn't turn them into a published campaign setting. When and how did this plan to turn a robbers and the world of law brand into a
campaign setting come to come to your mind? And Chris Metson says this, looking back on it, this thing was quite a trip from starting a company doing this project and going through the Kickstarter process.
Everything has taken quite a lot of turns over the past few years. In the end, a robbers is pretty much the campaign that my friends and I built when we were kids from around 1987 to 1994, we played a total of three generations of adventure parties and law brand World Book essentially describes the second generation, the middle story of this world. During that time, we were 17 or 18 just being kids in late high school, reading big heavy books, listening to rock and roll, things like that.
Over the years we built our own world and played through a fairly coherent storyline. And one day our adventure came to an end. Our second book, under the Sun by Mickey Nielsen, is a novelization of this adventure. And let me tell you, the ending was quite shocking. I remember that one group member stood up, stomped around and was about to leave the room. Things got really emotional. Those moments where real life friendships play out in the fiction you've created
are the memories we've all played for over years. Ever since then, I've chased this fusion of role-playing, world building and storytelling. When I left Blizzard about seven years ago, I wasn't really interested in being creative. I was, you know, very ready to not do any of that for a long time. And when I was ready to be creative again, it was not even a question of what I wanted to do.
I had been carrying these memories around for years, so why not make it into something to share with the world, right? And the rest of it goes on from there. It's very long. So I'll let you dig into that and I'll probably read the rest of it sometime later to just see more about the TT R P G and stuff like that. There's some amazing art in here. Somebody drew, um, it says hand drawn sketches of Chris Sen's first group of adventurers.
I'm not sure if he drew them or one of his group did or something like that, but they look really cool. Uh, it's all on paper because you know, back then you couldn't really get like, um, computerized, you know, making art type things . So, uh, yeah, but it's really interesting and I'm glad he is doing that.
It seems like right now is an excellent time for somebody to say, oh, hey, I made a T T R P G, especially someone like Chris Metson that a lot of people know who's done storytelling for a very long time within Blizzard Entertainment and who most people, um, you know, they like what they saw from it.
So I think it's a good, really, really good time to go ahead and just kind of announce, hey, this is, this is my T T R P G. It's really the best time considering everything with Dungeons and Dragons right now. There is a website I'm new to called PC Zeitgeist and they have an article called Every Game Canceled by Blizzard from 1995 to 2002, including Diablo Game Boy. Yes, really Diablo Game Boy.
So I'm just gonna skim through this a little bit. Uh, there was something called Games People Play, which not a lot was known about. It was a crossword word game that never got completed. So they just didn't do that one. They moved onto something else. The something else might've been this thing called Cria. It was a 2D top-down shooter being developed by Klia Games in 1995 and was going to be published by Blizzard Entertainment until eventually being canned.
Blizzard gave Klia games a 10 month development deal to flesh out Cria into a fully fledged game. Unfortunately, the game was simply not competitive enough in the market dominated by 2D shooters, so that got canceled. Shattered Nations. Another sci-fi realtime strategy game from Blizzard Shattered Nations was in development around 1995. We don't have too much info on this project beside a short teaser trailer that
describes a world dominated by nuclear winter. Now, living in a wasteland, you have to move your group of survivors around and collect gear, food and technology to survive. The game ultimately would lead to the first StarCraft, which was released just a few years after this project was scrapped.
There's one called PX Uria two, another realtime strategy game. It got canceled, it, it wasn't technically canceled by Blizzard, but they did pass off the rights to THQ and stopped working on Pax Uria two. In 1996, DENIN uh, was a game, uh, in included in a list of canceled game games. At Dice 2008, the writers of, uh, PC zeitgeist or writer couldn't find anything about that one war crafted venture Lord of the Klans. Now this one's kind of interesting.
It was intended to be a point and click adventure game set in the existing Warcraft universe. Warcraft adventures Lord of the Klans would be canceled a year into development. Blizzard contracted animation magic for the animation art and engine design.
Blizzard would provide the design sound and ensure the story made sense that the world they had created With a whole year of development and nearly a finished game, blizzard decided to try to get something out of the game and ended up having Christie Golden create the second book ever set in the War Warcraft Universe, Warcraft, Lord of the Clans. So something really good came outta that one at least, even though the game was canceled Diablo for the Game Boy. Um, yeah,
that was something they were trying to do. Uh, it was a development for Game Boy color, but was scrapped and almost never mentioned by Blizzard. The public wasn't even aware of it in 2007 when it somehow got leaked to the internet since the Game Boy couldn't connect to the internet. It's possible they would've used the multiplayer link cable to allow players to grind out Dungeons together, but that's what they were trying to do. There's something called Nomad that was created around 2000.
Blizzard began toying with the idea of a squad based sci-fi game called Nomad. Not much information. There's a little piece of art that looks like it's unfinished to me. It looks like a giant dinosaur with a tank on its back, that kind of thing. So that's interesting, all that known as Blizzard mentioned, nomad briefly and then scrapped it and began working on World of Warcraft, StarCraft Ghost. Remember hearing about that one back in the day.
Uh, that one was the thing, um, sort of for a while and then wasn't. So, uh, the writers here wrote, arguably, arguably one of the most anticipated releases that Blizzard would ever, uh, that would eventually cancel. Let me try that again. Arguably one of the most anticipated releases that Blizzard would eventually cancel StarCraft ghost was announced after the release of the original StarCraft rts and immediately had a hype train behind it.
It was a third person shooter where players took control of a character called Nova. Yeah, that Nova, I think that Nova's in one of Blizzard's other games right now. Possibly. Um, players could utilize various different weapons as they took on enemies from the StarCraft universe as well as some psychic abilities Nova had to had access to as a ghost.
The multiplayer mode was going to be the absolute king of online shooters upon release and featured a death match, capture the flag and King of the Hill mode along the few others. The project would be moved around between developers delayed due to new consoles being released and ultimately scrapped for reasons unknown. There's something called Riku reco, R A I K O, and it was a development between 1996 and 1998 designed to be an action R p G with Samurai Set in ancient Japan.
It wasn't even announced by Blizzard and no one knew about it until they discussed it at Dice. In 28 or 2008, unseen 64 interviewed, I don't know what that is. I interviewed one of the creators who said he wanted to make a game that was essentially a 3D Samurai Diablo. The project was Scrapped Titan. That was another one that went around. I remember seeing leaks about that and going,
I don't know what the heck this is at the time. , uh, when it was online and leaked there, or someone brought it up later, maybe it wasn't exactly when this was going on, but Titan was going to be a new mmo, not based on anything Blizzard had previously made. Uh, the idea for a new franchise was not connected to Diablo Warcraft or StarCraft and was extremely exciting for fans. And it's no surprise that hype built up and gamers couldn't wait to get their
hands on it. Kotaku released an ar, released an article in 2016 with some information about it. It seems like it would've been a shooter MMO on a distant future earth with three factions fighting for control of the planet goes on from there. After six years of waiting, the project was scrapped internally in 2013 and publicly in 2014, game assets would eventually be used to make Overwatch. There was a World of Warcraft mobile they were trying to do in August of 2022.
For three years, blizzard was secretly planning a World of Warcraft mobile game under the code named Neptune. This game wasn't going to be a port of the actual mmo and instead would take place during a different period of time in the same universe. The game would be developed by net ease, who also helped make Diablo more. All the game of scrap for reasons unknown. And that's it.
How many of those did you know about? I've never heard of most of these, but like StarCraft Ghost, I think, and this would've been around what year was this? I'm not even sure what year this was that this was being worked on, but um, there were like some novels for some various games and I don't, I think maybe this one was one of them. So I remember there were being like little paperback novels of it could have been this, it could have been Halo as well.
Those were coming out around the same time. A lot of the original Diablo series of books written by Richard Knack, those were coming out around then. So I think I've heard of it a little bit from that, but I didn't know much of anything about that one. The rest of these, not a clue that those were around really at all. Diablo two Resurrected Ladder season three is coming soon. This was posted on February eight and uh, it's patch 2.6 apparently. So here's the blurb you've returned safely.
Join us around the campfire adventurer. The stench of hell grows in intensity. Crazed snarls can be heard from afar. Demons birth straight from your nightmares, surged toward you meet them. Acts first on February 16 when Ladder three, season three starts. We have quite a few updates to Diablo to resurrected to share, continue on for a more comprehensive look as what at what is releasing with Ladder season three and patch 2.6.
It's gonna start in North America on February 16 and in Europe and Asia on February 17. Check this post which will be in my show notes@chattersoulstone.com for exact timing on that. And it's ushering in a new opportunity for Brave Adventurers to race to level 99 and a mass powerful loot. Along the way, they're also introducing changes to the availability of Sundering charms, existing Roone words and new heroic cube recipes with the start of ladder season
three. Here's some details. Um, there's descriptions of different ladder systems, hardcore soft core, this sort of thing. Once ladder season two ends, all ladder characters will be transferred to their respective non ladder group. All items in that character's group shared stash will go into a new withdrawal only set of shared stash tabs denoted by a check marked past box. Any items from ladder season one stored in the withdrawal only tabs will be lost at this time.
So don't put your loot in there is what I'm thinking They're saying you will have of, uh, you will have all of season three to withdraw any items you would like to keep from season two when ladder season three ends. This withdrawal only set of stash tabs will be overridden with any items in this the ladder season three shared stash. So get 'em out before you lose them.
There's eight new room words coming up. I can't pronounce these at all, but there's a whole chart here saying what they're called and what they do and what character level you need to be. It looks like mostly there's like some you could get at 35 or 39 and then it goes to 53 67 and then I don't know what happens from there.
There's some notes if you wanna know more about that. The seven Roone words, a handful of her Rodrick cube recipes that were added in ladder season one can now be used in non ladder online game modes. And there's some RO words here talking about that. Uh, also there's gonna be suning charms that can drop from fallen foes in all non-class game modes. So if you're looking for charms you can find more. Maybe patch 2.6 is going to start on February 15th, a few days from now.
And it's going to cha make changes to the terror zones and a variety of quality of life updates and bugs fixes will go live. Um, to spice things up further, we have made changes to terror zones also. Terror zones are now available in the offline games. That's interesting. Uh, if you play offline that's, you could still have these offline terror zones, will operate on a different schedule from their online counterpart but function the same. Otherwise remember,
you can now receive Suning charms as a drop in offline terror zone games. Two, the uh, and then there's some descriptions of what we could find these things, I guess Act one, act two, act three, act four, act five. There's some bug fixes to look at including in some of the terror zones. There's a controller, couple of bug fixes there, stuff in general and that's basically everything you need to know. And again, if you want all the tiny details you can check it out.
Filthy Rich is a community manager for Diablo and he wrote a blue post on February 7th. It says hello all Season 27 is coming to a close. Below are the times when season 27 will end for each region. We are of course talking about Diablo three North America. It's going to be February 19 at 5:00 PM Europe and Asia. It's going to be February 19 at 5:00 PM as well. They tend to do that. We'll be providing a season 28 preview soon, which will include the start time for the next season. Stay tuned.
The Diablo account posted D three PTR 2.7 0.5 has ended, but the eternal conflict rages on Diablo Mortal posted on February 6th. Brave the perils of the Fen in Diablo Immortal and it's got a lot of purple looking gear here at the top. It's an interesting piece of art. I don't know if that gear corresponds to this or not. So this is what they wrote. Good tidings await adventurers. Since our last encounter. Many adventurers have found good fortune in tong.
Shes renewal, escaped the recesses of their mind in the fractured plane and tinkered with the 36 new legendary items to dream up. Unspeakably powerful class builds. The Burning Hills have much in store for you. So grab your favorite elixir and let's dive in. A third wave of server mergers are coming to Diablo Mortal on February 22.
This wave will focus on our servers in the East Asia and Southeast Asia regions improving the ability for players in those regions to party up with others regardless of the server they play on. And you kind of know how that works. So they've got, um, just a big section for East Asia and a big section for Southeast Asia. The East Asia one is in Kaji that I have no hope of reading. And the Southeast Asia one is in English, or I guess these are names. I mean I guess they're English.
I mean I don't know how that would translate honestly, but that's not my problem cuz I don't work for Blizzard. So on February 22nd they'll be making some adjustments to normal gems. These gems will receive an additional attribute which modifies the base stats of the item. They're socketed into this change will ultimately provide more uses for normal gems. Therefore, to maintain the integrity of Winton's grand market, all normal gems will be removed from the market on February
22. During the server maintenance period. All current rules for listing normal gems in the market will remain unchanged and these gems can be re relisted in the market once the server maintenance period ends. Additionally, we'll be modifying hidden layers to provide players with additional ways to obtain tradable gems. Diablo Mordo will implement in-game text-based Turkish language support after server maintenance on February 8th. So that's already there.
That's kind of cool. It's always good to have more languages in there, especially for a game that's like worldwide I guess. Uh, maybe not all the way around the world, but a lot of countries are, you know, there's uh, servers for a whole bunch of different sections of the world. There must be a bunch of different people speaking different languages,
you know, play in the game. As with previous content updates, there will be server maintenance starting on February 7th and all of this, but we kind of, that's already done at this point cuz it's the 10th as I'm recording this additional stash tabs. Here's the thing, the ability for players to have additional storage tabs in their stash is one of our most requested feature updates. Now, players can unlock up to two additional stash tabs from within the stash menu for their character.
The first stash tab can be permanently unlocked for 2000 platinum. The second stash tab could be unlocked. While you have an active boon of plenty and will only provide additional storage space during this duration. If your boon of plenty expires, any item stored within this stash tab will remain there until you withdraw them. Additional items cannot be stored in this stash tab unless you have an active boon of plenty. So they're not just giving you stash tabs.
Like in Diablo three, we all wanted more and more and more stash tabs and they did give us some more. They did. But this doesn't seem, uh, it was, it's my understanding in Diablo three that you could either buy stash tabs with a certain amount of gold maybe, I don't even know cause I don't really have that many stash tabs. Or you could like work up to them in game or something and you know, whatever. But this, you can, you can have a second stash tab if you have 2000 platinum and
you could get platinum in the game without paying for it. It just, you know, you get some, I've got some, I've never bought any in there. Um, I used it to try to make a, uh, dark clan and . That's been kind of difficult because they keep kicking me out at the end of a season and saying, Hey, you gotta come back and do these after things again. I'm like, again, I'm hoping that changed, but you can get platinum in the game.
Most people are not gonna be patient enough to do that. Um, and the other thing, you have to have a boot of plenty. So that means you have to actually obtain that gem. It's, I think it's a gem and if it's not, it's, it's something with a countdown I guess. So that'll get you that second stash tab.
But there's a risk that you're going to have this boon of plenty expire and then you can still pull out the stuff in that stash tab, but you can't put anything new in it after the boon of plenty expires unless you get another one. So I'm thinking, you know, they, they hear us, they know that we want more stash space and more stash tabs, but they don't really wanna make it easy for people to have that. And I'm not sure why, but that's what they're doing.
There is adjustments to boss in vulnerable phases. I don't really know exactly what that means. Uh, the developer's note says, boss in vulnerability phases break the flow of combat making them one of the most notable forms of downtime in a dungeon. But they also allow for storytelling and gameplay pacing. In some cases we can completely remove an invulnerability phase, but in many, we need to reduce the overall duration of the phase to ensure the encounter
functions. Ideally, our goal is to reduce the overall downtime in dungeons, especially during combat. But we don't want this reduction to come at a cost of players' experiences. Many of these changes result in only a few seconds saved here and there, but added up. They should be noticeable. There are a path of blood rewards upon completion of a floor. Players will now receive gold experience and items as a reward. You may now skip directly to the nearest boss floor to your current floor,
such as floor 10. If you have completed floor seven, if you complete that boss floor, you'll receive credit and rewards for all skipped floors, the boss floor, and we'll receive the option to skip directly to the next boss floor. So they're talking about that with the cycle of strife, this kind of thing. Path of blood is, yeah, is uh, only to be forced to slowly trudge back to the top of the next cycle. Like if you, if you screw it up or something like that. So there's some descriptives in here.
There's a hell difficulty notification even in a place like sanctuary, reading a new, reaching a new hell difficulty level calls for celebration. Now when a player unlocks a new hell difficulty level of congratulations screen detailing the new feature available for them to will pop up. You can have a party member follow you, not like a follower in Diablo three, but like an actual person that you wanna play the game with.
And they will just follow you around wherever you go. So you can, if you're the one that knows how to get to that thing, then they can follow you there. Uh, player profile display. If your player is part of a war band, their war band's name can be seen in the player profile menu. There's a combat rating visibility. Combat rating is an integral aspect of Diablo Mortal to aid players in easily assessing their combat rating. We have moved the statistic to a higher location within the attributes
interface. There are, as a bounty rewards increase, so you can do more bounties and do stuff. Then there's a thing called perils of the Fen Limited time events. Let me see when that one starts. Um, started February 8th. It's gonna end on February 16th. Today's the 10th. As I'm recording it, I might have to get in the game and at least give it a try. Uh, something about arcane energy and stuff like this. And I mean, I'll at least give it a try if I can. If I have time to get into the game.
There's, uh, season 10, battle pass alchemists add mixture. There is some kind of fancy armor here. You probably have to buy . I guess. There's also the void beyond cosmetic set and that's, um, a cosmetic set. It costs a thousand eternal orbs. So I guess you have a choice. You can either buy this really cool cosmetic set for your character or you can buy an extra stash space, I guess. Or if you, you know, haven't made, uh,
an Immortal clan or a dark clan yet or whatever those are called now. Um, it's kind of like you don't have to do these things. You don't have to buy the cosmetics, but people are gonna want them. And it's like the same price for everything. It's 1000 internal orbs. So that's the thing. Um, so that's about all I have from the Diablo Mortal, uh, update officially here from Blizzard. And the last thing I'm gonna talk about is a video,
a YouTube video made by Echo gaming. It's called the Diablo Immortal Problem. It's about 12 minutes long and I saw this come up on Twitter and I thought, okay, that's interesting. What is the problem? And so I watched it. Now he can explain this way better than I can, but it has to do with the inability to get enough gems to gear up all of your gear to level 10. And there was something else in there too.
It was like how long it would take to actually get those gems, considering how many are even existing in the game or in that, um, I wanna say auction house thing. You know, and this comes to him from a person who decided to remain anonymous and the person's voice was clearly altered by, you know, by means so that no one would be able to immediately go, I know who that is. You know, that kind of thing. . And it was an interesting look at this.
It appears that even if you're a whale, this is still gonna take a really long time. And hopefully Blizzard will hear this and consider it and maybe make some changes. I know he said when I watched this video, which appears to be the first of the series of these, there was more coming. So I'm gonna look at some of those if I can find them and, um, at least clue you in on what those are for the next show. And that's where I'm gonna end this one.
You have been listening to episode 3 97 of the Shattered Soul Stone. Your Diablo community podcast missed an episode. You can find the show blog and listen to the show archives at www.shatteredsoulstone.com. Come join us in game our in-game community and clan, both named Shattered Soul Stone, are open to anyone who would like to join. You can also join us on Discord for the ultimate team and community-based experience, find the Discord invitation link on our Twitter and Facebook page,
as well as the Shattered Soul Stone website. Thank you for listening.